lzcutter

Otter, Here's the link to Filmlover's post on the January schedule that includes post-1970s films: http://forums.tcm.com/jive/tcm/thread.jspa?threadID=94162&tstart=0&start=0 The December schedule has already been taken down. <> I'm getting confused. Do you want a breakdown of each decade or just the post-1970s films? Also, please note, that complying this info takes a bit of time and isn't done quickly.

Since you whipped that right out, try December or January (2006-7); bet you'd get some different numbers... And throw in 60s movies - for the sticklers among us!!! >> Otter, The studio system was still making films in the 1960s. The last gasps of the studio system were not heard until the early 1970s. Many of our favorite stars and directors who got their start during the studio system continued to make movies and some came into their own. If you apply a no films after 1959 rule to TCM films we would not get to see would include: The Apartment, The Alamo, To Kill a Mockingbird, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Dr. Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Oliver!, Ride the High Country, Advise and Consent, The Longest Day, The Best Man, Fail-Safe, Dr Strangelove, The Rounders, Yours, Mine and Ours, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, How the West Was Won, Cheyenne Autumn, Shenandoah, The Flight of the Phoenix, The Shootist, Murder on the Orient Express, The Sons of Katie Elder, Donovan's Reef, Hatari, Father Goose, Charade, That Touch of Mink, The Grass is Greener, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Two for the Road, Wait Until Dark, My Fair Lady, Captain Newman, MD, Cape Fear, Arabesque, The Sting, Cool Hand Luke, Hud, Hombre, The Hustler, The Cincinnati Kid, The Great Escape, The Magnificent Seven, Hell is for Heroes, The Thomas Crown Affair, Will Penny, The Americanization of Emily, The Fortune Cookie, True Grit, The Godfather, Godfather Part II, Anne of a Thousand Days, Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, The Misfits and many, many more films that I'm sure many of us might consider classic. Message was edited by: lzcutter

Otterhere, I think we are all in agreement about not liking the name calling. As for the programming arguments, I think this may be the subject that has been debated/argued the longest. This argument has been going on for the four years I have been here and folks that have been here longer say it's been going on almost from the beginning of the message boards. Round One: Group A says TCM programming is changing for the worse with the inclusion of more post-1960 films. Group B begs to differ. Round Two: Group A begs to differ with Group B. Someone, usually Filmlover, will find ten year old copies of Now Playing, go through them and post the stats. The stats support Group B's argument. Not because Filmlover put in the fix but because the facts really do support the argument. Round Three: Group A will pooh-pooh the stats and the work that went into gathering the stats. Someone, usually Kyle, will fire up the Wayback Machine, do some sleuthing of his own, post the facts that he has found and provide links. Group B will back him up. Round Four: Group A will continue to disagree despite the evidence. Group B will counter argue. Somewhere along the line the disagreement will take a turn for the worse and name-calling and insults will start to fly. Round Five: Both groups will refuse to budge on their beliefs, the arguing will get shriller and more nasty. Many posters will start ignoring the thread all together. Round Six: The thread will finally die a quiet death. By then, posters are mad at one another and hurt feelings are an issue, some after many months of arguing decide they have better things to do and leave, the majority are relieved that the thread has died. But like every creature of the undead, the thread is not dead. It will be revived by the next full moon and come back to live in a whole new thread and the arguing will go on, every month of every year. Thus it has all been, say the old timers and from the looks of things, thus it shall always be.

That is a big jump in number of newer films. Why do they do this? There are so many older films that could be showcased. I don't get it. Are people requesting these films? >> It may be that the majority of pre-1960 nominated and/or winning films were not available for TCM to rent.

Filmlover, I am looking forward to it!

BHF, There are a number of movies that feature blackface musical numbers and sadly, it is often those numbers that keep the films sitting in the vaults, as they say, as we grapple with our past as we move forward. I hope that TCM's Race in Film series from last May was successful and I pray that if it was it might encourage them to tackle other sensitive subjects such as the one we are talking about. Put in its historical context via its roots and how and why it became such a popular act might take some of the modern onus off of watching these films, some of which have not been seen in many years.

So to me Oscar month data, now and then, is irrelevent to the discussion? >> Not necessarily irrelevant to the discussion because there will be posters, both old and new, who will announce that TCM is showing many more post-1960 films during their 31 Days of Oscar salute than they have in previous years. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, we can see that TCM has been showing a number of post-1960s films in their "Salute" for at least nine years and probably longer.

Larry, Thanks for adding to my post. I always adored Joan Blondell. She was one of my favorite characters on "Here Come the Brides" when I was much younger. It was about the time that show was running that our local, non-network affiliated, television station began running studio era films, especially the Warner Bros library. So, I got to see Blondell at the start of her career and towards the end of her career at the same time. I later became good friends with one of the sons of Henry Beckman who played Capt. Clancey and he always had good things to say about Blondell. BTW, I think we are grateful you had "big" ears!

Mongo, Pia and her husband, #3 maybe- the one who owned the Riviera Hotel for awhile- bought Pickfair about a ten years ago and tore it down and put up a McMansion. They sold it, maybe to Jerry Buss???, but either way Pickfair has been gone for awhile. Beverly Hills keeps promising that they are coming up with Historical Preservation laws/accords/etc but they keep putting it off and historical houses keep getting destroyed. Latest victim, the George Gershwin/Rosemary Clooney house was destroyed last year.

A.I. Bezzerides, a novelist and short-story writer who became a Hollywood screenwriter best known for the post-World War II film noir classics "Kiss Me Deadly," "On Dangerous Ground" and "Thieves' Highway," has died. He was 98. For more information on his very varied career: http://tinyurl.com/y3mjmh

She later adopts the child Blondell had with Powell but the book doesn't mention it, as it ends prior to the event. Now, why would Blondell allow such a thing to happen to her daughter? Does anyone know the details. Was Allyson really so bad?>> Cybrspacy, I don't know about Allyson being bad but a little digging shows that there is some misinformation on imdb.com about Blondell and her daughter. Blondell first marriage was to George Barnes. They had son Norman. Blondell and Barnes divorced. Blondell married Powell in 1936. Powell adopted Blondell's son, Norman. Blondell and Powell had a daughter, Ellen. They divorced in 1944. Powell married Allyson and they adopted a daughter, Pamela. So, while Powell and Allyson adopted a daughter, it was not the daughter from Powell's previous marriage to Blondell. Blondell went on to marry Mike Todd who left her in financial tatters due to his gambling addiction. They went through a controversial bankruptcy during their marriage. Todd ultimately left her for Elizabeth Taylor. Blondell and Todd did not have any children.

Kinston, I don't think the original poster was saying that June Allyson was a prostitute. There is a character in the fictional book, Center Door Fancy, written by Joan Blondell that includes a prostitute character that may be modeled on June Allyson. As Allyson is one of the reasons Blondell's marriage to Dick Powell blew up, Blondell was not known to harbor the warmest feelings towards Allyson. So, this is one of the times where fiction is, indeed, stranger than fact.

Jack, I agree. It's not an easy or pretty read. But the loss of our cinematic heritage is something that we need to be aware of because it affects what we are able to view on TCM and are able to view on home video and dvd. Great strides have been made in film preservation. The negative of "Stagecoach" was melted down for its silver content during WW2 and for most of my viewing life (40+years) the prints that were available for theatrical showings, classroom showings and even on VHS were hardly what one would call good. Luckily the story and the filmmaking is so good we overlooked all that and concentrated on the film. But it is only in the last few years that they have been able to restore the film's picture to the grandeur that it is today and that's without the original negative. Our cinematic history continues to deteriorate every day and film preservationists and archivists are in a race against time to save it. Factors such as corporate mergers, indifferent executives who have no clue about film history, the lack of funding, the consolidation of jobs and the idea that anyone, even the guy in the mailroom who knows nothing about film history, can handle the job of archiving ephemera and stills and know who the people in the photos are and what pieces are truly historic makes it harder than it should be. And studios like 20th Century Fox who are in the midst of auctioning off their historic collection of contracts, ephemera and stills rather than donating the entire collection to a University Library's Special Collections or the Academy. Putting a collection like this in many private hands makes it harder for historians, writers and students to trace the evolution of Fox as a studio because the research material will not be available to them for study. But we should always remember that there are people and companies out there doing heroic jobs that rarely get the spotlight shown on them but we owe them all a great debt for the job they are doing. They overcome obstacles from many different directions and work hard to save our cinematic heritage.

I haven't looked at these line-ups for Feb & March lately so I don't know if they have more or fewer "post 1950" films than January 1998.>> If someone does go back to do a comparison between Feb & March '98 and today please remember that in 1998, the 31 Days of Oscar was celebrated in March (as the AAwards ceremony was held in March) not February. Also, in doing some research on my thread about Nitrate fires, I discovered that as far back as 1998 people were noting that some of the more obscure and some of the best unknown titles were run in the wee hours of the morning and not during prime-time. So, perhaps it isn't that TCM has/is changing their schedule or their mandate as much as it is our memories of TCM. Memory is a funny thing, the further we get from a year or time in our life the things that bothered us at the time fade and we tend to remember that time in a much "rosier" frame of mind. The continued argument about TCM's programming is an example. There are people who swear they used to watch TCM 24/7 everyday and never see a post-1960 or rarely see a post-1960 film. The reality, thanks to the Wayback Machine, always shows that TCM was running the same amount of post-1960 films during prime viewing hours that they are today. So, perhaps it is our perceptions that have changed because we (the universal we) are more cognizant of post-1960s films now than when we began watching TCM in the first place. Just a thought.

The DVD is widescreen so which makes a lack of availability a bit hard to swallow. >> Isn't Quiller a Fox film? If so, Fox has its own movie channel- Fox Movie Classics. Why give a competing broadcaster a letterboxed version when you can send them a pan and scan version and keep the letterboxed version to air on your own channel?

Cinemascope, Here's some info on fires and negatives that I have been able to find that highlights what I have been saying: 1914: Lubin fire in Philadelphia destroys Oliver Hardy?s film debut as well as footage of McKinley?s ambulance leaving the Expo after he was shot. Also lost in this fire Hobart Bosworth?s version of ?The Sea Wolf?. 1914- Los Angeles: The lab shared by Keystone and Ince Films has a fire destroying films. 1915- Edison?s vault may have had a fire. 1924 Universal (East Coast)Vault Fire includes negatives to Universal films 1913-1924 1933 Warner Bros/First National Vault Fire destroys most of 1928-1930 Vitaphone talkies 1937- 20th Century-Fox (NJ)- Negatives for most of , if not all, pre-1935 Fox films destroyed. Big problem was that original negatives and fine grain masters were stored in the same vault. ?Cleopatra? starring Theda Bara is lost, so is "Way Down East" as well as films starring William Farnum, Harry Carey and Tom Mix are lost. Also companies such as Educational Pictures, World-Wide that Fox sub-distributed for are lost. 1940s- Museum of Modern Art suffers four major vault fires one which is said to have wiped out 2/3rds of the collection including Hans Richter?s hand painted color animation Rhythmus 25. 1943- Harold Lloyd?s personal vault has a fire. Losses include the Lonesome Luke series and the original camera negative of Safety Last! c. 1950s- RKO has a major vault fire that results in the loss of Citizen Kane. Other RKO titles believed lost include Case of the Sgt, Grischa, Freckles, Laddie,Leathernecking, The Monkey?s Paw, West of the Pecos, White Shoulders, Hit the Deck (soundtrack only survives) and Runaround. 1959 the Cinematheque Francaise has a vault fire that destroys films including Von Stroheim?s ?The Honeymoon?. 1961: 20th Century Fox?s New Jersey vault has a fire where the explosion could be heard for three miles. Lost films include most of Theda Bara?s work. 1965: MGM has a vault explosion and fire that destroys the entire contents. Films include ?A Blind Bargain?, ?The Divine Woman? and ?London After Midnight?. 1967 National Film Board of Canada Vault Fire 1993- Henderson Film Lab Fire in London. Destroys the original negatives of Satyajit?s Ray?s Apu Trilogy as well as Ealing Studios Comedies. Also at some point, George Eastman House had a vault fire that destroyed part of their collection. Non fire destruction 1948: Universal decides to toss out all of its silent library that it still has vaulted. By this time only a few hundred titles remain from the 5,000 films the studio produced prior to converting to talkies. The films, as well as screen tests and trailers, are destroyed to recover their silver content. Decomposition has destroyed many films. Paramount produced some 1200 silents and by the late 1960s only about 250 survived. Fox produced about 1200 silents and only about 120 are thought to still survive. Warner Brothers silent library is just as depressing. MGM silents from 1924-1929 seem to have had the best survival rate. It is believed that less than 20 of 1917-1922 Goldwyn silents survive. Frances Goldwyn ordered all of the post -1922 Goldwyn films destroyed (except the Winning of Barbara Worth because it starred Gary Cooper) because she believed they had no value. About that same amount of Metros pre-merge silents survive. Roger Mayer went to work at MGM in the early 1960s and continued the preservation work begun by Louis Mayer of transferring their films to safety stock and insuring back up copies are being made. He can?t work fast enough to stave off decomposition. Only about 24% of silents are said to still survive.

But putting a hard date on what era films can be shown will always exclude a number of great films that should be shown. Example: If you put a hard date of no films past 1959 to be shown, TCM would be unable to show: The Apartment, The Alamo, To Kill a Mockingbird, Oliver!, The Fortune Cookie, True Grit, The Lion in Winter, Lawrence of Arabia, Dr Zhivago, Fail Safe, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Cheyenne Autumn, The Best Man. Dr Strangelove and many more films that folks consider classics. A classic film, like a classic car or anything else considered classic, is an individual response. Trying to set hard dates for what can and cannot be considered classics is next to impossible because everyone is going to have an opinion and in the end, very few, if anyone at all, is going to agree 100% on the matter.

I'm a bit confused... back in the 40's, didn't studios generally own the movies they made 100%? And if they owned it originally, how can they have contract limitations?>> Cinema, It may have something to do with the contract with the author. Another problem is that VHS, laser and DVD are technologies that no one planned or foresaw so that can cause problems in securing the rights beyond just the film rights. Just because a studio owned the rights to make a movie from the book does not necessarily mean they own the rights in perpetuity or for technology beyond what was known in the 1940s. Also, this may be a case where the Abend ruling has precedent. There are wiser folks than I around here that can talk about that. I do agree with CRStudio that if WBHV is working on getting the rights worked out they will ultimately prevail.

Ham Dog, TCM makes every effort to show films in their original aspect ratio. However, they must rent/lease the films they show. If the studio/distributor ships a pan and scan version when TCM ordered letterboxed, there is nothing they can do about it. Often, TCM will try to run the film again at a later date in its correct aspect ratio. Message was edited by: lzcutter

There are accounts of two vault MGM vault fires. One was in the 1957 but I can't find a lot of info on it. The other one, the famous one, was in 1965. David Pierce wrote an article about it for Film History, volume 9, #1. The fire was sparked by gas from the nitrate reels in the vault. The fire sparked an explosion and at least one person was killed. In this fire were the negatives and/or prints of "London After Midnight", "The Divine Woman" and "A Blind Bargain", "Tower of Lies", "Married Flirts",the MGM Hanna Barbara animation and many more. There is a wonderful book called "Nitrate Won't Wait" that details the history of nitrate film and includes details on the various vault fires. Message was edited by: lzcutter

Kyle, You bet to the punch on posting about Schmillson in the Night. I love that album.

Kyle, Wasn't Coffy and Foxy Brown part of TCMU last Friday night? That would take them both out of primetime wouldn't it?

Do you think people really danced for over 1000 hours?!>> Rusty, I found this little tidbit on wikipedia: "Dance marathon participants went great lengths of endurance for rather small winnings considering the time spent. According to the Guinness Book of Records, the longest dance marathon lasted 5,152 hours - 214 days. It was held at the Merry Garden Ballroom in Chicago, Illinois, and the winning couple of Mike Ritof and Edith Boudreaux won $2,000 in a contest that ran from August 29, 1930, to April 1, 1931. It was reported that dance marathons were directly and indirectly responsible for numerous deaths, although no figures on the amount were reported. Nevertheless, in 1933 the Governor of New York signed a bill that limited dancing to 8 hours. A few states earlier had outright banned marathon dancing after the 1923 death of Homer Moorehouse, who collapsed after dancing for 87 straight hours nonstop." "The contests became endless, grueling marathons that would continue for weeks, regulated by rules and heavily promoted to audiences. No longer driven by dancers? record setting or ?fifteen-minutes-of-fame,? these events were staged and structured by promoters, fueled by the money that could be made." "Contestants hoped to have careers in films, and though many took roles as extras, only the few who were veteran performers before entering, like June Havoc and Red Skelton, found real fame and entertainment careers after their marathon days." Hope that helps!

TCM does not show all movies in their original aspect ratio, they are at the mercy of the distributors and show whatever they receive. For example today's showing of the Quiller Memorandum was shown in pan and scan.>> Sweetbaby, At least TCM makes the effort to get the film in the correct aspect ratio and broadcast it that way if it is available. The other pay channels don't go to the lengths that TCM does to show a film in its correct aspect ratio.

I was looking for VHS or DVD. I know the restored 1999 version hasn't been released on DVD yet, but if someone could have taped it off TCM on a DVD-R, I'd imagine.>> Joe, I believe that the restored Greed is scheduled to be released on DVD later this year from WBHV.