The Fight for Turner Classic Movies

Five wonderful TCM hosts...being forced to stand
with the man who might end the channel

Like all awards nerds, I have my own personal awards that I do every single year.  I have done them annually since I was 11, in partnership with my little brother.  A holdover from starting said awards when I was 11 is that some of the categories are based on an 11-year-old's understanding of the world of entertainment, and so I have consistently had a category entitled "Best Channel" since then that has become the cheekiest of the awards we give each year.  Since 2002, for 21 years, one channel has been cited every single year, winning multiple times, but never missing as a nominee, and that is Turner Classic Movies.  Throughout that time certain channels (ABC, HBO, The Food Network, and now the streamers) have come in to rival it, but TCM is the immovable object in the lineup.  The best way to signal to my brother that I had been kidnapped or been replaced by an alien cyborg would be to say "I don't think TCM makes it this year," it is such a steadfast presence for me in that category, and in both of our homes.

I have watched Turner Classic Movies since I was a teenager.  My journey with movies started roughly when I was 11, the first time that I saw both the Academy Awards and the film that would set off my obsession with classic film, A Streetcar Named Desire.  Like many aspiring cinephiles, my journey with classic movies began with a few entry points.  First, of course, were my parents.  My mom would take my brother & I every Tuesday night during the summer to the early, discount movie night (since it was my dad's golf night) and we'd see a plethora of titles, many of which I knew nothing about until the credits started to roll.  My parents introduced us to their favorite titles, and given my mom's penchant for romantic comedies & musicals of the 1950's (she'd want to point out that she is not that old right now, so I will clarify most of these came out before she was born) I knew about films like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and White Christmas early on.  During the mid-1990's, I got one of my first almanacs, which had a list of every film that had won an Oscar for Best Picture, Director, & all four acting trophies, and during that time the American Film Institute started to do annual "Top 100" lists.  

The Oscar/AFI picks became something of a game.  I remember many, many hours of reading them all off to my brother (my lifelong partner-in-crime when it comes to all things classic movies, and by definition, Turner Classic Movies), and we'd list how many of the movies we'd each seen.  Our channel guide would come on Friday's in the newspaper, and we'd peruse the movies section, looking for screenings of the films on the Oscar/AFI list, taping them on our VCR and watching them at our leisure.  Initially this was on AMC, which had a very different vibe back then, but in high school our cable package changed, and we got TCM...and suddenly that became the principle source of our movie fandom.

That never changed in the years that followed.  Turner Classic Movies is the first, and quite frankly only thing I look for in a cable package when I pick one, and is the only reason I still have cable.  I have for literal decades looked through the monthly schedule on the first of the month, making notes or recordings for my DVR.  Every February I would exhaust the DVR, recording 31 Days of Oscar, but in the years that followed, I started to go beyond those Oscar & AFI lists to know other actors & directors whom I love.  I learned about genres that I cared about, and adored the deep cut nature of the channel, a beautiful oasis on the entertainment landscape that remained largely unscathed.  Commercial free, filled with movies of every nature, almost always from somewhere between the 1910's to the 1970's (unlike other TCM fans, I didn't hate that we occasionally got in beyond New Hollywood, but like them I definitely wanted to stick to the original 60 years or so of the channel), and usually including introductions from film historians.  First, of course, Robert Osborne (the Patron Saint of Cinephiles), but then Ben Mankiewicz, Jacqueline Stewart, Eddie Muller, Dave Karger, & Alicia Malone would soon follow.

This past week, it has become clear that Turner Classic Movies is in trouble, possibly lethal trouble.  David Zaslav, the worst thing to happen to movies since the 1965 MGM Vault Fire, appears to be either drastically downsizing the channel or eliminating it entirely, laying off all of the senior leadership and (according to reports) most of the behind-the-scenes staff, though it's not clear if any of the onscreen presenters have been let go as well (some have been giving off updates to TCM fans on social media, though little is to be gleaned from it, with Muller tweeting "at this point I do not know" what's happening).  Whether or not the channel will exist at all in the near future is definitely up-for-debate, with Warner keeping their cards close to their vest.

Beloved TCM host Robert Osborne with actors
Jill St. John & Robert Wagner

This has sparked outcry from the film community, and speaks to the special place that TCM has for a lot of film fans.  Actors like Ryan Reynolds & Valerie Bertinelli took to Twitter to talk about their love of the channel, and reportedly film directors Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, & Paul Thomas Anderson met with Zaslav directly to talk about the importance of the channel to the filmmaking community.

In many ways, TCM is less a channel and more a way-of-life for cinephiles who watch it regularly (which I count myself among).  Though it isn't a huge moneymaker for Warner Brothers (estimates put it about a $250 million annual gross for the channel), it is beloved by those that watch it.  It's honestly a way of life, regular series on it are chronicled with an ongoing "TCMParty" tag on Twitter that helps fans find each other.  Devotees of the channel descend each year to Los Angeles for the TCM Film Festival which regularly has film luminaries available for eager movie buffs to hear from on stage (in 2023 alone, cinema icons Ann-Margret, Pam Grier, Angie Dickinson, & Shirley Jones all made appearances).  The intros/outros are gospel to viewers, as important as the films themselves, and many people just have it on in the background, like a roommate in their house (Maya Rudolph has talked publicly about how this is true in her kitchen all day long).  Everyone from Tom Hanks to Michael Douglas to Drew Barrymore are on public record as loving the channel.

It is also one of the last great entry points for aspiring cinephiles.  With the demise of the second-run movie theater, the large video rental store, Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide, Siskel & Ebert, and the annual AFI lists, this is one of the few places in the Hollywood structure that focuses on Hollywood's past.  Honestly, it's really the only thing that does in a major, commercial way other than the Academy Awards.  TCM does a remarkable job of showcasing hard-to-find & underseen films from classic film actors.  Many of their movies have never been released on physical media (and not available on any streaming platform), so this is the only legal way to see them.  Its end would be the nail-in-the-coffin of a specific type of film historical preservation, with much of Hollywood's legend, a town who gets much of its mythology from its own glittery (and tragic) history, being tossed in a garbage can.

I have talked about Zaslav's horrendous running of Warner Brothers, arguably the most important movie studio in the history of cinema, because I find it deeply upsetting and dangerous to the future of an industry I have spent much of my life devoted toward.  But eliminating Turner Classic Movies would be unforgivable, and honestly would feel like a death of a loved one.  I genuinely cannot imagine my life without it, and taking it away (or turning into another mindless zombie in the cable landscape) would be further proof that a movie industry that is struggling to understand why so many have lost interest in it has no clue how to save it from itself.  If you don't understand what makes yourself special, you won't ever be able to recapture it when you've burned away everything that people loved about you.  And for people like me, Turner Classic Movies is the living embodiment of why I love cinema.