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I'll gladly take their so called "hawking", as you call it if it fends off the alternative and any former fan of AMC should know exactly what I'm talking about. It's a business folks and TCM has to pay the bills somehow.

TCM owes me no explanation. It was a technical problem and that's that. The important thing is that they fixed and it's back and working. Thanks TCM.

I don't think Walt Disney intended SONG OF THE SOUTH to be racist, but as times have changed many are indeed offended by it. The Disney organization owns the film and has every right to do what they want to with it. From a business standpoint it's a public relations nightmare so they've chosen not to release it. Whether you agree with that or not it's their right.

In its original usage, the term actor was used in a generic form meaning a performer. Of course, back in those days, men performed both male and female roles. I don't know when "actress" started being used to describe a female performer. Unfortunately, I think that many times when a title was altered to describe a female doing what had up then had been a man's job, it was a subtle way of saying it was now being done by a women so don't expect the same level of service or performance. For example a "steward" on a ship was considered a very important and respected member of the crew, but a "stewardess" on a plane was often thought of as little more than a "good-looking waitress". It worked in reverse too. For many years, hosptals had "nurses" and a few "male-nurses" who rarely got the same respect as their female counterparts. Today they're all just "nurses". I think in this day and age there's no need to have any job title sex-specific. So as far as I'm concerned "actor" is all inclusive rgardless of the performer's sex.

I don't have any inside information as to what goes on in TCM's programming department, but I do have decades of experience as a movie programmer at a local TV station. It's not uncommon for film deals to be struck years before they start showing up on air. We'd often had a contract signed that didn't start for three, four, or even five years in the future. I retired in 2008 and when I left there was a package that had titles that didn't become available until 2014. There's many reasons for that. Sometimes it was the doing of the distributor, other times it was to lock up a package of films for future use when current packages will have expired. Most often it was about money, keeping the cost off the books until other films have been written off. I don't care if it's the biggest network or the smallest local station, they all have to work within a yearly programming budget or some kind. I know this sounds odd to somebody outside the business, but that's often how it works.

I don't usually do it everyday, but there are three or four that I try to look at at least once a week or so. I rarely check all of them, but every once a while I try to just to see what's going on, if anything. I think most people have discovered that they'll get more and quicker responses from the more general boards than more limited genre boards. I find that true on other sites too.

I don't know where you live, but you you might start by checking your local public library. Most libraries carry DVDs and Blu-Ray movies now. Where I live, I'm lucky that our county library system has almost 35,000 DVDs between its 18 libraries and that includes many, many classics. All of which can be orderd for free and delivered to whatever branch the patron wants. That system is probably the best thing our county government ever did.

TCM's lease agreements aren't open ended and perhaps the one for INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS has expired. That film has just recently been added to NetFlix's streaming service along with a number of other Paramount-owned titles, so perhaps they have exclusive rights to it now. All these new programming sources have really change things since I was in the business so I'm not sure how streaming affects the availability of films to cable networks like TCM.

Although I've always enjoyed PAINT YOUR WAGON, I have to admit that Clint Eastwood wasn't the best choice when it came to singing. I always wondered why they didn't have somebody else dub him. Well, okay, maybe Marni Nixon couldn't sing that low. To be fair, especially, back in the studio days, performers were under contract and if they were told to sing, they sang. So it wasn't always the case that they, themselves, thought they could sing.

There was a time when letters adressed to a movie star like that got delivered, but I suspect those days are long gone. Back then there were real live people looking at each address who could make decisions as to where a letter went, today mail is read and sorted by machines and if one don't have a proper address it gets returned. I remember, a few years ago there was a big flap because thousands of letters addressed simply to Santa Claus, North Pole got returned for lack of a state. Incidently, I met Lilian Gish once myself. She signed a copy of her book for me and was indeed a very gracious lady.

There use to companies that sold lists of fan mail addresses, but in this day of the internet, I don't know if they still exist. Have you tried doing a "Google" search for companies like that? The tried and true method always seemed to be writing in care of the whatever studio released the person's last film or TV show. Eventually, fan mail would catch up to them. It use to be that the Screen Actor's Guild had a mail forwarding service for its members, but they stopped that years ago. Good luck.

When TCM drops films for a tribute, usually they reschedule them during the next upcoming month that they haven't already released a schedule for unless it's an "event month" like "Summer Under The Stars", so it will likely be November. TCM never drops films to make room for other films that have previously been dropped because that only compounds the problem. No matter what they bump somebody will be unhappy. TCM has been doing timely tributes for 20 years so I doubt they'll change now.

Thank goodness. I was beginning to think I was the only one who did that. I put up with commercials between the films, but once they started the "commercial intermission" AMC lost me forever.

I can't address STARK LOVE in particular, but if TCM has the rights to it, they may be planning on using it as part of some kind of special programming event and will save it for that. It's also possible that while they made a deal for it, the rights don't begin until some future date. There can be many reasons why they might be sitting on I don't think anybody has to "jog" their memory. The programmers know exactly what they have and how they plan to use it.

Dream on. To start up a new channel today can cost more than a hundred million bucks. (just ask Oprah) If Time-Warner had that kind of money they sure wouldn't do another non-commercial channel. And even if they did, that doesn't mean that all the cable companies would want to carry it. They'd rather have channels that share commercial revenue with them. I just looked at the October schedule, thought it was one of the better recent ones. Everyone to their own taste.

They can call it whatever they want, it will still be the same, 75-80, films re-run endless through out the year. Anybody who thinks TCM repeats a lot should spend a few weeks watching FMC (or whatever it's called now). After that, they'll never complain about repeats on TCM again.

Didn't any of you guys notice that TCM is doing a whole day of Canadian films? Oh, wait, they couldn't get the Canadian rights. Sorry, I just couldn't resist. HAPPY CANADA DAY!!!

Guess you didn't hope hard enough. TCM announced it for Monday, June 30th as follows: 9:00am KISSES FOR MY PRESIDENT 11:00am ACT ONE 1:00pm HOW THE WEST WAS WON 3:45pm THE MISFITS 6:00pm BABY DOLL With such short notice, I guess TCM is just using what titles they have on hand.

He most certainly was. I met him, oh it must have been back around 1980. He was in town appearing in some show at a local summer theater and came to the TV station I worked at to plug it. He chatted with everybody and was an all around nice person. Shortly after the show, the crew broke for lunch and one of the guys and I went to this little sandwich shop next to the station. As we walked in, there was Eli sitting all alone in the back booth reading the paper. He looked up and spotted us and in that very distinct voice called out "Boys! Boys! Over here!". We spent a full hour with him, he entertained us with stories, but also wanted to know about us and our families. When we finally had to go back to work he grabbed the check and insisted on paying. After that hour I would have gladly treated him, but who's going to argue with Eli Wallach?

I think you're reading too much into it. All it shows is that some people watched and because they didn't know much about her took the trouble to look her up. It doesn't mean that flocks of people were "glued to their screens". Rock Hudson, on the other hand, is much better known and fewer folks need more information about him. Do we know the actual count? It could have been that two people looked up him, while three looked up her.

Well, I can't speak for the production end, but one of the biggest problems with Cinerama was on the exhibition side. The whole thing was so frightfully expensive that most theaters simply couldn't afford it. When processes like CinemaScope arrived on the scene, and assuming the theater had room for a larger screen, the installation was quick and reletively inexpensive and usually required only minor changes in the projection room. Cinerama, on the other hand, often required practically gutting an existing theater to make room for the massive screen, the new sound system and three seperate projection booths. Most often, existing projection rooms couldn't be used because Cinerama required an almost head-on projection angle and projecting from a booth higher up would cause distortion and misallignment of the three seperate projected images. This arrangement also required not one but three projectinists to run each show increasing each theater's operating costs.

That's okay, Fred. It's the thought that counts. Besides, I just figured you were about as skilled at doing this stuff as me.

sewhite2000, I'm afraid that I'm that culprit, but be assured that it was not intentional. I did indeed put my thoughts in the wrong place. and while I corrected that, I accidently left part of a sentence behind and never noticed. Thanks for pointing it out and I just deleted it from my post. Sorry about that.

The problem with all these kinds of programs is that the computer has no way of telling intent of the user. As we've seen even common words can make the list because of their associaion with offensive terms Using the example of " jawbone of an *** " the "offending" word is just a name for an animal in the way it was a used. I can see the need to block the most commonly offensive words, but as for the other stuff let the readers decide for themselves what the user's intent was. If somebody gets offended, they can then report it and let the moderators decide. Besides, people can still read a lot of things into the censored version too. Rhett Butler's closing line in GWTW might be interpreted a lot differently than Margaret Mitchell intended when it looks like "Frankly my dear, I don't give a ----."

There's a lot of things in older movies that I do not approve of and are not PC today, but that doesn't stop me from watching them. I see those films as "snapshots" of how society was back when they were made and can often be a learning experience as to why we find certain things unacceptable today. Just because I might watch BIRTH OF A NATION doesn't mean approve of those guys in the white sheets. (auto-censor wouldn't let me use their name)