> Because of the film technology at the time, a lot of the skin tones on set wouldn't match what you'd expect

It wasn't just skin tones. Wardrobe was picked for the resulting look on B&W film vs what it looked like in real life. Here's a pretty in depth article: https://www.screeningthepast.com/issue-39-first-release/desi...

Huh. That actually brings up a kind of modern parallel I hadn't thought of. A lot of action movies are done primarily, or in part, on greenscreen. The intent of using a greenscreen has nothing to do with what was captured, and more so to do with what is trying to be depicted; what ought be seen, not what is being seen by the actors and actresses.

It would be interesting to know if, in say, 100-200 years, there is some alternative technology that could de-render todays CGI perfectly, and then replace it with some alternative, perhaps insert some form of practical effect in a convincing way? Would being able to do so be better to do just because it can be done?

Like, suppose that one of the more recent big budget movies, Transformers or whatever, could entirely have all of the CGI stripped out of them instantly, and then be replaced with some form of "less fake" effects in a different way. Would it be good to do so, if that were possible? For me personally, I'm very much in favor of rubber suits and fake blood over sticks with ping pong ball overlayed with graphics. [1] In spite of my preference though, I don't know if however many hundreds of people who had worked the digital modeling for all of those scenes would appreciate essentially deleting all of the thousands of hours they had put into the movie.

Bringing that back to B&W films, I think that if someone was really excellent at doing the set design for B&W films, it makes me wonder how they might react if someone insisted on "fixing" the film by colorizing it, and showing their set pieces in a way that they never intended for those pieces to be seen by the audience. Like, if they weren't outright upset with even the idea of doing it at all, perhaps they might insist on some sort of creative control on how each of those set pieces were colorized and portrayed in the final product. Obviously, that would then extend out to all of the other things too, like wardrobe, makeup, etc. I could see the complexity ballooning out to be as complicated and involved as making the movie was to begin with! For example, maybe the guy that scouted the original location for the film wouldn't have chose the spots he had chosen if he knew that people would be able to see it on giant TVs that they could pause every single frame of, and perform all kinds of upscaling and digital zooms in and out on.

[1] I am firmly in favor of practical effects over digital for everything, except small technical errors like a boom mic or a coffee cup in a shot, because I think that the constraints a movie set faces will demand either: incredible innovative solutions by the crew, or, those constraints force directors to scale their vision back to something more contained and manageable. It helps to show where the scope creep for a movie is, and where it's simply unnecessary. For example, Jaws has a great backstory regarding the constant issues of the mechanical shark, it really forced Spielberg to rethink how and when the shark would be shown, and when it would be better to let the viewers mind fill in the blanks.