Word: hollywooders
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...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 the '30s and '40s; it also staged annual Film Preservation Festivals of, say, silent and early-talkie John Ford pictures. (Then AMC changed...
...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...
...rich month was devoted to Mexico, the second largest film industry in the Americas; another to Italian neo-realism, curated and introduced by Martin Scorsese. (One disappointment: in the recent month dedicated by Sophia Loren, only five of the 23 films were Italian.) A season on Asian faces in Hollywood movies veered eastward for two extremely rare Chinese silent films starring Shanghai's original tragic movie diva Ruan Lingyu...
...August Under the Stars. Since TCM's mission is to rekindle old Hollywood glamour, it makes sense to focus on a star a day for the month of August. Such a scheme can lead to laziness - drag out the old faves for the 30th time - but the staff often spotlights less obvious names, actors whose careers merit a close look: Marie Dressler, Constance Bennett, Peter Lorre and Trevor Howard all have shone in what amount to one-day retrospectives. In June, TCM will try a similar tack with the stars behind the camera: two directors a day for 30 days...
...movies, it's white people. When blacks and Asians were depicted, they were usually seen as slow or wicked menials and often played by whites in blackface or with spirit gum on their eyes. TCM has wisely annotated the old era by devoting prime-time months to the Hollywood images of blacks, Asians, gays and, in May, Hispanics, the programs curated and introduced by specialists in the fields...