TCM Reinvents Its Canceled Live Classic Film Festival Tonight As Judy Garland’s ‘A Star Is Born’ Kicks Off A Virtual Weekend

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Since 2010 when Turner Classic Movies first had the idea to go live with their own Hollywood film festival celebrating the classics that make the basic cable channel that a true outpost of sanity for film lovers of all stripes, I have religiously attended each and every year. I was certainly looking forward to the 11th edition of the fest which always takes place at the TCL Chinese Theatres and the Egyptian on Hollywood Boulevard.

The festival was to have opened tonight with the 35th anniversary screening of Back To The Future and the stars, including Michael J. Fox, were set to appear. It would have been swell.

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Those opening nights — and the entire fest — bring out movie fans from around the world for the unique opportunity to see these films presented once again on the big screen, often accompanied by appearances of the stars who were in them. But like just about every other event in this strange new world we live in that draws a crowd of more than 10 people, this year’s TCM Fest had no other choice but to cancel.

The network could have left it at that and said “See you next year,” but TCM immediately began to plan what they are calling a “Special Home Edition,” and it will run beginning tonight and continue throughout the weekend exactly as the live fest itself would have played out. Well almost. It’ll be on TV.

The movies and guests highlighted come from the ten previous years of TCM Fests, a smorgasbord of memories for all who have made the annual trek.

The opening night film this evening (at 8 p.m., ET) is the same one that launched the first fest in 2010: Judy Garland and James Mason in A Star Is Born. Through Sunday, that classic will be followed by an eclectic selection of movies that include Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, Deliverance, A Hard Day’s Night, Creature from The Black Lagoon, Sergeant York, Casablanca, The Hustler, Some Like It Hot, Harold Lloyd in Safety Last! (it was accompanied by a live orchestra when it showed at the first TCM gathering), and on and on including of course Singin’ in the Rain which was shown at the 2010, 2012, and 2017 editions. And that is just a sample.

Interviews will also be part of the programming. Tributes to Kim Novak, Peter O’Toole, Eva Marie Saint, Faye Dunaway, and then back-to-back Best Actress Oscar winner Luise Rainer who, at 100-years-old, still went on to live another four years (!) after her memorable 2010 session with TCM’s late great host Robert Osborne.

Osborne was like a rock star at the festival. The faithful would line up out the door and around the block of the Hollywood Roosevelt to get their picture taken with him. It was quite a sight. The fest gives out an annual Robert Osborne Award that first went to Martin Scorsese and this year was to go to critic and historian Leonard Maltin (it will be put off to next year).

Since TCM delivers classic film programming 24 hours a day, seven days a week, what is going to truly differentiate this “Special Home Edition” from what viewers normally see on TCM? After all most people don’t have the giant Imax screen and Dolby Sound System of the Chinese Theatre.

“It’s a good question,” TCM’s SVP Programming Charlie Tabesh told me when I asked this week during a phone conference that also included General Manager Pola Changnon and on air host Ben Mankiewicz. “One of the considerations was how do you make it different than what’s just on TCM. The truth is every single day, every single night is a kind of film festival in some sense because we’re thematically putting programming together, but we wanted this to be special and that meant including a lot of material that we wouldn’t normally include day to day on TCM, And so the first idea that was thrown out was: “Why don’t we play a lot of the movies that we were planning to play this year at this year’s festival?”

“The problem was viewers wouldn’t have the material, the guests, the tribute pieces, etc. It seemed natural instead to stage ‘the best of the best’ and bring back the rarely seen tributes, intros, and special material that flowed from the first ten years.”

Tabesh said that there is a lot of production that has gone into executing this remotely, using zoom, reformatting a lot of material created over the years to make the best kind of virtual fest-going experience imaginable.

Mankiewicz said he shot a lot of stuff in ways he has never worked, using social distancing and other safe techniques in delivering all new intros to this wealth of cinematic treasures. “So the programming that you’ll see this weekend, the 16th through the 19th will look different because I won’t be on my set. We shot that knowing the situation that we were in.”

“People look forward to this all year and that includes us. And the reason we look forward to it in large part is because of this incredibly rewarding connection that we offer to our fans,” Mankiewicz said, madding that he had gotten so emotional making the announcement that they couldn’t have the live festival this year that he had trouble getting through the take.

“I almost couldn’t get through without crying, and I didn’t expect that…It certainly helped me to be able then to come up and talk about these movies and provide some new context…Believe me, I’m shooting a ton of stuff right now — all the stuff that we’re doing online, on social media, on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter — to enhance the programming that we’ll have this weekend. So it’s a bit of irony in all this is that [we’ve] almost never been busier than these last couple of weeks.”

Changnon, who recently took over the post of General Manager, addressed the issue of the financial costs, not just in shutting down the planned live festival this year, but in remounting it for television. It’s TCM’s own version of the kind of virtual programming other shuttered fests like SXSW and Tribeca are engaging in.

“I think you can imagine how hard that was for South By and other festivals that you know live for this opportunity as a once-a-year effort…It’s so complicated and there’s so many moving pieces and, as you say, financially it can become onerous for certain entities.”

“We are incredibly fortunate in that we have a network that generates sufficient revenue and that what we do around the festival is not a live-or-die revenue proposition for us,” said Changnon. “It is all about creating something that brings these classic film fans together annually.”

“We’re already planning next year’s festival,” she said. “We’re already working on details around venues and dates just as we would ordinarily do.”

If this effort works, could it affect future programming on TCM, a new kind of virtual -style universe for them in the way they do things?

“I think this isn’t anything we planned at the beginning of the year or even two months ago. We’re going to learn a lot from it. We’re going to learn what works for the people who enjoy this experience, the people who are watching,” said Changnon.

“We’re going to take a lot of notes honestly to see if this is something that we could try in some way, shape or form. It’s an experiment.”

Here is the complete schedule for the TCM Classic Film Festival: Special Edition (all times ET):

THURSDAY, APRIL 16

FRIDAY, APRIL 17

SATURDAY, APRIL 18

SUNDAY, APRIL 19

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