Motion Pictures - Color Comes To Film

In the earliest days of motion pictures, color film had not yet been invented. Some films were colorized by hand, but that soon proved impractical. Color film first came out in the mid-1930s. It used three layers of colored film to reproduce the visual spectrum. Because color film was expensive and required precise control of lighting, black and white film remained the standard until the mid-1950s. Color and black-and-white were both used until the late 1960s, when color became the standard. This was partly because many films were sold for television broadcast after appearing in theaters, and black-and-white films were much harder to sell for television.