Word: filming
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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...
...Enriched, that is. For anyone who believes that the first hundred years of movies possess treasures that the last few years can't touch - and that's most of the professional film folks I know - TCM is an utterly essential part of the culture, our own American cinematheque. I can't imagine what the business model is, and I don't want anyone to ask, since TCM is owned by the same media company that pays my salary. Whatever it is, the network remains free of commercials. All movies, and movie specials, all the time. (See the All TIME...
...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...
...There were revelations aplenty, especially in the early-'30s Warner melodramas; they instructed a new generation of old-film fans in the urban snarl, panache and breathless efficiency of the young James Cagney, Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Davis, plus a bunch of directors that scholars had mostly ignored. But TNT was clogged with commercials, 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...