In Praise of OIder Movies

Why TCM Matters

I used to hate Charlie Chaplin. I was exposed to The Kid when I was a kid and I loathed its sugary  extortionate sentimentalism on sight. And I especially hated the herky-jerky cartoonish way that Chaplin moved, and the hyper-caffeinated way other actors responded to him. But then a few years back I was channel-surfing and caught a cleaned-up version of the film on Turner Classic Movies. I realized the Chaplin I’d first seen wasn’t the Chaplin that was intended. The film played at a more natural pace, as if the sprockets had finally been properly threaded, and I could see the athletic grace in the stunts and the thoughtful way he’d choreographed the camera movements. I still preferred Buster Keaton, but the Little Tramp began to seem more like a character than a caricature. Then I learned from the host’s comments after the movie that “the Kid” was played by Jackie Coogan, who later achieved immortality as Uncle Fester on the original Adams Family TV show.

It reminded me of the experiences I had at the great movie revival houses in the city when I was growing up: The Thalia, the New Yorker, Symphony Space, Bleecker Street Cinema, and the D.W. Griffith. I was able to discover the early films of Truffaut, Bunuel, and Preston Sturges at these cinemas, and learn something about them from the program notes.

In some ways, TCM has been even better. It shows immaculately-restored prints played regular speed, instead of the Million Dollar Movie versions that used to play at accelerated speeds on television so they could jam in more commercials. Even better, the channel hosts are all telegenic film scholars, whose introductions are often as entertaining as the movies themselves. And while it’s true that TCM leans heavily on warhorses like Singin’ In The Rain and Casablanca to bring in viewers, the programming also takes chances on more obscure titles. On his excellent Saturday show, Noir Alley, the host Eddie Muller has introduced his audiences to forgotten gems like Woman on the Run with Ann Sheridan, Talk About A Stranger with Billy Gray and Nancy Davis (later Nancy Reagan), and La Bestia Debe Morir, an Argentinian thriller based on a novel by Daniel Day-Lewis’s father.

Now, of course, because it’s something of quality in the 21^st Century, TCM is under threat. Its parent company Warner Bros. Discovery just announced that some of the channel’s top executives are leaving in a corporate restructuring. Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Paul Thomas Anderson were alarmed enough to ask for an emergency meeting to discuss TCM’s future.

Conveniently, the villain of this piece is also one of the main villains of the ongoing strike by the Writers Guild of America (of which I am a member).

David Zaslav is the chief executive officer of Warner Bros. Discovery. His annual salary is three million dollars, with a $22 million annual bonus, plus stock options valued at $190 million. For these princely sums, he has presided over decisions like taking the “HBO” out of “HBO Max,” gutting its content library for tax write-off purposes, and appointing Chris Licht for a brief but a disastrous tenure leading CNN. Zaslav dismissed Clint Eastwood’s 50-year relationship with Warners by saying “It’s not show friends, it’s show business.”  If you’ve walked by a strike picket line, you’ve probably seen Zalslav’s name on a sign with an expletive attached. That’s what happens when you’re publicly jumping up and down on a trampoline made of dollar bills, while median income for your “content creators” has declined by 23 percent in the last ten years.

The corporate defense is that the industry is experiencing seismic changes and the old models don’t work anymore. That’s true enough. But it’s hard to imagine that an operation like TCM costs a lot of money to run. Especially when you think of Zaslav’s compensation numbers.  

Now it’s also true that you can still find old movies in other places, like the Criterion Channel, which is a paid subscription service, and even Zaslav’s MAX platform. But you have to look pretty hard to find the classics when the network is more energetically promoting the likes of HOUSE OF THE DRAGON and THE IDOL with Lily-Rose Depp and the Weeknd, and Warners as a whole is devoting untold resources to the theatrical release of THE FLASH, which opened disappointingly despite Zaslav putting his personal stamp of approval on it.

It's tempting to say that it’s bad enough that suits like Zaslav are screwing up the present, can’t they leave the past alone? But maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps this doesn’t matter to most people. Maybe you don’t like black-and-white movies. Maybe you’ve never watched a silent film from beginning to end. Maybe you only watch sports and “Vanderpump Rules” on TV. But TCM has been one of the last refuges for old movies as an alternative to the Attention Deficit Disorder ethos of current pop culture, not to mention a lifeline for the lonely and insomniac in the wee small hours of the morning.

I’d personally miss it if was gone, but I think there might also be a greater loss. Most movies of any era aren’t very good, and were engineered strictly to make money. The writer Theodore Sturgeon famously posited that 90 percent of everything is crap. TCM lovingly presents the other ten percent.  The films it shows uphold an older, more patient form of storytelling that worked for a hundred years and made Hollywood the envy of the world. They represent some of the best of our culture and it would be a shame to see pieces of it sold off in a corporate fire sale like furniture in a condemned house by the railroad tracks.

I’m writing this on a Sunday. The news is full of stories about a failed coup in Russia, an imploding submersible, drowning immigrants, and random shootings on city streets. I want to know more about all of that. But there’s also a time for other stories. Charade with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn is on TCM tonight. If you need me at 10, that’s where I’ll be.