Pleasantville

Gary Ross wrote and directed this, his first feature. The black and white world was shot in colour; the black and white came afterwards. About 163,000 frames of 35 mm negative were digitised, most colours stripped out and the rest adjusted one by one. Scanning ran at Cinesite in Los Angeles on a Philips Spirit DataCine at 2K, starting at 2 frames a second and reaching 4 with new software. Shooting ran from 1 March to 2 July 1997. During it the camera operator Brent Hershman died in a crash driving home after a 19 hour day. The crew gathered signatures for a rule capping the day at 14 hours; it went nowhere. The film is dedicated to Hershman, the director’s mother Gail, and J. T. Walsh. The 71st Academy Awards brought 3 nominations and no wins: Art Direction (Jeannine Oppewall and Jay Hart), Costume Design (Judianna Makovsky) and original dramatic score (Randy Newman), music being split in two that year. No acting nomination, yet Joan Allen collected supporting actress prizes from the Boston, Los Angeles and Dallas critics. A good fit if you want the town turning colour read as work adjusted frame by frame, not decoration. Not for anyone expecting the allegory kept to hints; book burning and discrimination against the coloured townspeople are staged plainly.