markfp2

If you like British comedy, you can't go wrong with that one. Great cast.

The TCM database is not a catalog of what TCM has shown or has the rights to show. It's a reference source for films in general. Just because a film is listed in it doesn't mean TCM has or will show it. Incidentally, somebody once figured out if TCM had the rights to all of the films in the database and showed each one just once it would be something like 40 years before they would have to start repeating them. The good doctor has "talked to the animals" many times on Fox's own Fox Movie Channel which has gotten away from showing many of that studio's older films, so they probably decided to make some money from it and lease it to TCM.

Funny, I was talking about this subject to my wife just last night. I was watching THE BLOB (1958) and she asked me why Steve McQueen, who would have turned 28, that year was playing a teenager. Actually most of the principal "teenagers"in the film had to be in their 20's. I told her that I didn't know about that film specifically, but the practice was nothing new. Teenagers were often played by actors in their 20's because that allowed the studios to skirt strict child-labor laws that would require the producers to have on-set teachers, social workers and put strict limitations on working hours of minors. Sure they did all that to use important child stars, but when they could save a few bucks using an adult they gladly did.

> hibi said: Were these road show engagements? (LOL) No, there were no roadshows in my city. First-run films were shown as continuous performances every day. I think there were four showings a day, because of their length. The unusual thing was those films played 3 or 4 weeks. In those days, a film usually ran a week and maybe two, after that the circuit would move it to a smaller theater just down the street. By this time though that they had sold that one off and it was a parking lot. It was summer and I was out of school and happily worked both matinees and evening shows if asked to.so I got to see them many times.

> .....though you can only watch a movie so many times before you get tired of it, Oh I don't know, to this day and I can sing the entire score to both "West Side Story" and "The Music Man" thanks to having seen both of them at least 30 times when they first came out. Of course, I've never had much demand for that "skill" acquired when I was an usher .

I was just using that as an example, films are showing up on a number channel. .

>finance said: Is it my imagination, or did an awful lot of you work as movie ushers? Is that how you got interested in film? In my case, I was hooked on movies since I was a little kid. My dad was too so I guess that it rubbed off on me. Over all, I think that a lot of guys worked as ushers simply because it was an easy job to get. It was strictly part-time, and most would only work two or three shifts a week for a year or two and then either move on to college or a full-time job so there always seemed to be openings. There was also a certain bit of prestige in the job. You got to wear a fancy uniform and could see all the movies for free at any theater in town.

>We had none of that kind of conduct from any of the ushers I ever worked with. My first job was as an usher at a 3000 seat movie palace. Our manager wouldn't have stood for such behavior for an instant. It was drilled into our heads that we weren't being paid to watch the movie and our sole purpose was to serve our patrons. Whether it was finding them a seat, cleaning up spilled popcorn, checking the supplies in the restrooms or bringing up cases of candy bars from the basement storeroom we were expected to do so with a smile and always treat every patron, child or adult with the respect they deserved. I'm afraid that's something that many employees, and employers for that matter, have forgotten.

>lzcutter said: ....Warner Brothers now controls the former Turner library and leases those films to TCM. And if I might add, in recent years, Warner Bros. have been very aggressive in marketing those films to other channels too. There are occasions when, say Encore Westerns, will lease certain films for a limited time after which TCM can get them back, but it's also not uncommon for channels to pay a premium to have exclusive rights and that locks TCM out of any showings for what could sometimes be years.

Selling footage from one movie to the makers of another has been going on for almost as long as movies have. Most studios maintain a "stock footage" department that helps producers find just what they're looking for. It's just more noticeable today because we have almost endless choices of films available to us. In the past, when people only saw them in theaters two films released 20 years apart could use the same footage and nobody would notice. Today, it's very possible both of them would be running back-to-back on TCM some night.

As a former projectionist myself I agree with darkblue about nearly empty theaters on Christmas Eve.In the city where I grew up and first worked in the booth most of the small neighborhood houses closed that night but the circuits that ran the big downtown theaters all stayed open. It really is sad to see a movie being run for eight or ten people in a 3000 seat movie palace.

I hate to say it, but I predict that within a year or two stores will start their post-Christmas sales ON CHRISTMAS DAY. You can just imagine the ads proclaiming "Open Your Gifts In The Morning and Exchange Them In The Afternoon". They're all just waiting because they don't want the negative publicity of being the first one to do it. Then they can say "we didn't want to do it, but have to to keep competitive".

>finance said: The most obvious example-----Alec Cathorne, or Cawthorne, in SLEUTH. No such actor. Mankiewicz wanted to hide the fact that the whole film was only Olivier and Caine. Yeah, but that was meant to be like that as a trick pulled on the audience and not because the actor's role ended up on the cutting room floor. It was done they same way with the Playbill credits for the stage production.

I'm looking forward to it as I love stage musicals. I know, a lot of people will just have to compare it to the movie, and then complain that it's "too stagey", but after all it was a stage production first.

LA STRADA, on the 4th. I read an article that Pope Francis is somewhat of a film buff and that's his favorite film. I wonder if he'd like to be guest co-host that night.I'll bet Robert O. would love a trip to Rome Edited by: markfp2 on Nov 7, 2013 8:46 PM

I know TCM has shown A HARD DAY'S NIGHT before. With the 50th Anniversary approaching, I'll bet many networks would be interested in showing those films and the distributor has already put them up for bid. No doubt whoever had the deepest pockets will show them. I guess we'll just have to wait and see what network that is.

Here's what TCM says in their FAQ section: Why aren't all your films Closed Captioned (CC)? TCM is currently working on providing closed captions on all of the films we broadcast. Some the films we show are provided by other companies, and if they don't have a CC'ed version, we can't offer it to our viewers. Any film available with CC will be broadcast that way.

Can't remember the exact day, but I got mine sometime during the first week of October. I checked with a friend, in another part of the country, who got hers about the same time too. We know they were mailed, but perhaps a bunch of them went astray in the postal system. Try calling customer service again. They usually wait until the last week of the month to send replacements probably because by then most of the "lost" copies have finally shown up.

No question, this was a tragedy, and I'm not defending it, but that was war and tragedies happen during war often caused by somebody who makes a hasty, poorly thought out, decision. What I find equally as tragic is how, in the late 1940's some of the major Hollywood studios cleaned out warehouses full of prints of silent films and destroyed them because the studio heads thought they no longer had any commercial value and no longer wanted to pay to store them. That's one of the big reasons that over 80% of all silent films no longer exist.

>Sepiatone said: I liked that phrasing, "no redeeming social value". I'm sure most of us here can list hundreds of movies, ABSENT of sex and nudity, that fill that bill! Boy! You can say that again.

> FredCDopps said:" If I recall correctly, there was a Supreme Court ruling back in that era that said if a new film with a lot of sex and nudity had "no social redeeming value", then it could be censored..." Various courts, including here in New York often ruled against different films using the "of no redeeming social value" standard.The thing that put the stake in the heart of film censorship was the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that, like books, films were a form of "free speech" and thus were protected under the First amendment of the Constitution. From that point on it was virtually impossible for a government body to ban or censor films.

If it had been Harry Potter, it would have been just a coincidence because the Harry Potter we all know wasn't written for another 52 years.

Welcome to the boards, Michael. TCM does not release DVDs. It doesn't own the films and only has an arrangement with the various studios and distributors that allows the use of the TCM brand for purpose of marketing those DVDs. I don't think TCM really has much say as to what actually gets released.

>Sepiatone said: I wonder if it was the quality of the MOVIE, or all the "hoopla" surrounding it that made it somewhat of a success? Maybe if no fuss was made, it would have faded quickly into obscurity. That's been proven the case many times over.Tell, people they can't see something and get some righteous group to throw up a picket line and all the theater owner has to do is unlock the doors and stand back to keep from getting trampled by the crowds. They can't buy that kind of publicity. People who would never think of seeing a Swedish film will stand in line for hours because they heard "it's dirty". I remember some years ago, our local film society showed the ever controversial "Birth Of A Nation" as part a silent film series. Thanks to pickets and the coverage by the media, what would have been a normal crowd of about 75 turned into several hundred and sold out the showing.

I think that anybody who is looking forward to seeing I AM CURIOUS (YELLOW) because of its reputation will be disappointed. I was a projectionist back then and ran the film a number of times and believe me by today's standards it's tame. As I recall, the big fuss was caused by graphic (by 1960's standards) sex scenes that included full-frontal male nudity which had resulted in the film being seized by U.S. Customs. As for me, I'm going to watch it to see if it's as I remembered.(o nly recorded, not at 3am), but I don't expect any surprises.