1935 Technicolor Contracts Rewrote While Artists Debated Progress

George Lucas, 82 years old and no longer making Star Wars films himself, recently declared AI inevitable in filmmaking.

The skeptics, he suggested, are just people clinging to horses while the automobile rolls past. Progress doesn't wait for permission.

This is a remarkably old argument, deployed with surgical precision at exactly the moment when labor negotiations matter most. In 1935, studio heads announced that Technicolor was the future of cinema—not eventually, now.

The Technicolor process was genuinely superior to black and white, which made the claim technically true and strategically perfect. It also required new equipment, new expertise, and crucially new contracts. The existing colorists, the ones who had spent years mastering hand-tinting and optical printing, suddenly discovered their skills were obsolete—not because Technicolor required less artistry. Because saying the technology was unstoppable made the negotiation one-sided. You didn't bargain with progress.

Live orchestras experienced the same rhetorical maneuver in the 1950s when studios decided synchronized recording was the future. Then again in the 1990s when digital editing arrived and the craft editors—people who understood rhythm at the level of the frame—were told their exclusivity contracts were relics. Each time, the technology was real. Each time, the inevitability framing was a negotiating tactic dressed as prophecy. The mechanism is always the same. You name the technology, call it unstoppable, then quietly rewrite the contracts while everyone is still arguing about whether resistance is futile.

What's different now is scale. The 1935 colorist could find work in theater or advertising. The 2024 visual effects artist, the storyboarder, the concept designer—they're watching an 82-year-old billionaire who never has to negotiate with anyone again tell them that adaptation is their only option. They're watching it happen to their peers in real time.

The question worth asking isn't whether AI will reshape filmmaking. It will. The question is whether we'll let the word "inevitable" do the work that honest labor contracts should do instead. What Lucas called progress is a choice someone is making. Watch who gets to make it, and who pays.