Black & White vs Color

I watched an interview with Peter Bogdanovich tonight, in which he shared an anecdote I've heard before. When he was preparing to shoot The Last Picture Show in black and white, Orson Welles told him that black and white was the actor's friend, that all performances were better in black and white, and challenged Bogdanovich to name him one great performance that had been filmed in color. He couldn't.

Bogdanovich speculated that black & white strips away all the distractions -- you don't notice the color of the actor's eyes, for example, and thus can focus entirely on their performance.

Bogdanovich would go on to film Paper Moon in black and white (which he felt was appropriate given the 1930s Depression-era setting), and had intended to shoot Nickelodeon that way, too, but the producer insisted on color. Bogdanovich told his cinematographer to light for black and white anyway, though, because he always intended to return to the film at some point and re-release it minus the color. He said that it made sense to shoot it in black and white since it's a film about the silent era, and made the comment that in color, it looked like a movie made in 1975.

He did later release a black and white version of the film, but I haven't seen it. It's one of my favorite Bogdanovich pictures, and one of my favorite films-about-film, so I really should try and track it down, for comparison to the color version if nothing else.