Word: channelized
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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 the '30s and '40s; it also staged annual Film Preservation Festivals of, say, silent and early-talkie John Ford pictures. (Then AMC changed its format, emphasized "newer" movies, and devoted so much time to advertising that it became known as Always More...
...biggest complaint about TCM, however, is that it has virtually no competition. Fox Movie Channel also runs its library's films without commercial interruption, and we're grateful for all those gorgeous '40s musicals, but the catalog is severely limited. As for oldies from Paramount and Universal, they're almost impossible to find, except in bootleg editions. The rumor that surfaced last week about Time Warner possibly buying NBC Universal was cheered by FOOFs, because then those two invaluable archives would be under Feltenstein's loving aegis. If the rumor isn't true, couldn't the Paramount-Universal films stock...
...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. These were the programming staples for his TNT channel (Turner Network Television), which went on the air Oct. 3, 1988; the first movie shown was Gone with the Wind...
...sometimes 15-20 mins. an hour. In time, the oldies format gave way to basketball and reruns of '70s TV shows. The FOOFs were disconsolate... and ecstatic when free TCM premiered Apr. 14, 1994 (again with Gone with the Wind). The same library would be ransacked, but the new channel was free of commercials, more smartly programmed and anchored each evening by Robert Osborne, the silver-maned columnist for the Hollywood Reporter and a comforting, cohesive presence...
...give context to the programming and serve as valuable extras on TCM DVDs. The policy also means that my long-TIME colleague, Richard Schickel - who's done exemplary studies of Scorsese, Woody Allen, Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard for TCM - doesn't have to go on food stamps. The channel runs some Schickel doc nearly every month. Tune in for a fun film education. (See Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel's All-TIME 100 Movies...