Play It Again, Ted, But Omit Color

Well, it’s all over. All those months of anticipation, hope and wonder. After a bombardment of promises that seemed to simultaneously raise and lower expectations, they finally got the thing over with and it was . . . dreadful, embarrassing, one more blight on a once proud tradition.

I refer, of course, to Wednesday’s airing of the colorized version of “Casablanca” on TBS.

Those of us who revere that 1942 classic took it in the eye from the Turner Entertainment Co., which sent “Casablanca” to the paint shop along with dozens of other less notable, but no less innocent, black-and-white films culled from the massive library Ted Turner absconded with after buying and dismantling MGM three years ago.

Turner Entertainment has not yet made its decision about colorizing “Citizen Kane,” by critical consensus the greatest movie ever made. But it will be done, and most likely by American Film Technologies, the same San Diego firm that dipped “Casablanca” into the computer ink.

American Film, an 18-month-old company holed up in Sorrento Valley, has a digital process that is the state of the “art” in colorization. It has assumed about half of Turner’s annual business, and it is cranking out four to five films a month.

On Monday, succumbing to the friendly persuasion of American Film’s director Barry Sandrew, I drove up to his Sorrento Valley complex to see how the hues and the muse mix. When I got there, the colorizers were busily putting the applique on “King Kong.” You thought the big ape had been abused in New York!

Sandrew, an earnest 41-year-old neuroscientist with only a passing interest in movies, was recruited from Harvard where he designed computer programs for brain research. His colorization operation, tucked away in a nondescript industrial park near the junction of Interstates 5 and 805, has a calm to it that belies the fury with which it is staining films.

The mood in the main room at American Film, where the nitty-gritty coloring work is done, is reminiscent of the organ warehouse in “Coma,” where brain dead donors are suspended from wires waiting for their vitals to be harvested. It is calm and quiet, with the overhead lighting subdued so the 56 colorizers sitting at their $24,000 work stations can better see the images on their monitors.

Working from discs containing a few seconds of action, each colorizer carefully isolates the various shades of gray on the screen and assigns colors pre-chosen by the designers. Each person is expected to color 8 to 10 seconds of film per shift.

Sandrew now runs three shifts during the week and two on weekends, and plans to step up production.

OK, I’ve seen the operation, and I’m impressed. The fact that they can take a black-and-white print, clean it up, extract the shades of gray from it and replace them with selections from the 16.8 million colors available is an astonishing technical achievement.

As was the atom bomb.

It is inconceivable to me, as one who grew up without a preference for black-and-white or color movies, that I will ever appreciate a film that has been colorized. Even if they were to get the colors right (Sandrew says he is 90% there; I would be more conservative), who needs it?

Gary Milan, a Beverly Hills dentist, is even angrier than I about the colorization of “Casablanca.” “It is a disgrace,” Milan said, after watching the show Wednesday. “They showed no regard for authenticity.”

Milan was upset by claims made by American Film and Turner Entertainment about the amount of research put into “Casablanca” in order to get the colors right. He said they didn’t come close to getting the color of the piano that Sam plays in the Paris flashback scene. He knows whereof he speaks; he owns both pianos used in the movie.

“I called (Turner Entertainment) twice to tell them what I had and they never followed up,” he said. “Now, I know why. They just didn’t care.”

Milan says the piano in the Paris scene is green with gold and brown side and front panels. In the movie, it is mahogany with tan panels. But that wasn’t the only thing they missed. Milan also owns the doors to both the front of Rick’s Cafe and to Rick’s back-room casino, plus a lamp, a chandelier, some chairs and Ilsa Lund’s passport. None of those was accurately colored in the movie either, Milan said.

The dentist said he began buying up “Casablanca” props in the early 1980s, having found his hunger for the film unsatiated after 300 viewings. The first “Casablanca” piano he bought turned out to be bogus, but his luck made a skidding 180-degree turn when he bought another studio piano as a general keepsake.

“This thing had about 40 layers of paint over the original coat,” he said, “but whoever did the second coat didn’t do it properly so it cleaned up pretty easily.”

When he got to the original coat and removed a false back that had been added to the pint-sized piano, Milan caught his breath, almost certain that it was the other piano from “Casablanca” (he had by then bought the one used in Rick’s Cafe). Sure enough, the serial number matched the one entered in the Warner Bros. production log. Milan had himself a set.

But now, the set is being broken up. The Rick’s Cafe piano (orange in the movie, salmon-colored in reality) is headed for Walt Disney’s planned theme park in Florida where it will be on loan as part of a movie display. The Paris piano is going on sale at Sotheby’s in New York on Dec. 16.

Why is he parting with them?

“I just felt selfish having them all to myself,” Milan said. “I want other people to enjoy them, too.”

The Sotheby’s sale will also seed Milan’s budget for his continuing interest in collecting artifacts of colonial America. A Sotheby’s spokesman said the green “Casablanca” piano is expected to bring $75,000 to $100,000.