Technicolor Part Two : The Drama | Episode 22

Technicolor Pt. 2
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All right. Welcome back. Welcome part two of Technol. Yes, technol part two. If you have not listened to Technol part one, we highly suggest you go back and you do that first, 

You'll learn about the company and then you'll, in this episode you're gonna learn about the people who ran the company. Who worked at the company. Yeah. So the first one is all the history. . We got that out of the way we did and now we get to the people. Yeah. The behind the scenes stories.

, all the good stuff. Yeah. This is the good stuff. So we're gonna focus on Herbert Kalmus and Natalie Kalma today. And we touched a little bit about Herbert last time. Yeah. We talked about how he founded Technol. And how he also was instrumental in creating the processes that created color film.

, and I think we mentioned Natalie KK a few times. Yeah. We had to she ran the color advisory department at Technol and she would help elevate color in film to an art form. And ultimately \ she would help define what technol came to stand. But she would also make Herbert Alma's life miserable for 50 years.

And that's what we're gonna talk about today. One of Hollywood's most successful power couples whose story is as colorful as a three strip technical musical.

That was cheesy. Somebody had to do it . Anyway, back to the story. . All right, so if you wanna hear more about Herbert and Alan, whoa, Herbert and Natalie Kalma, a technical love story. Stay tuned.

So Adam, let's tell a little bit about Herbert's backstory tell us a little bit about Herbert. Herbert was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts on November 9th, 1881. Wow, that's a long time ago, guys.

Yes, it was. . He had a very sad upbringing. Both his parents died by the time he was 11. His mom died when he was eight from acute appendicitis. Wow. And his father died from bright's disease. What's bright's disease? Brights Disease is the inflammation of the kidneys caused by toxins in the endocrine system,

Shortly after his mother died, Herbert's father remarried. And then when his father tragically died Herbert was forced to move in with his Stepmother's family. And the main reason they moved there was because there were children in that family that were roughly the same age, and they just wanted to bring him up with kids.

So they moved out of Boston? Yes, they moved out of Boston. So here's another sad thing. When he turned 16, the other kids that he grew up with went to college, but that family told him that it, he would need to go and find a job because they couldn't afford to send him to college. I just think they thought of him differently and so he knew that he wasn't really wanted there anymore, so he just left, he packed up his stuff and walked out at 16, went back to Boston, got a job at a carpet store, working for $3 a week as a bookkeeper. But he was able to build himself up.

He was a very smart guy. Worked for various companies as a bookkeeper, and by his 18th birthday he saved up $500 and he decided to invest in himself. He wanted to go to college. . So he tried to get into Harvard and Yale, but because he never graduated from high school, cuz his stepparents forced him out into the workforce he wasn't able to get in.

They wouldn't accept him. So he applied to m i t and at the time, m i t did not require a high school diploma to go. So he went to m i t

. And at m i t, that's where he studied physics and met Comstock.

Comstock, right? Yeah. Yeah. They were the only two in MIT's physics department. That's wild. Besides teachers. , it was brand new at the time. . All right. So I'll give you a little backstory on Natalie Kalmus. She's a little bit harder to find information on with. Herbert, you had his autobiography, Mr.

Technol, but Natalie doesn't have anything like that. So I've compiled together her official story as told by her in various newspaper interviews. She was born Natalie Dunphy in Norfolk, Virginia. And when she was eight years old, she also had a parent that died. Her father was ice skating, and he fell and hit his head so hard that he fractured his skull and died from those wounds. So I'm sure that was a bonding point for her in Herbert, whenever they met after her father's death, her mother moved her and her siblings to Boston. And when she was in her teens, she started getting jobs as a catalog model.

. Natalie was an avid lover of the arts, and she spent a few years studying art in Boston. And when she was 19, she was teaching at the Boston Institute of Art, when she met Herbert and they met at a dance, at a school dance. Herbert was still in college at the time, and they were complete opposites.

Natalie was vivacious and Herbert was a lot more reserved, so complete opposites, but there was something about 'em that attracted them to each other, and the rest is history. Goodnight . That's my joke. That's your joke. So they got married in 1903 and Natalie said that shortly after they were married, Herbert graduated from m i t with the dignity of a doctorate, but without the dignity of a job, although I think he didn't quite have a doctorate in 1903.

He went, he got that from Zurich. Zurich, yep. He had trouble finding work at first and Natalie helped support him. And she worked as a librarian and

Herbert got a job teaching in San Francisco, but they were only there for two years. He hated it. And I guess the kids had a hard time understanding his really heavy Boston accent and there were a lot of giggles. He hated California before you could say they packed a cat in the Yad in the yard.

Yeah. So he hated California . There's a quote of him calling it a goddamned burned up desert. I don't know if he was talking about Southern California or Northern, but there we go. He hated it. So he actually decided to go back to school and he had a study grant from M I T and Natalie and in Herbert along with, I think Comstock, right?

Moved to Zurich. And he continued his studies and Natalie also enrolled in some art classes while they were there. And Zurich is where he got his PhD. After Zurich, the couple moved to Canada where Herbert got a job teaching at Queens University.

And while Herbert was teaching, he started a few side hustles, right? Yeah. While teaching Ontario Herbert created a new abras. What an abrasive, so a company came to him and asked if he could help form a new abrasive because the one that they were using was becoming too expensive.

So he used his scientific prowess to create a new abrasive. And also he formed a company called the Exelon Company in 1914 to actually produce this abrasive. And that's when they started the K C N W. Yeah, this was one of the first ventures that they did under that. Also while they were there Kalma formed the protein products company to create food products based on the collection of blood from slaughterhouses. Weird. Yeah. I guess he and Comstock took a tour of a slaughterhouse and saw all of this waste byproduct . And they're like, well, why can't we put this to use? It seems like such a waste to just pour this down the drain. We could obviously use this because it's got proteins, it's got all kinds of things that we can extract from it to create other things.

. And so they created byproducts that were used in food and all kinds of other things out. This waste. And so they created yet another company out of that. So prior to the formation of Technol, these guys were already very successful businessmen. I did not know that. That's really cool.

So Technol comes into the picture in 1914, that's when it was officially founded.

And right at the start, Natalie would help out where she could, they were. Working on developing a two strip color film process. And Natalie sort of became the first leader lady, if you will. They used her as a model to work on getting skin colors, right? Cuz that was their first priority with the red and the green system. They really wanted skin, lips, hair, that sort of thing to really shine and which is why they picked red and green, right?

Mm-hmm. over red and blue over blue. Blue, right Blue. And she was eventually dubbed the world's first technicolor star because the technical process in a way was calibrated on Natalie. Yeah. Her pal. Her hair cuz she had reddish hair. . And they really wanted that red to reproduce mm-hmm. which became very important for female stars later on. . And yeah, and in a lot of ways, not in a lot of ways, she was absolutely the very first Technicolor Starlet . So she started helping out where she could and because everybody was so focused on the camera and that side of it, they weren't really focusing on what to do test shots with.

So she would look at.

how the tests were turning out and really pay attention to the colors and then come up with colors to either decorate the set with, or to paint things or put things in the frame that were a certain color because she knew that it could capture it. So she really, right at the beginning, started focusing on the color.

She was using her art history background to help with complimentary colors or colors that would reproduce the best with that technology. Around this time, this is the time when technical moved their production to Florida when they had that railway car and they worked on the Gulf between their self-produced film. Natalie had a real job on that. She was the person that did all of the set design, right? . Yep. And that two strip color film process didn't go over so well.

So they had to recalibrate how they were gonna work out their two strip process, if you remember from the other episode. Yeah. I mean it wasn't that her set design was bad . It was. It was that the process? No, it was, the process was failed. Yeah. Yeah. That was the one with the mirrors and things that you remember from the other episode.

So the guys went back to the drawing board and they came up with a new process, which was process number two that they patented. And then they did their first test film called The Toll of the Sea. And that was in 1922. And by the time Natalie was working on the production of this one too, mostly with the stuff that was going in front of the camera, although she said that she helped out wherever was needed.

The second two strip color film process was a lot better. I mean, It was a huge leap for them, and things were going really well for technol, but behind the scenes things were not going so well for Herbert and Natalie, I don't know if working together, had finally taken its toll, but they secretly divorced in 1922.

during the production of the toll of the Sea. Wow. Yeah. I heard too that she wasn't on set a lot during this one. And that the long hours and the time in the laboratory afterwards, cuz , they weren't just shooting this, then they were developing the film and Right. , it wasn't like he went home after the set day was over.

And they filed for divorce in 1921, but it was finalized in 1922. It was December, 1921 when they, they filed for divorce, but it seemed like a really amicable divorce. You have a letter that Herbert wrote to Natalie?

Yeah, that's right. 

This comes from the book, the Dawn of Technol by James Layton and David Pierce. They have a letter that he wrote after the divorce that says,

You may be sure. I shall think of you ever so often and always most seriously wish you well. Surely because we find it impossible to live happily together is no reason we should not be friends.

So that was written. And as part of the settlement, Natalie received 7,500 per year as alimony, as well as certain household effects, a $25,000 insurance policy and the sum of $5,000 in cash, 1000 shares of stock stocking the technical or motion picture corporation and negotiable bonds of the total principle amount of $25,000.

So she did pretty well? Yeah. We're talking back when you could get a whole meal for 25 cents. . Yeah. And she continued to work for Technol? Yes. Although she didn't really have an official title quite yet. Not at first, no. He guaranteed that she would always have employment at Technol.

It wasn't actually formally written into their divorce. I bet he wished he did that though.

The unique thing about their marriage was that they continued to live in the same houses after the divorce.

Yeah. They called it living together yet separately , they were not husband and wife. They didn't share a bedroom or anything like that. And oftentimes they weren't in the same house, they had two houses. Cape one in Cape Cod and one in Bell Air.

And so sometimes when he would be in Cape Cod, he'd be in Bell Air and likewise. But they did at times share the same house. And I think I read that she had an apartment too, that Herbert was paying for, that she would live in some of the time when she wasn't staying at either of his two houses.

I hear that's not as uncommon as you'd think.

for people to get divorced and still cohabitate. Yeah. I of looked it up and people still do that to this day. Yeah. They can't afford to live separately. . So they have written agreements where they live in the same house still. Back in 1922, it also might have been kind of difficult for Natalie to get a loan on her own because around that time banks were not giving loans to women without a male cosigner.

So Natalie continued to work at Technol and in 1927 this is where she really starts to fly. We start to see her get credit for being a color consultant on certain films. , she got her first onset experience while they were producing the great event shorts. 

And around this time, In 1928, she became an official employee of Technol. , she started assisting in the selection of story material.

She researched period details and contributed to each film's color design through selection of costumes and props. And this is the year that Herbert assigned her with the task of overseeing the growing color control department.

Yeah. So at this point they had a color control department, but it wasn't mandatory on films, and it was being handled by the technicians that they sent out. So the guys running the camera, right? Yeah. Were also running the color control.

Color control. And so their first priority was not what is appearing before the camera. It's, we gotta get this, what's happening with the camera? Let's get this puppy to work. Let's keep this thing running, actually. Yeah. Yeah. So they had other things to focus on. This is also from that dawn of technical book.

This is a quote from Edward Eastbrook, who was one of these technicians. He was a camera operator. Mm-hmm. For Technol. And he says, one day Dr. Kalma said to me, I think we oughta take some of these other duties away from you and give them to Mrs.

Kalmus so she can earn a little cigarette money. . Wow. There's some animosity there. So that's how she got her first official job and he made her the head of a department. It's interesting because I can see these technicians. didn't want to be responsible for what was in front of the camera.

No. They had a job that they were doing and it was taking all their time and effort to keep these cameras running. . So I'm sure this guy was just like, heck yeah, please. Yeah, I don't wanna deal with it. Please take this away. Cuz this is like the last thing I want to think about right now. And so that's how she became the face of technol basically. Yeah. And this is around that time when they were having all those issues with makeup too, where it was, if an actor was standing too close to a red tablecloth, it might reflect that light up onto their face. So this was a really important thing for somebody to focus full-time on and to become really acquainted with the issues that could arise from putting certain colors next to each other.

Yeah. I mean you only had two colors so so all colors couldn't be reproduced anyways, so you didn't really know how things were gonna look.

She oversaw the color control department and from this she would go on to create the role of the color advisor. And later these duties became a mandatory service that they had to use during the planning and production stages of any film that was shot in Technicolor so at this time, Natalie starts to receive her first credits on screen.

As a color advisor? Yeah it's either color consultant or color director. I think she preferred color director, but eventually ended up as color consultant. . . Mm-hmm. . . But what are some of the ones that she worked on where she got credit? So in 28 alone, she got four credits. Madame Dewberry, the Heart of General, Robert E.

Lee, the Virgin Queen, and The Lady of Victories. And these were all shorts. All shorts that these were color craft pictures. I believe so. I believe these are. And Color Craft was the company that technical set up to produce all these shorts and they had that distribution deal with mgm. In 29 she received four more.

Yeah. And they're all the same. Yeah. All on shorts.

So the two strip process, if you remember from the other episode it was successful, but also it was really out of technical's hands if a film using Technicolor was gonna be used correctly. So by the time that they had developed their three strip Process number four, they made their color advisory group mandatory.

So anybody renting the technical camera and developing package would also have to use the color advisory group. And they would advise right from the script. They would, yeah, they were sent the script ahead of time. They would break down the script. They would break down the script.

They would come up with a color scheme. They would get sent samples for costumes, and they would pick like the color of lace that was gonna go on somebody's dress. Because at the time, even though it could reproduce the natural color, there were limitations. You couldn't have bright white on somebody because it just wouldn't photograph correctly.

.

It would pick up other colors. So they would suggest using a light gray, which would then photograph white on screen. Yeah. We have to remember too, that at this point they needed a lot of light in order to expose this film too. Yep. Which would make all the colors flat or actually change the nature of some of the colors because of the amount of light.

As soon as the color advisory group became mandatory, that also made Natalie a face of technol because she was the one dealing with the studios. That was something that Herbert didn't wanna do, right? Yeah. He was the guy that wanted to sit in the lab and take the business meetings. He was not the guy that wanted to be on set every day.

Or deal with Hollywood executives or deal with directors or creatives in any way. Yeah. Could you would coming in telling them how to do something new. He would deal with the heads of studios and deal with the money aspects and things like that to broker the deals. But he wanted very little to do with the creative day-to-day.

So they left that up to Natalie to really be that liaison between the directors, the art directors, costumers and technol. So by de facto, she became the face of Technol. Mm-hmm. ,, she was the person that all the media saw on set. . She was the head of that department, so she was the interface between all of the other departments and so as a byproduct, she started getting a lot of press. . Yeah. The people were really excited when they heard that there was a woman not only running a department, but running a technical department in Hollywood. And so she started getting a lot of coverage in magazines.

There's one article that we've read from 1932 from Photo Play Magazine. Called All Hollywood Has Now Gone Color Conscious, and it was about how Natalie chooses colors to go into films and

I'm gonna read a little bit from this article. It says, you will find a simplified color chart made by Natalie Kamus on these pages to which you can refer to in choosing your colors. And after I have told you, now the stars react. You can play a fascinating game by analyzing the color likes and dislikes of yourself and your friends.

Why do certain colors buoy you up and others take you down? Read on and you'll find out. And later on in the article, they have a little chart. About the significance of colors. So blacks and dark browns, they're depressive or blues, could represent peace and harmony.

So they break down all the colors and then the readers were urged to use the chart to curate their own wardrobes for the right colors, because that could push them further along the road to success and happiness.

And that's just one example of places talking about Natalie and Technol was fully behind it. Yeah. They embraced this. They liked perpetuating this idea that Herbert was the technique of Technol and that Natalie was the color of Technol. Yeah, that's the other thing. Magazines, loved the fact that they were a husband and wife. because they were still parading us husband and wife.

And in fact, I think Natalie still liked being called Mrs. Kalmus. I think she demanded to be called Mrs. Kalma. And nobody ever questioned it cuz they were sharing houses and everyone thought that they were still married. We even read some magazine articles where the writer followed them around for a day from the job to the track cuz they were both avid gamblers and talked about how they were this blissfully wedded couple and she was, fierce and opinionated and would make her decisions at the track based on dreams that she had and that he treated her like a child and gave her an allowance. And it was very much the, those gender roles were being enforced and they were both complicit in the idea that they were still married. Because that reflected good on technol. Yeah. It was great to do that great publicity.

. So why wouldn't you? If she didn't mind and he didn't mind then no one was getting hurt. No. She was someone who liked attention. ever since she was model liked it. Model craved it. Craved attention. Yes. Yes. And that's one of the things that Herbert said drew him to her, was that she was this very vivacious character that commanded a room.

You read that other article that said she was like a force of nature. The writer was talking about just being in her presence and how she was just it was exhausting if you weren't with her . But if you were with her Yeah. It was innovating or something. Yeah. It was really good.

There were other magazines that came out that were chronicling the Rise of Technol and there was one that referred to her as the tchen haired wife of a brilliant scientist. Yeah. The big story here was that she was a high powered woman in Hollywood. , that was in charge of a technical department in the premier color company in the world 

, they all made a big deal about her gender. That was the story. Yeah. There's a headline that said, expert in color photography woman is paid $65,000 a year, which is over a million dollars. 1.2 million in today's money. Yeah. There was another headline that read.

When film colors go bluey, they ask a woman to fix them. And in that article it said that Kalice did not in the least measure up to the general conception of a business or professional woman, she was decidedly feminine, small in stature, mild mannered, but confident that she knows whereof she speaks.

Yeah, so a lot of them were a little bit condescending and in their because there was sort of that perpetuated notion that technical aspects of filmmaking were more masculine, and so this was the opposite of that. So they were calling that out. But in our eyes, of course, it is a little condescending.

That is the story, right? . . But yeah, some of the terminology that they use or the characterizations are definitely condescending. But, she was making 1.2 million in that period. So say what you might, doesn't matter how they characterize you, as long as you're good at what you do and you have thick skin, right?

. Yeah. She was very thick skin, I think, and that made her the perfect candidate to be the bossy scapegoat that technical required when dealing with the Hollywood executives and directors.

In 1935, she wrote this article called Color Consciousness. And this is an article where Natalie Kalmus laid out her manifesto, which would form the ideological basis for every technical film design for the next two decades. She advised against flagrant mistakes of the unnatural super abundance of color, instead calling for judicious use of neutrals and precision so that colors could comprise a pleasing harmony.

This is basically her color theory essay, and this is outside of everything else she did. Probably her biggest contribution to film where she lays out all her ideas about how color should be used in film. This is something that people hadn't had to really think about before.

In this single essay, she elevates film color theory to art by making art analogies. . Yeah. She compares it to a lot of, to fine art. . And at this point, prior to this, it was only kind of a novelty. It wasn't thought of as an art form. Yeah. Yeah. There's a quote from this article.

She says, the principles of color tone and composition make a painting a fine art. The same principles will make a colored motion, picture a work of art. There you go. Summed up in a single sentence, elevating what they do to an art form. No one had ever thought of color on film that way before.

She very smartly lays out how she feels about it emotionally, and then always ties that to a recognized work of art.

She mentions Boaler, she mentions Al Greco, like there's a bunch of artists and even writers, poets. That she makes analogies with . In the article just for a few examples here, she says, yellow and gold.

They symbolize wisdom, light fruition, harvest, reward, riches, gaity, but yellow also symbolizes deceit, jealousy. She says that green recalls nature, so it suggests freshness, growth or vigor. That

that red recalls to mine. A feeling of danger, a warning. It also suggests blood life and love. It's materialistic, it's stimulating

and 

black is no color, but absorption of all color. It has a distinctly negative and destructive aspect. Black instinctively recalls night fear, darkness crime. It suggests funerals, mourning. It is impenetrable, comfortless secretive. It flies at the mast of a pirate ship. Our language is replete with references to the frightful power of black art, black despair, black guard You get the idea. , she goes through every color and suggest, so puts emotional meaning behind it, purpose to them. Yeah.

So this became a document that Technicolor actually handed out to screenwriters and directors and everybody. . By doing this and by all the coverage that Natalie was getting, I think that started to feed into her ego a little bit because in the late thirties, people got where they really didn't wanna work with her.

And this is where most of these fun stories start . And here's the thing about Hollywood stories, yeah. Every story, there's what you say, what I say, but the truth is really somewhere in between. Yeah. And I think that's probably true for these next couple of things that we're gonna talk about from her episodes on the set. Think about it. She's a female. walking into a male dominated world with a lot of power behind her.

Mm-hmm. , , because she has the technical know-how and all of the people that keep these cameras running and are instructing the director and the camera ops and everybody how this thing is done. I think the problem was by the late 1930s, directors and technicians were very familiar with technol and how the technol process worked.

And so they were trying to play around with possibilities. And a lot of that was going against Natalie's color consciousness. And she wasn't having it. No. She was like a little emperor, , . So let's talk about Snow White. She told Walt Disney that he needed to pull back the colors on his first feature length cartoon. Because they didn't think that audiences could stand these bright colors for two hours for Yeah. For two hours. They thought they would tire of the color. after two hours, it would be too much for them.

It would be too much. So give them headaches and eye strain made. She made him pull back and that's why that film is a lot more muted in tone than his later works would be. And it actually makes it distinct. Because of that, it looks much different than later Disney stuff. Yeah.

He didn't listen to her on the next one. But she was part of it. They won the Academy award for animated feature for that film.

So you can see when you compare Disney's Fantasia in 1940 to Snow White, 1937, how different the concept of color usage on film was at that point. , that one. That's where you get that Walt Disney, ultra saturated, bright and beautiful look. 

when Michael Kurtis was hired to director of the Adventures of Robinhood, Natalie insisted that the colors be toned down. He wanted to do very bright colors, and she thought that they were gonna look like a comic book

But Michael Kurtis says, but Natalie, that's what we're going for. So they butted heads right from the start. 

She fought with Michael Kurtis on the set, but he ultimately won because that is a very colorful film, and it's known for its use of color.

Yeah. That's what he was going for was that hyper saturated , you know, comic strip look. But this wasn't an isolated incident because Natalie was starting to get a reputation for being difficult to work with. And on the one hand I can understand where she's standing up to men teaching them about technology, which you know, isn't gonna go over so well in 1930s.

On the other hand, she didn't really know her place. Now she about that she tended to overstep. She did like you said, that power of got to her head. And so she started to reach outside of her role as a consultant. The word consultant being the operative word there. Consultant. Yeah. Not dictator.

Not dictator. Which she was referred to because she was really trying to make sure that technicolor was never used for anything. But it's very best advantage because that's what had happened with , the two strip process. It wasn't always used correctly and it didn't work.

So Natalie made sure that all sets costumes, lighting, fully accommodated her husband's color process, but not all of her collaborators appreciated being dictated to how they should make their movie. Aka a pushed around and one of her victims was distinguished cameraman James Wong Howe they were on the film, the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1938.

He didn't wanna listen to her at all and she ended up barring him from working with Technol for 10 years after he employed less than the stipulated levels of lighting on the cave sequences. Wow. No wonder he made so many beautiful black and white films. Oh, his black and white films are great and now we know why.

Unbelievable. She's telling him how to light something . \ because she had rained in her color world for so long, she was really resistant to experimentation and that's exactly what was happening in the late thirties.

Yeah. And at this point we're several years into the process. . So a lot of these people that they're working with, have already used Technol. , they've probably learned as much as they can from the people that are being provided. So the consultancy isn't nearly as important as it was when they were early and introducing that process.

But Technol is becoming a lot more popular so she's overseeing a lot more films. So she of has that inflated sense of importance. Yeah. Cuz she's on everything, right? Yeah. Because of the amount of stuff that she was overseeing. James Wong, Howe was just shooting that one movie. Exactly.

She's overseeing all of these

Cut to 1939, and she's working on The Wizard of Oz and one of the best things that she did was advise them to change the silver slippers to red slippers because the silver would've just reflected the yellow and it wouldn't have popped on the yellow brick road. Yeah. That's pretty impressive.

If you have one claim to fame, changing the Ruby slippers, which are , knows, the iconic image of the Wizard of Oz. . That's a pretty good one right there. Yeah. I think she was so pleased with herself that's when she started calling herself the Ringmaster of the Rainbow.

I don't know when exactly she started that, but I feel like it had to be Wizard of Oz. Yeah I agree. I It had to be in one of these articles. I never read it though. I was looking for it. I found that somewhere and I didn't write it down. , what year that was. That's a little egotistical.

The ringmaster of the Rainbow though. Yeah. . But it shows you just how she thought of herself. So she made all of her color charts and things like that for Wizard of Oz, and it said that they were not suggestions, that they were directives. If a set of drapes violated her rules, they were out, no questions asked.

Yeah. This actually becomes a problem later on for her. 

When does this come to a head? That would be on the film, gone with the Wind Also. 1939,

you know, You're thinking it. Yeah. Gone With the Wind. Yeah. for Adam's full song. See the technical part of it? , he's not gonna resing that. I would, but she won't let me, so Yeah, I won't, yeah. Shutting him down right now. was on the set of Gone With The Wind and she butted heads with David Selznick so much.

Life Magazine had an article where they called David Ozick, the most dictatorial in irregular executive in an industry where irregularity is commonplace.

with Selznick. Kalmus had met her match. She believed in Jamir naturalistic colors, and he believed in expressive saturated colors. He wanted the brightness of the film to reflect Scarlet O'Hara's changing fortune. And Natalie Kalmus didn't that became a problem for her. Yeah. The two went head to head over set props, wardrobe.

And remember, this is also the film where the new film stock was developed, where they fixed a couple issues with the camera, the lenses, and the camera. So now they could be more expressive, much lower lighting conditions. So it wasn't like she was used to. So I think that really threw her for a loop too.

So They went head to head. And if Natalie didn't like the way that a certain character was costumed or how a certain set was furnished, she would just go onto the set and change it herself without asking Selznick's permission or anybody's permission.

Yeah. That's called overstepping people. Yeah. . You don't walk onto someone else's set and just start ripping things down. Yeah. And Freddy Baston, who wrote that glorious Technicolor book, He said that on one occasion an entire set was replaced. She came in and just said, no, were doing this hole. Oh, she fixed it.

She was like, oh, that's not happening right there. Yeah. Wow. Selznick was really known for all of his memos. He was an avid memo. Oh yes. And we have a couple here that are pretty funny in the way that really express how he felt about the technical team. Yeah.

That, and he was hopped up on Benza. That's why he was up at all hours. dictating all these dict memos. All these memos. Yeah. In one of them he says,. . I cannot conceive how we could have been talked into throwing away opportunities for magnificent color values based on the squawks and prophecies of doom from the Technicolor experts

it said that Selznick coined the term art director, for his production designer William Menses.

To stack him against Natalie Kalma because she was the color director. So basically he could mitigate her input. Yeah. , but Natalie wasn't deterred by that , so what'd she do? This went on for a while, but the conflict climax over mulberry wallpaper. Really? Yes. Wallpaper? Yes. So wallpaper had been selected for the dining room at 12 Oaks, and it was seen only briefly as a background, and there's a lot of men wearing beige jackets.

And Natalie walked onto the set and said, out with the wallpaper, and her reasoning was that she thought that , the beige of the jackets would fade into the background that was mulberry and that the actors would be lost in the scene. So they said, okay. And they did some color tests to see if that was right.

And when production director, William Menes showed her that there was enough contrast and it wasn't gonna be an issue. She was not very happy about being proved wrong and she wouldn't give in. And eventually she went in and had the mulberry paper removed herself. And that was the final straw, huh? Yes. 

So here's another example of one of David Selznick's memos the technical experts have been up to their old tricks of putting all sorts of obstacles in the way of real beauty.

We should have learned by now to take with a pound of salt, much of what is said to us by the technical experts. I have tried for three years now to hammer into this organization that the technical experts are for the purpose of guiding us technically on the film stock and not for the purpose of dominating the creative side of our pictures as to sets, costumes, or anything else.

If we are not going in for lovely combinations of set and costume and really take advantage of the full variety of colors available to us, we might just as well have made the picture in black and white. It would be a sad thing indeed, if a great artist had all violent colors taken off his palette for fear that he would use them so clashing as to make a beautiful painting.

Impossible.

So after this incident, David Selznick had Natalie removed from the set.

He broke her to deal with Herbert KALMUS to keep her off the set. So what did Kalma do? So , just to make sure she would be off the set, sent her to England, . She had gone over there a couple times before she got exiled to Great Britain. She got exiled. That's probably the only way to keep her off the set.

Yeah. He was like, the only way to do this is to get her out of town. . She's gone, dude we can't even have her on the same continent. She's gotta be out. Yeah. So he sent her to England. There you go. That's how you do it. 

David Selznick's was really unhappy with her. Yeah, I'll say , but he wasn't alone. No, really? She had other run-ins on other sets. Oh yeah. There's quotes from Cecil b de Mill who after working with her once fumed it's too bad. The good Lord up in heaven didn't have a technical consultant when he made apples and oranges.

So Natalie sent overseas to the London Technical Office, and this wasn't the first time that she had been there. She had been there throughout the thirties. She had gone a couple times, but she started butting heads with Powell and Pressburger 

playwright and screenwriter. Arthur Lorenz. He butted heads with Natalie this guy wrote West Side's story. Gypsy. Oh wow. He wrote the rope for Hitchcock. This. Oh, awesome. Yeah. He's a big guy, and his memoirs, he said, Natalie Kalma might have to be killed off camera.

Which I just think is so great. Yeah. This guy wrote for Hitchcock, so he knows about killing things, right? Yes, he does. . Yes, he does. 

No matter where she went her reputation precedes her.

The general sentiment towards Natalie Kamus was probably best summed up by Alan Dwan, who was a big director during the silent era, and even into the talkies. He worked for Republic Pictures among other places. He said and I quote, Natalie Kalmus was a bitch. . No, he said in an interview.

Yes, in an interview. You do that again. He said in an interview in 1980, when asked about Natalie Kalmus, he said, and I quote, Natalie Kalmus was a bitch. Whoa. . He's not mincing words, huh? Nope. Nope.

And I think that Vincent Minnelli would probably agree with that. Yeah. On the set of Meet Me in St. Louis. Oh boy. Which is one of those really bright, beautiful films that uses really saturated color. So Kalma supervised, meet Me in St. Louis in 1944, much later. . She'd gotten back from Britain at this point. Yeah. Found her way home. Yep. found her way back. She spent some time over there though. . So in 1944 on the set of Meet Me in St.

Louis directed by Vincent Minelli, he wrote in his memoir that my juxtaposition of color had been rightly praised on stage, but I couldn't do anything right in Mrs. Alma's eyes. . And then you have a story about one of her onset antics too, right? Yes. So during the shooting of the film in the middle of a take, she walks on set and busts the take, which is something you just don't do.

You never do that while they're shooting. While they're shooting. The camera is rolling. She walks on set and she screams you can't have one sister in bright red gown in another, in Bright Green at this point. Vincent Minelli just rolled his eyes and said I didn't listen to her ever again.

I depended on my own instincts from then on . Oh, can you believe she busted a take? But why red and green next to me? Those are like the technic color colors, especially during Christmas. Yeah, red and green are Christmas colors. Oh my God. Miss Kalmus. Yeah, . I don't understand that one, but she fought all her battles.

She didn't pick them.

So the same year that meet me in St. Louis came out. The Harrison Company, a high-end department store, reached out to Natalie and they said that they wanted to use Technol in one of their collections.

They wanted to use the name Technol, and they wanted her to help curate a collection of clothing, a fashion line. And she said you can't use the name Technol, but you can use my name. So they launched a collection called the Natalie Kalmus Color Collection. Wow. In 1944. . Wow. They created a monster.

Huh? They did. This was the same year the Mimi and St. Louis. St. Louis happening Louis. Yeah. And that same year, this is when Herbert's life got really miserable . I mean, Already he was dealing with all the complaints about Natalie. They're going straight to Herbert with these complaints and they shuffled her around.

They moved her from one account to another account. things like that. At this point, it was starting to become a problem. It was more of a problem than it was a benefit at this point. Yeah. Around this time, Herbert was in a relationship with a woman named Eleanor King, who was a journalist. and he wanted to get married, but Natalie was still in the picture and Natalie wasn't having it because a lot of people at this time still thought that they were married and they thought that anytime they would see Herbert with another woman, that it was just an affair and that it was an arrangement of two of them had.

But Herbert just really wanted to move on with his life at this point. , he wanted to get married. Yeah. He wanted to get married, which means that she could no longer be Mrs. Kalma anymore. Right, right. Yeah. She couldn't you couldn't, you can't pretend to be something when everybody else knows you're not.

Nope. And at this point, I think her benefit for the company had long since Worn off. To be fair, they had used her principles and applied it and now they were also applying their own roles. They'd learned enough about how to use Technicolor, that they didn't really need that service anymore.

Other than the technicians to keep the cameras rolling. , they didn't need the consultancy anymore. No. Yeah, I think she saw not only with him trying to get married again, but she saw that her role in the company wasn't long to be sustainable. There was no way that she was gonna be able to.

Hold that role. She saw the writing on the wall. Yeah. In Hollywood. It just wasn't gonna happen. Yeah. And it was both in her work life and in her private life. 

So in 1945, she takes him to court trying to get the divorce reversed, claiming that they had been remarried secretly in 1923 , which she could not provide any proof of. But Herbert settled out of court with her again because he just wanted to move on with his life. He wanted to get married. . And at this point, he paid her $36,625.

He agreed to pay her 7,500 a year alimony until she dies. Even if he died first, she would get it till the end of her life. And then he paid all of the court fees and then an $8,000 lump sum in addition to that. And all she had to do was say that they were still divorced and that she had no claims on it and that she couldn't sue him in the future claiming anything else.

So did she, she settled for all this. Of course, she took her the money. But then she takes him back to court saying that they had lived as man and wifes since 1922 and since they shared residencies and had close collaboration that they were common law.

Married. Yes. This was in 1948. She takes 'em back to court and by doing that, she's voiding the 1945 decision because she said she had no claims on it. And agreed that she would never take 'em to court again. That was part of the settlement. Just by taking him back to court, she totally goes against what she said she was gonna do and she's basically just trying to extort more money from him.

Right.

But unlike in 1945, this time she comes with a media behind her and makes this a big fiasco. She started bringing them to court a lot. She thought she was gonna try this in public and that she was gonna win it because people would feel bad for her. And there's all kinds of headlines. One of 'em, not my wife, Kalma says, an alimony contest there's another headline. Dr. Kalma sues to curb wifes talk about him cuz she had been talking in the papers. There's another Mrs. Natalie Kalma loses divorce battle and court setback for Mrs. Kalma brings hysteria. Wow. Yeah. She was trying this in the media, basically. And she was still trying to produce proof that they were still married, but couldn't . I think what she was trying to do was stall. Yeah. And hope that this was decided in the media and he would just settle a out of court with her. So when that didn't work, she started claiming that he was guilty of cruelty and infidelity. And that she deserved half of his $3 million estate 

and half of the company. And every week her complaints got more dramatic and the papers ate it up. Yeah she made sure that every time she left or entered the court, that she called the media and she. Cry to them afterwards and give interviews and talk about what a horrible person he is and talk about the five women that he was seeing on the side.

That she was just a wife and only wanted to do her best to be a wife to him. And she kept trying to claim that she was still K's legal wife. And the judge wouldn't do it. And she would go ballistic and she, yeah, she would yell at the judge.

She would cry in court. She would she tried all kinds of crazy maneuvers when things wouldn't go her way in California where she originally filed. She tried to get it moved to Boston and they wouldn't do that. So she then filed a claim in Boston against the California court, saying that she wasn't able to get any sort of justice in California because of where it was geographically and that nobody there would, see her side.

And so she actually kind sued the court and then she claimed that the court had given her a heart attack. Yes. This was another big move that she had. So her histrionics didn't just go on in the media. They actually went on in court. She claimed she was so sick that she couldn't even show up anymore because she lived in Boston.

and she couldn't travel out to California even though she was given the legal time, notified five days in advance of when she would have to appear. She just couldn't do it cuz she was too sick and she got a doctor to say that she was too sick. But because of all of the craziness, they sent a private investigator out to see how sick she was to follow her to see if she was actually sick.

Yes. And so let me read this is from the court . We got the court document.

This is what they found when they went to Boston and they followed her around.

In response to the foregoing affidavit. Respondent Kalmus filed affidavits showing on May 19th, 1949, that the appellant took a taxii cab for considerable distance from one hotel to another at the latter, which she had luncheon with a group of 11 people that upon leaving the luncheon, she went shopping, returned to her hotel, obtained her baggage, proceeded to a railway station, and departed on a journey

There was another affidavit that said that she was walking briskly vigorously, firmly and rapidly. And then in another affidavit it says, the plaintiff arrived in Boston from New York by train. Then she walked rapidly and carried her own luggage. She attended the horse races in Boston and she remained through six of the races and returned there from via a streetcar and Subway.

Whoops,

Another plaintiff said that she was seen riding in an automobile, shopping in various stores and carrying various parcels,

And one guy even said that while she was at the races, she walked fast and shouldered her way through a very large crowd without any trouble

So it seems like she wasn't really telling the truth on that, huh?

No. And the whole time she's bashing Herbert in public. And Herbert soon went on the defense and he started talking to the media and

he said that his ex-wife had repeatedly threatened to ruin his business. He said, and I quote, she called me a stinker, a liar, and a crook, and she insulted the women. I had a perfect right to entertain. She continually threatened to murder me. She said she would shoot me in a dark alley

Dang. I believe it too. I believe she would. She kept doing appeal after appeal, and she would pull these dramatic scenes in court and there's court documents where she was saying things like, I can't stand it. She would sob in front of the judge and she would say, oh God.

To any court, dare give me justice. And she did this for years in 1954. So she originally took him to court in 1948. This went on to 19 50, 54. , this is still going on. In 1954, she wrote a nasty letter to the judge that was overseeing the case. And so the judge cited her for contempt of court and sentenced the 73 year old Natalie to five days in county jail.

And he said, you can get neither justice nor sympathy in these courts. So she cried. I'd like to go to jail so I can publicize the injustice that has been done to me. You've had justice. You won't believe me, you won't believe your own attorneys and you won't believe the District Court of appeals.

So I will have to take heroic measures. And so he threw her in jail.

She pulled all kinds of crazy stunts trying to get this to happen. And ultimately, do you know how this ended, how

Herbert Kalmus ended up settling outta court just to get her out of his hair? After six years in court, he finally agreed to just pay her off and she of course took the money. She takes that money. Do you wanna know how much she got? Yeah,

She wanted to increase her alimony to $15,000 a month, and then she wanted a lump sum payment of $125,000. What she ended up accepting was that $15,000 a month alimony, and then a hundred thousand dollars lump sum in 1954. Wow. A hundred thousand dollars cash.

Plus, she was drawing $11,000 from Technol in 1948. She, her contract was up and they didn't renew it. That's another reason why she took him to court. She knew she wasn't going to have a job after 1948 at Technol, but she knew she was guaranteed a pension of $11,000 a year. So a hundred thousand dollars lump sum, $15,000 a month in alimony until she dies.

Herbert can die. She still draws that $15,000 and she gets $11,000 a month from Technol for the rest of her life. And that's what she settled.

Sad thing is that probably half of that went to all the different lawyers, for her. Can you imagine six years in court how much that would cost?

Yeah. And we're laughing, but, you know, I feel bad for her. I feel bad for her because I do think she was crazy 

We read in the Mr. Technol book that she had actually had a lifetime of checking herself into psych wars. So this kind of reveals who she was as a person. . But it was later revealed that, everything she claimed to be was not true. Everything. So Herbert's second wife was a journalist, Eleanor King, and Natalie was a huge thorn in her side and she started looking into Natalie's origin story because she felt the things just didn't add up. Plus she heard a lot from Herbert about what had really gone on behind the scenes with the two of them.

A lot of things just didn't add up.

No. So she did a little research and natalie's official story was that she was born Natalie Dunphy in Norfolk, Virginia. It turns out she was born Netty, Mabell, Dunphy in Maine. And when she was very young, her parents moved her to New Brunswick, Canada, and her father made a living as a farmer and a grocer, and at ate, her parents divorced and she moved back to Boston with her mother and siblings.

So that whole story about her father, ice skating, hitting his head and dying at eight, completely fabricated. Manufactured, yeah. I think that's to come in line with her, Burt and . Yeah. Using part of his origin story as hers. . So there's also no evidence of her ever going to any kind of art school in Boston.

There's no records of it. Or in Zurich. Or in Zurich, or in Canada.

Although Herbert encouraged her to attend an art program in Zurich, she never did enroll in that school or any other of which there is a record. Natalie depended on informal study or absorbing what Europe had to offer. But we also read that she didn't even stay in Zurich. Very long .

Yeah, this was a big reveal in the Mr. Technol book that when they moved to Zurich after about a year, she just went home back to Boston and that was not an uncommon thing. 

Also Eleanor uncovered that she was pregnant and subsequently never told Herbert Kalma this and had it aborted. That Natalie did that.

Natalie did that. Yeah. This is early, right after they got married and then they moved to Zurich. This is the time period where, you would be in love still. . And she did that without him even knowing

. It's a little telling. The George Eastman Museum has also done a lot of research into Natalie's history. And they said that no documentation has been found for any school that Natalie was enrolled in, except for in Leland, Florida, where she enrolled as a special student enrolled without examination for largely high school work.

And she did that when they'd moved there with technicolor to shoot the toll of the sea. So her whole image of being this highly educated art school, art historian was all a fallacy. It was all manufactured. , and I'm not sure if it's all manufactured by her, or was manufactured by both her and Herbert to further the technicolor name.

Because they, Because they needed a good story. Yeah. And they needed somebody who was an expert in authority. On color and art, and she had a natural eye for it. And she was apparently a really good BSer. , hey, that's all you need in Hollywood. So going back she would often check herself into Sanitariums throughout their career.

Anytime anything would get heavy or she would have to work too hard, she would just take a time out and check herself into a sanitarium for three, four months at a time, and then check herself out. and then tried to reenter technicolor right where she was before. And this happened over and over again.

It happened right after the gulf between like really early , it happened multiple times after that. And they would be doing something and she would just disappear and go back to Boston on him all the time. She was not reliable for Herbert in any way.

So if that's the case, why did they continue living together after they got divorced? There's a story, and this is one that I would put a caveat on because Eleanor was not there for this. And this appears in the Mr. Technol book. Eleanor the Herbert's second wife.

Her, yeah. Herbert's second wife. And she tells a story about how she perceived that she got back into the houses. And I'll read that excerpt here.

Shortly after the divorce was final, Natalie's sister showed her the Boston Herald with a front page story with a photograph. The caption read Millionaire investor plans color in a motion picture with Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford to be called the Black Pirate. Sarah asked innocently. Isn't that a wonderful picture of Herbert?

He looks younger and better than he has in years. Natalie snatched a paper from her and read the story. Her reaction was bitter. I knew it. I knew all along. I didn't get what I was entitled to. And now, oh, the dirty double crossing. She ripped the paper to shreds. Sarah tried to calm her. She reminded her that she was just beginning to find herself.

You seem so pleased with your life alone. Natalie shrugged off her consolation. We'll see. She said In 1922, technical's Hollywood plant was in construction at 1006 North Cole Street. Now, technol would be able to offer rush print service to the studios. Doctor was on the site one day complaining about the Southern California to the amusement of the crew.

This hot damned burnout blasted desert furnace of a country. He was saying when he stopped short across the site of the new studio, he saw an apparition approaching him. Picking her way delicately through the building materials was a beautiful, smiling Natalie, whom he had not seen since the divorce.

Startled he could only stare with Natalie was Mrs. Comstock Daniel's dignified and beloved mother. Both women were smiling and calling out to him. Finally, he was able to speak to, what do I owe this unexpected visit Herbert. Dear, I have something to tell you. It's extremely important I have come with Natalie all the way from Boston to talk to you.

Mrs. Comstock reached his side and lowered her voice. Natalie has been given a year to live by the doctors. She's a very sick girl. Oh, I'm very sorry to hear that. Natalie, what has happened? Oh, said Natalie. Reluctantly. You remember Herbert, that I always spend a lot of time in hospitals and sanitariums, but I thought I was over all that.

Now, the Boston doctors tell me that my heart, she f flattered her hand over her heart and allowed her champion to take up the story. You see, Herbert said, Mrs. Comstock, I felt that if you knew this, you would help her stay in California where the weather is so mild. This is the only place where the doctors feel she could be active and occupied.

Since she gave so much of her life to traveling with you and sitting in on conferences on Technicolor, I wonder could you give her some sort of part-time position here in Hollywood? Mother Comstock, you have asked for. The only thing I am unable to do, dear, I don't like to remind you, but when you graduated, you told me to remember all my life that you were so grateful for being a family member during your college days, that there was no favor.

I might ask you that you would not grant Herbert. I'm not a young woman, and this trip has been severe for me, but I could not sleep at night if I did not do this for Natalie, during her remaining time, I think you owe her your help. She has promised me that she will not infringe on you in any way.

Haven't you promised this Natalie? Yes indeed. Mother Comstock. Perhaps there's something I could do two or three days a week in your new color department to make me feel useful. Please. Herbert, I asked this of you as my final request urged the older woman, Dr. Looked intently at both of them for you Mother Comstock, and against my better judgment, I'll find something for Natalie to do and I sincerely hope I will make her life happier.

I don't agree with this, but I'll do it. That decision was to bring Dr. 30 years of grief.

So like I said, she wasn't there for this. No, this is a total fabrication. It's a good story though, but it's probably a story that she was told by Herbert and then related in kind of a narrative way. . The fact that Herbert didn't include any of his marital details in the book at all.

It's all in fact, no reference to Natalie at all in anything he wrote. It's a 200 page book. He doesn't name her one time. Yeah. So his wife, after he had died, wrote a few chapters at the ends before this book was published. It was published posthumously, and she added some stuff because she said that there's no way this book can come out.

any mention of Natalie. And she had all access to all his papers, all their correspondence over the years, and found out a whole bunch about it. Not only that he had related to her personally but through correspondence and o other documentation. And like you said, she was a journalist, so it was kind of in her nature to get to the root. She also addresses why she was able to stay in all of their homes over that time period.

So that still doesn't quite fill in the story of why he would've let her live there and then pretend to be Mrs. Kalma. 

How did that all start? It's as insidious as this last one, so let's again, grain of salt. This is, she was not present. This is hearsay. Yes. Is hearsay not present?

This is Eleanor's story about how Natalie got back into their homes during the years since his divorce from Natalie In 1921, doctor she called Herbert Doctor, had made several trips to Europe with various women friends. He was after all free men, and he saw no reason why his arrangements with Natalie should compromise this freedom.

Knowing his schedule, Natalie caught doctor at a conference and gave him a greeting from her mother. Doctor asked about her family. He had always been fond of them. They had been his family too during his marriage to Natalie. How is Mother dumpy? He. He was unprepared for Natalie's gambit. Herbert mother misses the cape.

The hot Boston Summers are very trying for her. Could she and the family stay at Fernbrook while you're in Europe? Even two weeks would be so refreshing. You've always been so generous, dear, and you know how they love you. Doctor was no match for Natalie. He was no better prepared when she made her next advance.

I was wondering. My little apartment is so suffocating. These hot nights. I can scarcely breathe. There's always a cool breeze on your lovely hilltop. Could I entertain technical clients there while you're away? The cook and the butler and the gardener are on hand anyway. Isn't that a good idea? 

He did these things out of open-hearted innocence. Never for a moment did he suspect that his generosity and discretion would enable her to assume the role of wronged wife. . Wow. Well That makes sense. Little by little. Yeah. But it was beneficial for both of them. Ultimately for we read that article where they both professed to be married. , because it was a better story. It is a better story. And using her as the face of Technol got them a lot of press.

And that press made them the number one color format in Hollywood. And we also read that Technol was having other people in the company write articles and they were putting Natalie's name on them when they published them. Yeah. Technol had to be complicit in that.

. So it was working both ways, I think eventually he saw that, he didn't need her anymore. Technical was the premier color format and he didn't need that press or story, but he kept her along. And the fact that he paid her, no matter what she demanded, meant that he valued what she did for the company, I think.

Mm-hmm. ,, she just couldn't get out of her own way. That's the problem. Yeah. That's a really good way to put it. Yeah. She should have been more set up than she was. She had gotten, hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years. She had a really bad gambling habit. Yes. Very bad. Apparently you see a lot of pictures of her at the track with various Hollywood friends.

Yeah. That's unfortunate. She would gamble money she didn't have. Yeah. And then go to Herbert and ask him for money and he would give it to her. After she wasn't at Technol anymore. She did a couple things on her own. There were some television sets that were released.

Yeah. I called the Natalie Kalmus television sets. Yeah. The Natalie Kalmus collection. They were like furniture back then. TV sets. . And she designed them and they were really cool looking. Yeah. We saw a catalog that had all the different designs. Yeah. They had like names, like the Shangrila and things like that.

She also traveled the world and taught color classes. Yep.

There's a lot of debate whether technol thrived because of Natalie or in spite of her, and I think it's easy for people to dismiss her position as the result of nepotism, as a result of just being a good story for technol.

Yeah. Good publicity. . But I think that her legacy, although it's somewhat tainted by a lot of this stuff is one of true triumph she had in effect on the film industry that we are lucky to have today. . Yeah. Her impact is undeniable. Natalie Kalmus and Technol, there wouldn't be film color as an art form like there is, or it wouldn't, have been as rapidly accepted as it was.

When she wrote her Color Consciousness article, Color was still being seen as a novelty, something to be used with musicals or spectacles, not something to be used with dramas. And she wrote that showing that it is art, it can be used with that. And many of those theories that she lays forth, that color theory, the emotional color theory we still use today. We do. When you see someone bathe in red light, it's anger or jealousy or avaris, it's something strong, mm-hmm. , , hatred, all those things are still true.

, I think that her being specifically female also helped too.

Men look at women as having the ability to put colors together or to have an aesthetic eye in a way that men don't. So the fact that she was female gave her a leg up in that. . If this were a man telling another man that you should put, gray instead of white against another color, he would look at 'em and be like, who told you that?

You're the expert on color. But because she was a female and there were already those kind of gender biases you just took it for granted. She knows because she's a woman, Mm-hmm. women know this stuff. And I think that was a way that Technicolor was able to work within gender biases and make them work for them.

, Mm-hmm. , I'm sure she encountered a lot of, like, the opposite too. The fact that she's a woman in telling men what to do. I'm sure there was a lot of, things that she had to deal with, but I think that, the fact that she was a woman also worked for her. . . No. And I don't think she was necessarily bad at her job.

I just think she was bad with people. I think she was great at her job at first, and I think that, like you said, I think she got a bigger head and overstep. She got set in her ways and yeah. Didn't adapt other people did. Mm-hmm. .. She needed to understand that as people became more familiar with it and started pushing the limits of what the technology should do, that she should have been there.

Right. With them trying to push that technology as well. 

Natalie Kalma has over 300 credits to her name on I M D E. Her name was put on every film that Technol was involved with whether she was directly, personally overseeing it or not. Yeah. That's a legacy, a massive legacy that no matter what happened afterwards, can't be tainted, ,. And this is one of the problems with becoming a personality, everything you do is amplified in the press.

And unfortunately we only have the articles and things that we can read about her life, about things that happened because there's just not a lot of stuff out there on her. And unfortunately nobody really has good things to say about her, which kind of says something if universally everybody seems to have the same sentiment towards her.

I think that's the consensus now is that, she couldn't have been a great person to work with because so many people have talked ill about her afterwards. Yeah. I think of her as like the Devil wears Prada. Ultimately good at what she was doing. She knew what she was doing, but not the best with navigating personalities.

Right.

She pushed the boundaries she helped change in industry a lot of the things that she, came up with, we still use those today. Yeah. And she was a pioneering female in a male dominated world. And who's to say technol would've ever looked as good as it looked as quickly as it looked good without her?

That's what I'm saying. Yeah. I don't think you can talk technol without talking Natalie cameras. Yeah. Because by the end of the thirties just a few years into using technol with live action, it looked amazing because of the color advisory group. Right. You can't say that it wasn't, they weren't a part of that.

Yeah. They ruled with an iron hand. . Yes. They were directives, not suggestions. . Yeah. So next time you're watching a Technol film, look on the Technol card at the beginning of the credits and you may just see Natalie K's name and now you'll know a little history of the Lady behind the Color, the rig, master of the Rainbow, if you will,

and who knows ultimately what's true, what's not true. Their fun Hollywood stories.

And Natalie stepped up when Herbert didn't want to do that. She did. It wasn't all her. He put her in that position. And allowed her to run in that position for a very long time. She ran with it and she ran with it. Good on her. and we salute you. Natalie . Yeah. However crazy. You may or may not have been , and remember Natalie always takes the money.

All right. Thanks for joining us on this trip down technical lane. Yeah, this was a fun one to research. . Especially when we would get into the legal stuff. Yeah. I didn't really know much about Natalie Kalma. I'd seen her name on things, but I didn't know any of the backstory.

And I was at the Herrick Museum doing research for the movie White Christmas, and I just came across a story. And I had to forward it to you and say, have you ever heard this? And it was all about Natalie and Herbert Kalmus and just all the drama that she caused on set.

And we thought instantly we have to share this with other people because there's articles out there on her and on this. But I don't know that it's super widely known. No, I think a lot of people are trying to reclaim her right now but you can't have that discussion and disregard all the bad stuff too.

I think everybody is made up of contradictions.

, there's not one person that is all one thing or all one other thing. And so those contradictions are what make us human and make us interesting. Mm-hmm. .. And I think we needed to talk about all the good things and the bad things. And you can't talk about technicolor without talking about Natalie.

No, not at all. Because she was such a face of technol in the thirties when Technol really got on its feet. Yeah. Yeah. I You cannot unlink them. Even though we told the story the first part without talking about her. 

It's difficult to do that cuz that's not the whole story. , there would be no technol without Natalie Kalma. And whether she was a help or a hindrance is ultimately irrelevant. And whether she was self manufactured or if she was manufactured with the help of technicolor, which is what I suspect , it doesn't matter. It honestly doesn't. It doesn't. Because she was capable of what she did and look at all the great stuff we got out of it.

, ultimately Technicolor's legacy is what speaks for Technol and Natalie Kalmus.

let's acknowledge some of our tools and research. The Herrick Museum, again, always a great resource. Harnessing the Technical Rainbow Color Design in the 1930s by Scott Higgins.

There's the Dawn of Technicolor by David Pear and James Layton, glorious technol by Freddie Baston, Mr. Technol by Herbert Kalma with a little bit by Eleanor King. At the end there was the documentary Glorious Technol from 1999. Check that one out.

There's a lot of the stuff about Natalie there, about Natalie and her ugly hats. We didn't even get into that. Yeah, I thought that was petty. It was. But there's a, there's mention of her in there and of Herbert of course. There's all the countless news articles that we read.

, thanks to the Lantern website. There's also this J store website that's got a lot of articles from institutions that you can look up by subject. That was great. Lots of great resources. I hope I've named, checked most of them. Yeah I hope so too. . . We really want to give credit work, credit due credit's due.

Yes. Yes. So none of this was all on our own. It was all with the help of all of these other resources. Lots of reading. Lots of reading. Fun reading though. Fun reading. Anyway. All right. So if you wanna send us a note, we are perf damage podcast gmail.com. We're also on Twitter at perf damage. We'll have a letter box list for this episode where Adam will list every film that we've mentioned, which for this one is actually probably lower than most.

Yeah. I think both of these technical ones were yeah. Pretty subdued on that. Yeah. We picked. Cherry picked someones to talk about. Don't worry. We'll really amp it up on the next one. don't. We won't just name, we won't let you guys down. I'm gonna name drop every movie. Go. Yeah, you're just gonna start lists.

Yep. List and list. List the episode.

All right. It's been real. And if you've got ideas for stories for us, please send us a note. Or if you just wanna say hi, we like that too. We have really had a fun time connecting with people. You have reached out and it's been great. We love the feedback. We really do.

We do. We do. So thanks for joining us here on Per Damage.