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To PARAPHRASE Gilbert and Sullivan, it was not an easy thing for Fairbanks to be a pirate king. Among the challenges he faced on the way to producing The Black Pirate in 1926 was the problem of color. "Pirates demand color," declared Fairbanks in 1923, when he first began planning the picture; "stories of modern life, war stories, even romances like The Thief of Bagdad might be told in black and white, but what pirates needed was something more vivid. It was impossible to imagine them without color"
Yet audiences and filmmakers had so far been fickle about color. Handcolored films from Pathe Freres had worn out their welcome. Mechanical processes like Kinemacolor, an early experiment in a two-color additive system, and Technicolor, a subtractive system, were condemned either for causing eyestrain or for technical shortcomings. An editorial writer for Motion Picture Magazine even speculated that there was a "psychological reason for their non-popularity," concluding that "color seems to cross the line between the real and the unreal and leaves too little room for the imagination"
Undaunted, Fairbanks and his designers Dwight Franklin and Carl Oscar Borg, cameraman Henry Sharp, and Technicolor advisors Arthur Ball and George Cave spent $125,000 and expended six months and fifty thousand feet of color...