Word: turner
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Before I got hooked up to Turner Classic Movies, which turned 15 years old in April, a few friends issued this promise or warning: "It will change your life." Like me, they were FOOFs - friends of old films - and in the late '90s, the repertory cinemas of our New York youth, the oldies houses, had pretty much vanished. There were exceptions: one could see many artifacts of Hollywood's golden age on videocassette, the eight-track of its day. And the commercial-free American Movie Classics channel was still showing Paramount and Universal goodies from...
...when they spoke of TCM, the FOOF's voices fell into whispered reverence. People scheduled their vacations around it, obsessively taped its movies; there's a clique of Turner Classic Monastics who record, then trade, every premiere of an antique film on TCM. From its airing of films from the rowdy 1930-34 period, a new genre called pre-Code entered the FOOF phrase book along with auteur and film noir. To the faithful, TCM was the Lamborghini, the Mouton Rothschild, the very Callas of movie channels. Eventually, I got to see what all the rapture was about...
...Here's how it came about. In 1985, Ted Turner, who'd made money from his TBS superstation and the Atlanta Braves, bought MGM/UA, a blending of two legendary film companies - one the dominant and most glamorous studio from the '20s to the '50s, the other a kind of filmmakers' cooperative that nurtured indie-minded directors from D.W. Griffith to Woody Allen - both of which had fallen fallow. Almost instantly, Turner was obliged to sell the studios and their California real estate; but he held on to the library of 3,000 old MGM, Warner Bros., UA and RKO films...
...started out good and just got better. So in homage to its decade-and-a-half on cable, I offer 15 reasons to cherish Turner Classic Movies...
...basic collection. Even when TNT had commercials and AMC didn't, the Turner network had an edge because its library was stronger than its rival's. Turner had (and has) the grandeur of MGM, the grit of Warners, the swank of RKO. And the movies usually look great. This is a living archive; it keeps restoring classic films so they look as pristine as when they premiered. That's thanks in large part to George Feltenstein, whose title is senior vice president of theatrical catalog marketing at Warner Home Video, but who is really the boss of all things...