12 Things That Were Really To Blame For Hollywood's Biggest F*ck Ups

5. Colourisation Was All About The Benjamins

Ted Turner may not be history's greatest monster, but he certainly gave it a good old college try. He came up with CNN, the first 24 hour news channel, which we believe has received its most thorough critical analysis via Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues. He also founded WTBS, which pioneered the superstation concept in cable television. The thing he's perhaps best known for, however, is TCM €“ or, Turner Classic Movies, the channel which carries his name. The same channel which, in the mid-eighties, began the incredibly controversial practice of colourising old films. Which is exactly what it sounds like, really: taking the black-and-white films of yesteryear and using a specific computer-based process to bring them kicking and screaming into the modern age, in glorious technicolour! Or just regular colour. Which, obviously, lots of film fans weren't best pleased with (and still aren't), both from an artistic perspective and also because they new Turner's reasons for doing it were entirely cynical. To be fair, Turner had snapped up the rights to a lot of these old studio pictures €“ including The Maltese Falcon and It's A Wonderful Life €“ and, as he said, "The last time I checked, I owned the films that we're in the process of colourising," said Ted Turner. "I can do whatever I want with them, and if they're going to be shown on television, they're going to be in colour." The accepted reason for him making this decision is because, duh, people don't wanna watch stuff that looks old. Black-and-white isn't appealing to today's audiences, right? Besides, y'know, Nebraska and stuff. Turns out that was maybe half right. The audience Turner actually wanted to satisfy were advertisers, who would tend to pay a lot less money for the privilege of appearing in breaks between black-and-white films than colour. So whilst the price of colourising a film was around $300,000, they'd make like $500,000 for showing them. Plus changing the films in that way helped him assert his copyright over these old films, so who cares what Woody Allen or Billy Wilder say?