By CAROLYN THOMPSON, Associated Press Writer Carolyn Thompson, Associated Press Writer Mon Jun 22, 3:15 pm ET

ROCHESTER, N.Y. – Sorry, Paul Simon, Kodak is taking your Kodachrome away.

The Eastman Kodak Co. announced Monday it’s retiring its oldest film stock because of declining customer demand in an increasingly digital age.

The world’s first commercially successful color film, immortalized in song by Simon, spent 74 years in Kodak’s portfolio. It enjoyed its heyday in the 1950s and ’60s but in recent years has nudged closer to obscurity: Sales of Kodachrome are now just a fraction of 1 percent of the company’s total sales of still-picture films, and only one commercial lab in the world still processes it.

Those numbers and the unique materials needed to make it convinced Kodak to call its most recent manufacturing run the last, said Mary Jane Hellyar, the outgoing president of Kodak’s Film, Photofinishing and Entertainment Group.

“Kodachrome is particularly difficult (to retire) because it really has become kind of an icon,” Hellyar said.

The company now gets about 70 percent of its revenue from its digital business, but plans to stay in the film business “as far into the future as possible,” Hellyar said. She points to the seven new professional still films and several new motion picture films introduced in the last few years and to a strategy that emphasizes efficiency.

“Anywhere where we can have common components and common design and common chemistry that let us build multiple films off of those same components, then we’re in a much stronger position to be able to continue to meet customers’ needs,” she said.

Kodachrome, because of a unique formula, didn’t fit in with the philosophy and was made only about once a year.

Simon sang about it in 1973 in the aptly titled “Kodachrome.”

“They give us those nice bright colors. They give us the greens of summers. Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day,” he sang. “… So Mama don’t take my Kodachrome away.”

Indeed, Kodachrome was favored by still and motion picture photographers for its rich but realistic tones, vibrant colors and durability.

It was the basis not only for countless family slideshows on carousel projectors over the years but also for world-renowned images, including Abraham Zapruder’s 8 mm reel of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963.

Photojournalist Steve McCurry’s widely recognized portrait of an Afghan refugee girl, shot on Kodachrome, appeared on the cover of National Geographic in 1985. At Kodak’s request, McCurry will shoot one of the last rolls of Kodachrome film and donate the images to the George Eastman House museum, which honors the company’s founder, in Rochester.

For McCurry, who after 25 years with Kodachrome moved on to digital photography and other films in the last few years, the project will close out an era.

“I want to take (the last roll) with me and somehow make every frame count … just as a way to honor the memory and always be able to look back with fond memories at how it capped and ended my shooting Kodachrome,” McCurry said last week from Singapore, where he has an exhibition at the Asian Civilizations Museum.

As a tribute to the film, Kodak has compiled on its Web site a gallery of iconic images, including McCurry’s Afghan girl and others from photographers Eric Meola and Peter Guttman.

Guttman used Kodachrome for 16 years, until about 1990, before switching to Kodak’s more modern Ektachrome film, and he calls it “the visual crib that I was nurtured in.” He used it to create a widely published image of a snowman beneath a solar eclipse, shot in the dead of winter in North Dakota.

“I was pretty much entranced by the incredibly realistic tones and really beautiful color,” Guttman said, “but it didn’t have that artificial Crayola coloration of some of the other products that were out there.”

Unlike any other color film, Kodachrome is purely black and white when exposed. The three primary colors that mix to form the spectrum are added in three development steps rather than built into its layers.

Because of the complexity, only Dwayne’s Photo, in Parsons, Kan., still processes Kodachrome film. The lab has agreed to continue through 2010, Kodak said.

Grant Steinle, vice president of operations and head of lab operations at Dwayne’s, said the southeast Kansas shop was fielding calls Monday from customers asking whether it would continue to handle Kodachrome, which accounts for 20 percent of the lab’s business. Steinle said he understood why Kodak reached its decision, but it was still disappointing.

“Kodachrome is still an important part of our business,” he said during a phone interview Monday.

Hellyar estimates the retail supply of Kodachrome will run out in the fall, though it could be sooner if devotees stockpile. In the U.S., Kodachrome film is available only through photo specialty dealers. In Europe, some retailers, including the Boots chain, carry it.

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On the Net:

Kodak: http://www.kodak.com

I couldn’t quite decide which movie should be the first movie I wrote about.  Should it be a favorite of mine like The Straight Story or Millions?  Or should I pick a movie new to theaters?  I decided to wait until a film moved me to write, compelled me to write.  After a year of waiting, I found that film:  Be Kind Rewind.  This exercise in the suspension of disbelief, this film within a film  (or perhaps VHS within a film is more apropos), is my choice for review number one.

Michel Gondry, writer and director of The Science of Sleep and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, brings the same deft hand to this tale of a Passaic, New Jersey video store called Be Kind Rewind.  What’s unique about this video store is that, in the days of iPod movie rentals and purchases, they still only have VHS tapes to rent.  “One dollar, one title, one night,” Mia Farrow’s Miss Falewicz reminds store manager Mike, played by Mos Def.  This cultural antique is about to become a faint memory as the store’s owner, Elroy Fletcher (Danny Glover) is given 60 days to bring the condemned property up to code or else face demolition to make way for a new and generic city property.

In order to gain perspective, or perhaps to avoid any and all perspectives about the impending end to his business, Fletcher reunites with fellow Fats Waller aficionados in the rail car in which Waller died.  Waller features prominently in the narrative because Fletcher has touted his business location as the birthplace of the jazz great and even features several Fats Waller films in the Be Kind Rewind inventory.

While away, Fletcher entrusts his store to manager Mike, with the simple request to not allow misfit Jerry (played perfectly by Jack Black) in the store.  We, as an audience, now that won’t happen, and wait for Jerry to enter and wreak the havoc Fletcher so feared.  After a freakish electrical mishap, Jerry enters the store and demagnetizes all of the VHS tapes, thereby rendering the store completely obsolete.  Farrow’s Falewicz arrives at the store to turn in her overdue copy of Driving Miss Daisy and quickly asks to rent Ghostbusters.  Asking her to wait until the next day, Mike buys enough time to try and find another VHS copy for Miss Falewicz.

As Mike’s time evaporates, necessity gives birth to the invention of a brand new type of film—the ‘Sweded’ adaptations of Mike and Jerry.  The 20-minute creation that is part Ghostbusters, part sci-fi amalgamation, becomes a hit with Falewicz’s family and friends. The next day the two men ‘create’ Rush Hour 2 for another Be Kind customer and suddenly Mike and Jerry are taking custom orders for their special version of Hollywood hits.

As an audience member, I yearned for the happy ending—that Mr. Fletcher would earn enough money via these remade movies to save his home and business from demolition.  But I knew the odds with these hapless heroes.  Enter the FBI and writ for 6300 years and prison, and every creation of Be Kind Rewind is destroyed in the street by a steamroller.  As Jerry and Mike continue to raise funds for Mr. Fletcher they realize that the thing no one can take from them is their own, original work.  They make a movie of their own and screen it for their adoring public, which also happens to be the cast and crew of their magnum opus.

Of the many things I enjoyed about this film, it was Gondry’s use and manipulation of the visual that was most intriguing.   The main menu of the DVD was fascinating to me.  It wasn’t the sharply composed images we’re used to with digital television and DVDs.  Instead it was that slightly blurry VHS image we couldn’t have been happier to view when it was the best we had.  That contrast in clarity highlights a change in our own clarity as people today.  We’re used to high-speed, high-quality, high-__________ for our entertainment, our food, our air—our everything.  Are we any better for it?  Are we as high quality as the high quality things we buy?  I don’t know.  But I do know that there was a gorgeous simplicity to the act of going to a video store and putting that clunky mess of plastic and magnetized tape into that machine that usually rested atop our televisions.  We heard it go in and at the end of the film, if we were kind, we would indeed rewind that tape.  Even now, I can hear the whir of the motors rewinding the images and dialogue that had just captivated me for the previous two hours, only to come to a halt when it reached the beginning.

For reminding me that there is a special magic to the movies, I appreciate Be Kind Rewind and all of those dusty VHS boxes on the bookshelf.  Perhaps I’ll fill this lazy afternoon with a whir from the past.

Grade:  A

Cast & Credits

Jerry: Jack Black
Mike: Mos Def
Mr Fletcher: Danny Glover
Miss Falewicz: Mia Farrow
Alma: Melonie Diaz
Lawyer: Sigourney Weaver

Official website:  http://www.bekindmovie.com