If It's Purple, Someone's Gonna Die

Patti Bellantoni

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136068454
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Películas y vídeos

If it's Purple, Someone's Gonna Die is a must-read book for all film students, film professionals, and others interested in filmmaking. This enlightening book guides filmmakers toward making the right color selections for their films, and helps movie buffs understand why they feel the way they do while watching movies that incorporate certain colors. Guided by her twenty-five years of research on the effects of color on behavior, Bellantoni has grouped more than 60 films under the spheres of influence of six major colors, each of which triggers very specific emotional states. For example, the author explains that films with a dominant red influence have themes and characters that are powerful, lusty, defiant, anxious, angry, or romantic and discusses specific films as examples. She explores each film, describing how, why, and where a color influences emotions, both in the characters on screen and in the audience. Each color section begins with an illustrated Home Page that includes examples, anecdotes, and tips for using or avoiding that particular color.Conversations with the author's colleagues-- including award-winning production designers Henry Bumstead (Unforgiven) and Wynn Thomas (Malcolm X) and renowned cinematographers Roger Deakins (The Shawshank Redemption) and Edward Lachman (Far From Heaven)--reveal how color is often used to communicate what is not said. Bellantoni uses her research and experience to demonstrate how powerful color can be and to increase readers awareness of the colors around us and how they make us feel, act, and react.*Learn how your choice of color can influence an audience's moods, attitudes, reactions, and interpretations of your movie's plot
*See your favorite films in a new light as the author points out important uses of color, both instinctive and intentional
*Learn how to make good color choices, in your film and in your world.

Red the Caffeinated Color

Bright red is like visual caffeine. It can activate your libido, or make you aggressive, anxious, or compulsive. In fact, red can activate whatever latent passions you might bring to the table, or to the movie. Red is power. But red doesn’t come with a moral imperative. Depending on the story’s needs, red can give power to a good guy or a bad guy. After all, both the Wicked Witch and Dorothy wore the ruby slippers.

Lola has twenty minutes to find 100,000 marks to save Manni's life. Red is her visual fuel.

Because we tend to see it first, red gives the illusion of advancing toward us. Due to this, it can manipulate our sense of space. In Sydney Pollack’s The Firm, for example, the camera places us directly behind Tom Cruise when the door to the law firm opens. What we see is what Cruise sees: It is a bright red wall that visually says “power.” Because bright red has this visually aggressive quality, the space does indeed appear to come forward, and it looks shallower than it actually is. That is exactly what is going to happen to him at the firm. Cruise is about to enter a high-powered place in which there is little room to maneuver.

Red can also make something appear to move faster. (Red cars get more speeding tickets than cars of any other color.) Bright red can raise your heart rate and anxiety level. It is visually loud and can elicit anger. One of my students told of how her happy, well-adjusted family was bored with the neutral color in their dining room. They wanted to make it more cheerful. After selecting a number of paint chips, they decided on a bright red. Almost immediately and without warning, they began to have altercations every night at dinner. It sent them into a tailspin. In fact, it got so bad, they went into family therapy. A few months went by with no appreciable change. Frustrated, they ultimately searched for an answer in the dining room itself. As the only thing that had changed was the color, they decided to change the color back to the original pale yellow. They stopped fighting almost immediately.

Bright red tends to be cold. Power-hungry Sigourney Weaver wears red in Working Girl, and in The Sixth Sense the cold-blooded murderer wears it at a funeral. This aggressive quality of bright red is somehow tempered when the color becomes warmer. Warm reds (red-oranges) tend to be sensual or lusty. Think Gwyneth Paltrow’s bedspread in Shakespeare in Love. Rose (light red tinged with blue), like the train car in the last scene of Racing with the Moon, is more romantic. (See illustration on page 39.)

Red darkened to burgundy reads as mature, regal, and elegant. In Moonstruck, when Loretta (Cher) buys a burgundy dress for the opera, it’s an important clue to a change in her heretofore-mundane character. Burgundy, a deep red, that has a whisper of blue, is more sophisticated. It’s like a fine vintage wine. It signals a growth and maturity in Loretta. This may be her first opera, but that burgundy suggests it probably won’t be her last.

In the last analysis, the color most people think of as “red” is the one we call “fire engine red.” This is the red that makes people eat faster and gamble more. Think of the sound a fire siren makes. Red is its visual equivalent. It makes it difficult to believe that the red in the traffic lights visually signals us to “Stop!”

Think About This:

Does the red in a traffic light really signal you to stop?

1 Powerful, Lusty, and Defiant Reds

DOI: 10.4324/9780080478418-1

Powerful Reds

The Wizard of Oz

• 1939. Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Burt Lahr, Jack Haley, Margaret Hamilton. Directed by Victor Fleming. Cinematography: Harold Rosson; Art Direction: Cedric Gibbons.

RED: LITTLE SHOES/BIG POWER

Think of it this way: The green brick road, the yellow shoes, and the ruby red city. Doesn’t work, does it? And it’s not only because this film is part of our cultural heritage (it was voted number six on AFI’s list of the 100 greatest American movies of all time) that the yellow brick road, the emerald city, and the ruby-red shoes are impressed as clichés in our consciousness. It’s because those specific colors send specific signals for specific intentions in the story.

Underneath all the charm, underneath all the delight is a serious and scary story about the struggle to find power, compassion, and courage. It’s about facing the green witches and blue monkeys of the adult world. It’s akin to Luke Skywalker’s using “the force” to fight the dark side or Harry Potter’s summoning his Patronus to repel the dementors. Luke had his lightsaber. Harry had his wand. Dorothy, in a sweeter time, had her magic shoes. It’s interesting to note that even though Dorothy’s slippers look like adult shoes, they fit this little girl. Dorothy’s ready to grow up, and they give her something that she desperately needs to travel down that yellow road, and red is the clue to what it is.

Dorothy needs power. The pale blue of her pinafore doesn’t send a strong enough signal to ward off the scary trees and flying monkeys that she will face along the way to Oz. After all, it’s the red shoes that will have contact with the cautionary yellow of the road and, therefore, need the most power to carry her there. Red is her visual courage.

Dorothy’s also a kid who’s been wrenched from home and feels powerless in this strange world of witches and munchkins. It is important to remember that in 1939, when the film was made, audiences were viewing films in black and white, and so it was brilliant for the filmmakers to expose the audience to black and white in the beginning of the movie so that they too could experience the incredible shock of the exotic and bizarre Technicolor world along with Dorothy. Intimations of vulnerability were rumbling through the cosmos in 1939. People wanted to feel strong and invincible. It was good to know that it was the home from Kansas that squashed the Wicked Witch so Dorothy could have those ruby slippers and the strength and the power to make it to the Emerald City. The number one red signal is Power.

Yellow: The Promise and the Warning

The yellow has it all. It’s bright, and it’s a color, like red, that tends to take over the visual field. After all, we see it all the way to the Emerald City. Because of its brightness and warmth, it is often associated with happiness. Perceptually, it appears to come forward. We “see” it first, which is one of the reasons it is used to signal caution in traffic signs. That road leads the way to finding happiness over the rainbow and at the same time it cautions Dorothy of the unknown obstacles that will test her along the way.

Blue: Powerless Pinafores and Scary Monkeys

Actually, Dorothy’s pinafore was a blue gingham-check, which reads as pale blue. Year after year, our investigations revealed that the paler a color is, the more powerless it is. She definitely needs that red.

Those monkeys, on the other hand, are a very cold and very bright blue, and combined with their gargoyle-like faces, they are the stuff of which nightmares are made. Scary-looking things that are a cold color do not read as compassionate, and consequently become even scarier. Blue is the coldest color in the spectrum. In its most saturated form, it is not associated with emotional warmth or empathy.

Green: The Mean Old Lady and the Evil Witch

In the black-and-white beginning of the movie, the face of Miss Gulch (Margaret Hamilton) is really scary. But when the scene shifts to the Technicolor land of the Munchkins and she becomes the Wicked Witch of the West, her face is green and she becomes absolutely virulent.

She is evil incarnate. Chalk it up to genetic memory of venomous reptiles crawling or sliding out of the slime, but our reaction to green skin is programmed at a very deep level. Our aversion is a knee-jerk response. We can’t help it.

Green transforms the already horrid Miss Gulch into the even more evil Wicked Witch of the West.

Green: The Emerald Anomaly

Then why aren’t we afraid of the emerald castle? The answer lies perhaps in the idea of this green as a beautiful jewel. Not to cast a shadow over a film icon, but in the last analysis (my research shows green, when not in a natural state, can have very negative associations), green may not have been the best choice for this magical city. Renowned color consultant Faber Birren says in his well-known book Color, “Green … is used to express both the curse and the blessing of youth.”¹

1 Faber Birren, Color, Marshall Editions, Limited, 1980, p. 206.

Try this experiment yourself: In the last sequence, the Wizard is about to fly off in the balloon. A crowd of people dressed in green forms around him, and the green city surrounds him. Wait until the screen is nearly filled with green and put the video on “pause.” Just stare at the screen as if it were an abstract painting and see how you feel physically. Then you decide: Does it feel magical or not?

Working Girl

• 1988. Harrison Ford, Melanie Griffith, Sigourney Weaver. Directed by Mike Nichols. Cinematography: Michael Ballhaus; Production Design: Patrizia von Brandenstein.

The Fall and Rise

Accompanied by Carly Simon’s “Let all the dreamers wake the nation,” the Staten Island ferry, in all its working-class glory, heads toward Manhattan. This is a journey between two worlds. And the credentials required to gain access into the more powerful one are hard to come by for a girl from the “Bridge and Tunnel” crowd. Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith) is a young woman who has worked hard and long, gone to school at night, and won a degree with honors. Yet she doesn’t have the resumé to make it in this part of town. Her big hair lets us know that right away. When we first see Tess, she’s in a brown vinyl car coat, rosebud textured tights, and lots of costume jewelry. But Tess has great instincts. Her transformation begins on her first day in her new job as a secretary in Mergers and Acquisitions. She wears black. Her new boss, Kathryn Parker (Sigourney Weaver), makes her entry softly, wearing an elegant suit the color of deerskin with simple pearls over an ivory-colored blouse. It doesn’t, however, take Kathryn—an egotistical power-obsessed control freak if ever there was one—long to begin wearing red.

She throws a cocktail party to introduce herself to her colleagues. In a brilliantly staged scene, a gaggle of gray-suited men swarms around her, like little boys to a candy store. Kathryn, sophisticated and elegant, is a corporate temptress incarnate. In the midst of this grayness, she stands, wearing a deceivingly simple bright red dress. The color is dominant and signals power, but her dialogue is laced with lusty inn...