The Story of Film on The Late Late Show

[badartfilm]

I know a lot of the posters here have had their fill of "The Story of Film" but I just wanted to express my dismay over the 2:15 AM showing of this week's chapter. Why so late? Also, for the first time the episode will not be repeated on Tuesday.

[allthumbs]

i caught this episode of Story of Film, and one thing that helped to get it buried was a clip from a Wim Wenders film where Wenders (in an acting role) is full frontal naked.

[sewhite2000]

Prior to the airing of My Brilliant Career earlier in the night, Mr. Osborne was unusually candid in pulling back the curtain a bit about programming decisions accompanying this series, stating the featured films were being cut back to one night a week for the final leg of this series because A) Newer films are more difficult to acquire the rights to air; and Because of the adult content of some of them, TCM could only show them in the middle of the night, like they did with this episode of The Story of Film. I found these comments particularly revealing. There are posters on here who posit the theory that TCM is aggressively trying to drive away its older, longtime loyal viewers by showing as many "newer" films as possible (I put newer in quotes, because it's a relative term; The Graduate is now a 46-year-old movie, for point of reference, and even something like Out of Africa is now 28 years old). Whether that's actually true or not (and I don't think it is), I don't think those viewers have a lot to worry about, because the truth is, there's actually competition to get the rights to those films, while who else but TCM has any interest at all in showing some B picture about a runaway bus Loretta Young made in 1932 before she was famous? There will always be a home on TCM for those kinds of movies, I think.

 

But I'm rambling. TCM prides itself on showing its material "uncut and unedited", so if the guy who made this series insisted on putting full frontal male nudity in one of his episodes, he has to expect it's not going to air until after midnight. I don't know if the series was completed before a deal was made with TCM to air it; I don't really know anything at all about the history of its production. It is distressing that with a series is heavily hyped as this, one of the episodes would suddenly be shuffled off to the post-midnight wasteland. If TCM had any say in content (and I doubt they did), surely they would have considered excising that clip so that the episode could have been shown in primetime.

[JamesJazGuitar]

Well that was some intelligent rambling.

 

I agree that the fear that TCM will change their programming to show mostly post 1968 films is way overblow. While I can see programming films related to a series like The Story of Film can cause one to pause, this, like Oscar month, don't reflect TCM's overall programming choices.

[FlyBackTransformer]

> TCM prides itself on showing its material "uncut and unedited"

 

Don't hand me that. A few months ago on a saturday afternoon the TCM slackers aired *No Time For Sergeants* with the scenes with Don Knotts completely cut out.

[Im4movies2]

Let's face it the time period covered during The Story of Film comes into the era of more explicit detail in language, subject matter and nudity. I think it very wise to show it during a time period when most younger viewers are supposedly asleep in their wee little beds. Just set your recorders whatever you have and view it later the next day.