Natalie Kalmus's Film Credits:
Her position as Chief Colour Consultant for Technicolor came out of her divorce; the job and title was part of her settlement. She was very obsessive-compulsive, which caused a lot of problems. When Technicolor was new, there were a lot of technical limitations that had to be dealt with when sets were built. There were certain colours you weren't supposed to put side-by-side, there were lighting issues, etc. Well, Natalie was in charge of all that, so she made movie studios do everything by the book, no experimentation allowed. She was considered a thorn in everyone's side, widely disliked.
When David O. Selznick made Gone With the Wind in 1939, one of the first things he did was to lay down the law with his studio's people, telling then that Natalie Kalmus was there to ADVISE, not to tell them what to do - after all, it was Selznick paying Technicolor to use the process, not the other way 'round. Selznick had been through it with Kalmus on several movies by that time, and he was fed up to the teeth with her. GWTW ended up with a lot of stuff in it that Natalie Kalmus said "couldn't be done", like night scenes and the scene where the O'Hara family says evening prayers. Natalie tried to make them use a lot of light, and Selznick wanted the scene to look like it really was evening. Selznick backed his people up in every confrontation with Natalie Kalmus, and the result was not only a magnificent movie, but Selznick had broken up Natalie's power base. He got away with it because GWTW represented a huge portion of Technicolor's income for 1939; the movie used nearly all the company's equipment and resources for half the year.
It didn't take too long before Technicolor began using other, more flexible colour consultants like Henri Jaffa, and making Natalie's job a token figurehead. Her credit onscreen after that was more or less a legal requirement because of the terms of her settlement; she didn't really do all that much. When she did come on movie sets, she marched around and told everybody what to do; studio personnel said, "Yes, Mrs. Kalmus," and then ignored her.
She was a piece of work, trust me.
