Okay, let me get the positives out of the way first.
My attendance at Turner Classic Movies' second annual "Classic Film Festival" was a wonderful Christmas present bestowed upon yours truly by good friend Djinn from the Bronx. It's hard to top that as a novel idea.
If only Djinn's ingenuity had been put to good use by the folks running the festival itself. They sure could have used the help.
How do you screw up a film festival of classic movies held in Hollywood? Organized by perhaps my favorite TV network, whose offerings are constantly viewed or DVRed in my house.
Here's how...
Well, you can start with "bang for your buck." The TCM Classic Film Festival is a four-day potpourri of classic movies played on a virtually non-stop schedule in the best film houses that Hollywood Boulevard has to offer. The Egyptian. Grauman's Chinese Theater. The central spot for the festival is in the lobby of the legendary Hollywood Roosevelt. How bad can this be?
There are a plethora of Festival "pass" options. I estimated the average cost for a pass is about $400. Okay, as I surveyed the landscape, I then guessed the number of passes/attendees at around 5,000 folks.
That's a TCM haul of approximately 2 million dollars.
You know what you get for your four hundred dollars?
A lanyard. That is attached to a plastic badge with your name on it. The lanyard and the badge allows you to get a number so you can stand on line to see a movie.
A lanyard and a badge.
I repeat, a lanyard and a badge.
As I trooped around the festival for two days, I thought of all the ways TCM could improve this event. And that would give its patrons even the slightest illusion of getting something more for their multi-hundred buck entrance fee.
How about setting up some free food stations in the Roosevelt? There was something called Club TCM. With drinks for purchase. There were some hotel eateries. With food for purchase. Of course, all around the area were places to nosh. With food for purchase. Meanwhile, why did your 400 bucks get you?
A lanyard and a badge.
I repeat, a lanyard and a badge.
How about a gift bag for all attendees? I heard a rumor that there were free tote bags, but they were all gone by the time I got there on Friday. But, how easy and inexpensive could that have been for TCM to do? Vinyl bags are cheap to make. Stuff them with some goods from sponsors who would eat up the promotional tie-ins. Raisinets and Goobers. A customized water bottle. Some classic DVDs and discount coupons to order more off TCM's website. A cheap t-shirt. The ideas are endless.
A lanyard and a badge. That was it.
I wondered what TCM was doing with all this dough. Sure, the theaters needed to be rented. A staff needed to be hired part time. After that, what exactly is the overhead you're paying for? I can't imagine that all the old time celebrities who appeared were compensated, but who knows? Okay, you needed a limousine service on call to schlep the late Debbie Reynolds in from her house. But how much does that sink into your profit? The more I thought about it, this was a money-making scheme that would have made the One Percent blush with envy.
Admittedly, the prospect of seeing a classic movie on a single screen with one of the stars doing a Q & A afterwards is not so special for me. Living in Los Angeles, I can usually manage to do that every weekend. But, for the TCM Festival folks, this was really big doings. Most of them were from out-of-town and I don't mean New York City. Lots of the crowd were overweight and from places where Hollywood dreams are usually not made. It was essentially the Couch Potato Convention.
I could tell their make-up as I stood on one of the many movie lines and listened to their conversations with each other. My snob attenna was out all weekend.
"Well, my flight was diverted from Raleigh because we had to fly around that tornado."
"Well, my flight was diverted from Macon because we had to fly around that tornado."
"The Burger King in the Selma airport was closed because of that tornado."
Clearly, the favorite cable networks of all these peckerwoods were TCM and the Weather Channel. As for me, I was a pair of black dress shoes in a sea of white tube socks purchased at Walmart.
There was some folks that weren't merely hayseeds from South Carolina. Some dressed like they were fresh from the swing shift at Lockheed in 1944. Several had genders that could be disputed. Like, for instance, the "chick" in the red striped dress below. While others were looking for popcorn, I was on the hunt for "his" Adam's Apple.
The bizarro malnourished Fred Astaire wannabe above showed up all over the place. I'm guessing that, from time to time, this screwball has also dressed up like Ginger Rogers.
Everybody was friendly enough and always tried to engage you in conversation after reading your name on the badge hanging off your lanyard.
"Hi, Lou."
"Hey, Lon."
"Where ya from, Les?"
None of them got even remotely close to "Len." I began to ponder just how complicated my three-letter first name could be to somebody with a fifth grade education.
On one line, I chatted up a very nice but simple lady from Florida. When she learned that I was a resident of Los Angeles, she looked at me with an awe usually reserved for Gary Cooper. I told her that classic film screenings are a regular happening in our town and that this is one of the last places in America where you can still see something like "Gone with the Wind" in a classic movie house. I added that you can't even do that anymore in New York City, which has criminally destroyed all of its moviegoing history.
A tap on the shoulder.
The guy behind me had listened to my rant. And was ready to dispute. He was over 50, overweight, and wearing shorts with tube socks. This was a big weekend for somebody who rarely ventures far from his mother's basement.
"Hey, I'm from New York and you can still see classic movies there."
Oh, really, Fatso. Where?
"Well, the Ziegfeld..."
Oh, please. That was built in 1972. What else you got, Stupid?
I got into a battle of cinematic wits with somebody who was destined to lose as soon as he hauled his swollen ankles out of bed that morning. He tried to argue with me the merits of film exposition in New York City. He got lost at every verbal turn.
"Well, I do come out here eight weekends a year just to go to classic movies."
Oh, so, if New York has so many classic films on display, why do you have to leave there eight times a year and come here? More importantly, do you get that much time off from your job at the video store? And what happens if your mom needs help to pumice her corns?
Ladies and gentlemen, that was the typical TCM Classic Film Festival patron.
When I arrived at the festival on Friday morning, I immediately surveyed the schedule of films that day and realized that I had pretty much missed the start of every morning movie. My friend Djinn had to work part of the morning and I was on my own. Her sole goal for the day was to attend a then-alive Robert Osborne-hosted interview with the then-alive Peter O'Toole, so I decided to make my own fun.
With the festival schedule laid out before me, I realized that it was so tightly orchestrated that a person couldn't possibly do more than three movies a day. Plus you apparently needed to build time in between so you could walk to your theater, get your bakery line number, queue up, and then wait for your next direction from the TCM volunteer police.
Three movies a day at these prices? I speculated that this came to about fifty bucks a film and I started to remember fondly the days when I got into a double feature at RKO Proctor's in Mount Vernon for fifty cents.
But, I did have a lanyard. And a badge. And lots of places around me where I could buy a Diet Coke.
Only because it was playing at that time, I ambled over to the Chinese 6 Multiplex to see something called "Bigger Than Life." I had never heard of the movie, but one of its stars, Barbara Rush, was appearing beforehand with Robert Osborne. I needed to at least see one movie at the TCM Classic Film Festival.
I wound up on line with "#96." And you had to stand on-line in the appointed sequential order. Around me, I would hear plaintive wails of confusion.
"Who's got #52?"
"I'm #67. Where's #66?"
"I can't read. What does this say?"
The Chinese 6 screen that ran this movie was a smaller house with no air conditioning. We filed in and, for my revered #96, I wound up in the last seat in the last row. Thank God Barbara Rush had teased her hair that morning or I would not have been able to see the top of her head. The cool air finally kicked in midway through the movie and it was decent enough. James Mason as some school teacher who goes nuts because he's been taking the wrong dosage of cortisone. Hardly a raving endorsement of Prednisone.
I looked for my next screening. Hmmm. I had about twenty minutes to walk over to the Egyptian for Mickey Rooney's appearance at an unspooling of the MGM musical, "Girl Crazy."
Once again, a number and a place in line. The Egyptian is a huge theater, so there was drama with some higher digits.
"Who's got #257?"
"I'm #309. Where's #308?"
"I can't read. What does this say?"
I had seen two movies and two Hollywood stars. I was already exhausted.
The next day was better. Djinn, fresh from her exhilerating dalliance with Peter O'Toole, hooked up with me and we attacked that day's screening schedule with the pinpoint precision of the first moon landing. First up was the Egyptian and Hayley Mills interviewed by Leonard Maltin prior to Disney's "The Parent Trap." She was delightful, even though I had seen her once before while waiting for an ultrasound at St. John's Hospital.
Another number. Another line. And this time in the hot sun of Hollywood Boulevard amid all the other annoying tourists.
At the end of the night, we were spent. It's an energy drain to watch three movies in one day. But, as I reviewed my experience, I was certainly glad to have had it. Kudos to my friend Djinn for a thoroughly creative gift.
And my lanyard. And my badge. Both thrown into a drawer when I got safely home. Luckily, I didn't encounter a tornado on my drive back to West Los Angeles.
I vowed never to go to this again. And, eight years later, I still have not.
Dinner last night: A rarity---Big Mac and fries.
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