Back in the 1970s, he worked at Harvard Medical School and helped pioneer the medical imaging technology on cat scans, using color to improve the diagnostic capabilities.

Later in the 1980s, he was asked to analyze existing analog colorization technology and realized, “It’s like adding color to an extremely high resolution digitized X-ray. But you need to efficiently add precise and realistic color to 140,000 images in a single movie and all of the images are different.”

Once he made that realization, Sandrew not only created and patented the first all digital colorization technology but he helped create American Film Technologies, a San Diego-based company that in the late 1980s and early 1990s did the majority of colorized films in the world, including 90 percent of Ted Turner’s colorized catalog.

Back then, colorizing films got a bad rap from film geeks who felt the process destroyed the filmmaker’s original intent. However, Sandrew feels that many of the classic filmmakers who shot in black and white back in the 40s and 50s did so for budgetary, not artistic concerns.

For instance, Sandrew is currently in talks with stop-motion animator pioneer Ray Harryhausen to reissue some of his early films on DVD and he says the filmmaker told him that his original vision was to do it in color “but says budgetary reasons and color stock back then made it hard for him to do backgrounds and make them look the way he wanted.”

The colorizing technology has improved leaps and bounds in 15 years but Sandrew says the approach to using it has also changed.

“Turner wanted all his films to look natural but for some cult classics we’re having fun with it,” Sandrew says.

That means that the characters in the colorized version of Reefer Madness have clothes in cartoonish colors and every character who smokes pot has their own shade of smoke, Sandrew says, “to reflect their different highs.”

Also, the newly colorized Plan 9 From Outer Space has particular color details to show off the film’s legendary low budget, such as accentuating a curtain behind a flying saucer or the “effeminate tastes in clothes” of the aliens invading Earth.

But the colorization business isn’t limited to DVDs. Legend Films did film resolution work on Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator to colorize some of Howard Hughes’ black and white films and stock footage.

Despite these efforts, Sandrew still runs into film geeks who criticize colorization without being aware that the process actually subsidizes the restoration of their precious classic and helps introduce the movie to a new audience.

Currently, Legend Films is releasing about two films a month at www.legendfilms.net and Sandrew hopes to increase the output to another film per month in the next year. But while the company has plenty of films to colorize, he insists there are some black and white films that should stay that way, such as Citizen Kane and Casablanca.

“There are some films I would say no to colorizing. Unless the original creative people participated in the color design.”

David Moye is a fifth generation resident of San Diego county and has the same birthday as Reggie Bush--but none of the athletic ability.

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