5th Annual TCM Classic Movie Film Festival
April 10-13th
The 5th annual TCM Film Festival out did itself with special tributes, panels that included Oscar Winners Richard Dreyfuss (The Goodbye Girl), William Friedkin (Best Director, The French Connection) and Oscar-winning editor Ms. Thelma Schoonmaker(Raging Bull). Schoonmaker is beloved by movie fans because she edits the films of Martin Scorsese (since 1980), but her visit to TCM was also to discuss film preservation. She introduced a screening of a fantastic British film titled A Matter of Life and Death. The movie was directed by her late husband Michael Powell. Michael Powell is a director Scorsese often cites as a major influence and names Powell’s The Red Shoes as one of the films that made him want to make movies.
TCM festival is not a festival for filmmakers to get discovered or make deals. It is for the fans. The staff, filmmakers of the past, audience are all there for one reason, the love of movies. This event is not about how we love movies for a date night or it can pass a few hours between appointments, the festival goers are serious movie lovers. The nature of the event dictates that I describe the festival as my experience. We are too accustomed to forgetting our opinion or like for a movie does have something to do with who we are. It is no surprise the audience members in their 70’s were lined up for all the movies from the ’50s.
If you attend TCM festival, you have yourself invested in the films you decide to see. They range from silents to movies of the ’90s (only one movie was that recent and it was Mr. Holland’s Opus as part of the Richard Dreyfuss tribute of films). It was a special year celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Wizard of Oz, but also had to give attention to another anniversary that is really more a part of our world’s culture: The Beatles. TCM teamed with Janus Films to pay tribute to 50 years of the The Beatles by showing their movie A Hard Day’s Night.
It was a wonderful event, held in the legendary Graumman’s Chinese Theater (now called the TCL Chinese theater, but you can not find one TCM fan willing to call it anything but Graumann’s). The film included a special introduction with music Producer Don Was (The Rolling Stones, among others) and was moderated by Alec Baldwin. The film’s director Richard Lester is in his late 80’s and could not attend.
*****
I also saw Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker. The film was introduced by TCM’s host Robert Osborne and 7-time Oscar nominee Quincy Jones, but as Q. said “The Oscars and Grammies are not why you do it man.” Jones told us stories about getting into the business thanks to the film’s director Sidney Lumet (Dog Day Afternoon). Jones explained the harsh reality of, even though he had toured the world and was a well known Jazz musician; “to them I was just a negro, I had no talent.” It was Sidney Poitier (In the Heat of the Night, another film Jones scored) who had broken down some of the racial barriers in the business and use his clout to vouch for Jones. Quincy Jones said “I owe my career in movies to both Sidney’s. I never imagined scoring films, it was never a goal. Lumet used his clout and fought for me.”
The crowd was seemed to be dead silent, for this brief moment. The aura of the room changed, this is not Quincy Jones the creator of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, it was a guy bringing us all down to the human level as he spoke of “I was not even allowed through the studio gate, because I was not a cook or cleaning toilets man.”
The Pawnbroker is about a holocaust survivor and although extremely sad, is a gem of a film. After Jones reminding us of the “race” issues behind the scenes, it added an intensity to the fact the movie also dealt with racial genocide. There were many scenes that were unwatchable, but that means the director did his job. Sidney Lumet is TCM host Robert Osborne’s favorite director and I highly recommend to all movie fans to go to IMDb and make a list of Lumet films (make sure to see 12 Angry Men, Serpico, Network and The Verdict).
I attend this festival with my Dad each year and A Hard Day’s Night was his highlight. The experience of seeing it with my Dad and hearing him explain how “wild” Beatlemania was and how in “High School they consumed every radio station.” The fact a father and son can see something and relate in the exact same way, but from two completely different generations, that is the power of cinema. We all take it for granted, Turner Classic Movies as a channel and Festival reminds us that movies are not mine or yours, they are “ours.”
People mistake loving old movies as “movie snobbery”, but right now we need to respect and appreciate our past and realize there is more to movies than explosions. Movies show us who we were, who we are and films even represent where we are headed as people.
The festival more than doubled in size since last year and included four days of movies instead of three. They show films in Graumann’s, Mann’s Chinese Multiplex, The Egyptian and poolside at the Roosevelt Hotel. For photos from the festival and more info about Turner Classic Movies and the festival go to http://www.tcm.com/
Article by Entertainment Writer, Paul Booth
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