There’s Movies in Color, a wonderful Tumblr devoted to extracting individual color tones from scenes of classic films. There you'll find the Wes Anderson canon deconstructed into bright swatches. The same teals and reds pop up in The Life Aquatic and The Darjeeling Limited, mustards and caramels repeat themselves in The Royal Tenenbaums and Fantastic Mr. Fox. All of which highlights the extent to which color schemes help establish the feel of a director's work. (See also: Quentin Tarantino, Alfred Hitchcock, and Sofia Coppola.)

Technicolor turns 100 this year, a milestone being celebrated by George Eastman House with a centennial website, a special exhibition, and a book. And though Technicolor was incorporated in 1915, it wasn't until after World War II that full-color films began to be accepted by audiences as more than just a passing fad. In the 1920s and 1930s, Technicolor was still experimental, oftentimes to the point of being absurd. "Especially in the early days in the 1920s, it was a two-color process so it couldn't capture the whole spectrum," said James Layton, one of the authors of The Dawn of Technicolor. "You couldn't get proper blues or purples or yellow. If you filmed something that was purple, it might come out black or brown."

The two-color process worked by filming with a beam-splitting prism behind the lens that would divide light into two paths; one filtered red and the other filtered green.

George Eastman House

Filmmakers could only prioritize certain colors for naturalness—they chose red for skin tone and green for foliage. "Which meant skies would never reproduce accurately, and water wouldn't," Layton told me. "But they didn't mind sort of the color palette being a bit thrown off because if people appeared natural then audiences were willing to forgive it a bit, or accept the rest as natural even though it wasn't. There are some great examples. A beach scene... where the sky is this very vivid green, it's very unnatural."

In the beginning, only brief sequences—sometimes just five minutes long—would be colorized in otherwise black-and-white films. Technicolor was a proprietary process, and it was expensive. "Very often, fashion shows [would be] in color," Layton said. "It was also kind of common to have, if the lovers in the film got married, the wedding would be in color. Really splashy things. If you were paying for color, you wanted to see color. It wasn't always subtle or artistic use."

That began to change with The Black Pirate, one of the most famous early Technicolor films shot entirely in color—and painstakingly so. "Douglas Fairbanks decided he was going to make an entire film in color, which was very expensive," Layton said. "He actually decided after months and months of tests that he would shoot it entirely in the studio and control every single color. He built the ship in his studio and had a pool. It was completely artificial down to the palm trees. He would paint the leaves on the trees, effectively painting the set how he knew it would turn out."