Today's useless fact - What was the first movie to use color?

Color movies were expensive and difficult to produce, and so displaced black-and-white films far more slowly than "talkies" had replaced silent films. By 1954, just half of all films were being made in color.

Kinemacolor was an early color process developed by George Albert Smith of Brighton, England in 1906. Leon Douglass of San Rafael, California, perfected a color process and produced breathtaking color travelogues, as well as a feature-length color film, Cupid Angling, with Ruth Roland in 1918. His process became one of the factors in the formation of the Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation, which came to dominate the industry in the 1930s and '40s. The Technicolor process required a special camera that split the image and recorded on three strips of black and white film simultaneously. Red, green, and blue filters were used to filter the light to the three strips respectively. A proprietary printing process translated the images from the developed strips into the color prints projected in the theatres. The process worked well, but was more complex and expensive than black and white.

Contrary to popular belief, "The Wizard of Oz" was NOT the first color movie. Check out the links in our Movie category for more.