The yellow brick road wouldn’t have been yellow without Boston’s Technicolor

The company’s very name, Technicolor, was an homage to MIT, which publishes a yearbook called Technique. Two of its three founders were MIT grads who went on to teach physics at the university. Many of the key engineers who joined the company were their former students. And from 1915 to about 1931, when it moved everything to Hollywood, the company had offices, research and development staff, and film processing labs in Boston. If you’ve been to Fenway Park, there’s a good chance you’ve walked past two of them — without noticing, since there are no plaques or historic markers.

Technicolor’s founders had previously run a consulting firm; one of their clients was a Boston attorney who was exploring a potential investment in a new kind of movie projector that would eliminate flickering. They advised against it, but then suggested the attorney aim higher — why not try to put color on the screen? He agreed to put $10,000 into their new venture. To achieve their goal, they had to develop their own cameras, shooting and lighting techniques on set, film processing, and add-ons to the movie projector. Not to mention finance some of their own movies, to convince movie studios that they could shoot in color on a reasonable schedule and budget.

Technicolor set up one of its earliest offices and film processing labs in a railroad car. The car was hitched to a train heading to Jacksonville, Fla., where Technicolor made its first demonstration movie, “The Gulf Between.” In it, a young girl gets lost, is raised by a sea captain, and later finds love — as well as her family of origin. Sadly, the hour-long movie’s print was lost in a fire in 1961.

At the time, Technicolor’s approach to projecting color involved two strips of film running through the projector in sync, the light passing through color filters, and bringing the two images into alignment on the screen using a glass adjusting element. Technicolor founder Herb Kalmus joked that it required a projectionist “who was a cross between a college professor and an acrobat.” (Technicolor’s initial approach could not represent some colors well — like the blue of a sky.)

The first time an audience saw a Technicolor film was in September 1917, when the company held a screening of “The Gulf Between” at the Tremont Temple, next door to the Omni Parker House hotel. After a road show of that film failed to wow the industry, the company worked to refine its approach so that showing a color film wouldn’t require special attachments on the projector. But despite attracting the backing of movie star (and producer) Douglas Fairbanks, who made a film with the refined Technicolor process called “The Black Pirate,” there were still snafus: Technicolor’s film would warp, go in and out of focus, and get scratched as it ran through the projector. The company was constantly shipping out new film prints to theaters— an expensive proposition.

By the time Technicolor was perfecting cameras and film processing techniques that would eventually persuade Walt Disney to adopt it, and lead to breakthrough movies like “The Wizard of Oz” and “Gone with the Wind,” the company’s center of gravity was already shifting to Hollywood.

Kalmus traveled west in 1924 to set up a permanent office in Hollywood, and he moved to California in 1926, says Luci Marzola, author of the book “Engineering Hollywood,” and a film history professor at the University of Southern California. “For about the next five years, you have that split – the on-the-ground, practical side of the company in L.A., but you still have the lab, where they’re processing the film, in Boston.” But by 1931, she says, it proved to be “too much of a disconnect to be shipping things back and forth, and the volume of film processing is going up with the introduction of three-strip Technicolor.” (It was called that because red, green, and blue were captured on different strips of film.)

Marzola says the magic act that Kalmus performed as entrepreneur “was to keep his investors happy, despite the fact that they didn’t turn a profit for 20 years. That’s kind of remarkable.”

Technicolor became one of the giants of 20th-century Hollywood. It became so successful, and was so central to the process of making color movies, Marzola says, that there was an antitrust suit against Technicolor and its film supplier, Eastman Kodak, charging the companies with monopolistic practices in seeking to control all color film production. After Technicolor signed a consent decree, and some of its early patents began to expire, the company’s dominance began to fade. But there’s still a vestige of Technicolor that survives today, known as Technicolor Creative Studios. It’s a publicly-traded company that makes animation and special effects for movies, television, and videogames. It has offices in Paris, London, Bangalore, and Los Angeles — but not Boston.

The railroad car that served as Technicolor’s mobile laboratory was likely scrapped, says James Layton, co-author of the book “The Dawn of Technicolor.” Tremont Temple is still there, operating as a Baptist church, but no longer showing movies.

Two of the company’s first film processing labs are on Brookline Avenue in Boston (numbers 110 and 120), a block over from Fenway Park. One has been renovated and is occupied by PathAI, a health care startup that uses artificial intelligence to analyze samples of tissue. (Like Technicolor, one of its founders is an MIT alum.) The other, run-down and graffiti-splattered, is slated to be demolished soon, part of another project to upgrade the Fenway neighborhood.

Today, that endangered building bears a small, boxy sign for Twins Enterprise Inc., a maker of sports souvenirs that is now known as 47, for the year it was founded. But in an earlier era, when Boston helped usher in the age of color movies, the building once had a proud sign above its entrance, in all capital letters: “Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation.”

Scott Kirsner can be reached at kirsner@pobox.com. Follow him on Twitter @ScottKirsner.