TCM Classic Film Festival 2020 Was Delivered to our Homes
I am writing this at well passed midnight on Sunday night (Monday morning?), feeling sleep deprived and loopy. I am also feeling more emotionally sound than I have since entering quarantine nearly six weeks ago. For the last couple of days, I have lived in Turner Classic Movies, along with thousands of people around the nation via Twitter. I abandoned all thoughts of the news, and the anxiety it inspires, in favor of livetweeting some truly excellent cinema, discussing the cast and crew that populate those films, and sharing that love with the friends I have made over a decade of our shared pilgrimage to Hollywood every spring for our favorite event.
Missing the in-person fun! Pictured: Cinema Junkie Beth Accomando, me, and Victoria Mature
It was also a bittersweet weekend because we had marked this one on our calendars for the 2020 TCM Classic Film Festival, which of course had to cancel in order to protect us all from the pandemic. In response to this, the network decided to hold what they called the TCM Classic Film Festival Special-Home Edition (TCMFFSHE). I have decided to reflect upon my experience with this experiment here, while my thoughts and emotions are still so real and raw. Because I run my own film festival that will likely have to consider something similar very soon, I also want to consider some of the ways this altered the overall experience.
The first thing I want to talk about is probably the single most positive change in the experience. For the first time in a decade, my family was able to join me in the TCMFF. Of course, they didn’t go as bonkers as I did, but we experienced much of it together, and that left me with a weekend full of delight. Some of this was even better than I could have wished. My daughter Scarlet is not even two yet, but she sat and watched quite a few classics with me, and I got some pictures and video of her reaction to SAFETY LAST! and SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN that I will cherish forever!
The main thing to know is that the “Home Edition” put on by TCM is not really analogous to what many of us in the film festival world have either had to do or will find ourselves doing. The most fundamental difference is that the TCMFFSHE was not taking what was planned and putting it online. They have the powerful tool of a cable television network already at their disposal, so they were able to shift their planned programming to accommodate this novel idea. No need for searching for some video sharing platform, no concern about rights or premiere statuses or any of that. For intents and purposes, it was a special programming weekend on TV.
The other big difference is that, if we were going to have to go online, we would take our programming and have to work with the filmmakers to find a way to just move the festival to some virtual environment. In the case of TCMFFSHE, this was not the festival they had planned simply moved to television. It was more of a highlights of past festivals, with films that have been shown, interviews and clips from previous years, and really only a couple of titles that had been slated from this year. It was more a celebration of the festival and community it inspired than a virtual version of the festival itself. This is not a complaint or a criticism in any way—I had a wonderful weekend—but merely a compare/contrast with what I and my fellow festivals would have to do since the TCMFF is such a unique film festival as one that is exclusively repertory content run by a television network.
Ok, so logistically it would be unwise to fully compare what TCM did with what I would have to do, but I do want to look at it emotionally and from the perspective of community. Everything about the notion of doing a virtual festival is antithetical to the reasons I spent my life and financial security building a film festival to start with. I have been having a genuine crisis about this and, while I don’t think that crisis is completely alleviated, I do want to acknowledge the joys that indeed were inspired from this format. I want to break some of that down here.
First things first, I am a bit crazy and I watched A TON of the TCMFFSHE. To illustrate this, I think my record number of programming blocks (films or presentations) at the regular in-person event is 19. This weekend, I watched 33. This surprised even me. How could it be so many more? Here are some things the home edition had that the live event would not:
Wednesday programming that went all night
Thursday programming that went all night (typically it is only Friday/Saturday that have midnight screenings)
Films that I woke up as early as 5am for (typically first screenings are around 9am)
No booking it top speed to get from one cinema to the next (though this does eliminate forced exercise, which is too bad!)
No waiting in line or grabbing queue cards
Food, drink, and bathroom breaks are basically integrated into the watching when it happens at home
All of that means I can get in a lot more content, and I took advantage of it. Not including the presentations I watched, like long interviews with Faye Dunaway, Norman Lloyd, and Peter O’Toole, here are the actual film titles I got to see:
There is another significant difference between the format of the actual festival and this TCMFFSHE experience: this one is a single screen. This could be viewed as either pro or con. One of the challenges every year is choosing to view one film over another. The festival utilizes a multitude of screens, and this multi-track format requires some extremely difficult choices. A lot of people get frustrated as this, but honestly I find it to be part of the fun. I will get together with friends to discuss who picked what and why. With just our television as the sole screen, this conflict is eliminated. That also brings up another change.
I decided years ago that my number one deciding factor in choosing one film over another would be whether or not I had seen it. Even if I LOVED a film, I tended to go with the one that was new to me. Over the years, this has led to some truly beloved discoveries at the festival. This experience was not there for me this year. The only new-to-me narrative film over the entire weekend was DOUBLE HARNESS, which I was not able to get into when it was screened before. The two documentaries, HAROLD AND LILLIAN: A HOLLYWOOD LOVE STORY and FLOYD NORMAN: AN ANIMATED LIFE were both new to me and absolutely fantastic.
Being familiar with everything screened did mean I could lend some attention to Twitter, though. In addition to connecting with friends I was hoping to see in person, it was very nice to be able to have online conversations with folks who, largely because of financial reasons, had not been able to attend the festival before. In a way, this was their first TCMFF experience. Yes, it was only available to people who have access to the cable network to start with, but I suspect most people who would attend the festival already have that access. In an odd way, I was able to have longer and more in-depth chats with people during TCMFFSHE because I spend the entire in-person event jetting from one film to the next.
Despite the physical distance, the sense of community among me and my fellow classic film fanatics was present and palpable. This is an interesting thing to consider when I think about the possibility of virtual events for myself. A big caveat is that I wouldn’t want people livetweeting the details of new films that we would be showing. That during-film conversation would be something this safely had that I would not, but I definitely would want to find a way to foster a similar connection somehow. Live streaming a filmmaker interview is not what I am talking about, but I mean a genuine connection among all participants in response to what they have seen.
I do want to thank TCM for this experience, for feeding my love of cinema with a fire hose for the last couple of days, for helping me forget the terrors enveloping our world for a while, and for also allowing me some time to consider my own festival for the first time in too long. The pandemic has led to a lot of work for my day job, and Horrible Imaginings has receded in my mind a bit too much. I need to reach out and pull it in.
And now, a couple of highlights:
