Mess with Turner Classic Movies and risk Hollywood’s eternal wrath

The same can be said, he said, of Turner Classic Movies, one of the last venues where “A Place in the Sun” lives on. TCM is more than a channel or even a brand. For many in the film world and beyond, it’s an institution, a library, a way of life. It’s the organization that hosted Stevens Jr. and Steven Spielberg as they introduced a restored version of “Giant,” another of his father’s films, at the TCM Classic Film Festival at Hollywood’s Chinese Theatre — the same place where it originally premiered about 65 years earlier.

“It allows audiences to treat films as culture,” Stevens Jr. said. “It’s a national treasure, and something to be nurtured.”

Late last month, the channel came under what felt like a brief siege, in the fallout from an ongoing crisis in the streaming revolution. As more people chose streaming over cable and broadcast, something unfortunate but inevitable became obvious: It couldn’t last the way it was promised, all that limitless expansion, constant growth and creative freedom. So streaming networks and the corporations that own them began consolidating, mega-merging.

There were causalities, big and small, along the way: entire series being deleted (yes, deleted) from existence in cost-cutting measures and old brands being smooshed together into something more digestible. Of particular interest has been Max, a Warner Bros. Discovery amalgamation of what used to be HBO Max and Discovery Plus. The media conglomerate’s chief executive, David Zaslav, shepherded this merger, ignoring critics who argued that watering down established brands is bad for business.

On June 20, the Warner-owned TCM laid off or bought out five of its senior executives, including general manager Pola Changnon and lead programmer Charlie Tabesh. Though many consider Tabesh to essentially be TCM these days, the network promised that there would be little change in what viewers see. Its fans say that’s impossible: The people who curate the programming are TCM’s heart.

“Why these cuts?” you may wonder. It’s hard to say. Promised to shareholders in the merger were $3 billion in cost-cutting measures, but it’s difficult to see how a few jobs at the already tiny TCM could help achieve that, even if the channel is ad-free. It’s possible that bottom-liners see TCM as simply a catalogue of movies, rather than what it is: a cultural institution far outpunching its weight class, one so beloved that it has created a community — online and in real life — that stretches to the upper echelons of Hollywood.

The outcry from the Hollywood elite was therefore swift. “Turner Classic Movies has been a fixture in my life for as long as I can remember. It’s a holy corner of film history — and a living, breathing library for an entire art form. Please don’t f— with ⁦@tcm,” tweeted actor Ryan Reynolds. “I want to go on the record and say…DO NOT F*CK WITH @tcm,” echoed actress Ellen Barkin. “Honestly, @tcm is the only reason we have cable,” tweeted cable TV star Alton Brown.

The day after the announcement, Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Paul Thomas Anderson offered a semi-defense of Zaslav, saying: “We have each spent time talking to David, separately and together, and it’s clear that TCM and classic cinema are very important to him. Our primary aim is to ensure that TCM’s programming is untouched and protected.”

A week later, Zaslav semi-reversed course. The network announced that Tabesh would stay at TCM and that the three directors will help curate the channel.

So, what is it about TCM?

Turner Classic Movies, the brainchild of media mogul Ted Turner, debuted in April 1994 with a mission to show classic movies from the Golden Age right through the New Hollywood era, not skimping on French New Wave and its ilk on the way. About a year after its debut, the New York Times said it had “by all accounts the world’s best classic film library. This month alone, in a salute to the Academy Awards, TCM is showing nothing but movies with Oscar winners or Oscar nominees, 24 hours a day, all month — 325 films in all.”

It hasn’t changed course since. The movies are generally presented by a critic or historian — including the late Robert Osborne and Ben Mankiewicz, the grandson of “Citizen Kane” co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz — who provide historical and cultural context, background information and notes on the effects of the films.

“It’s a free film education,” said actress J. Smith-Cameron, most recently known for playing Gerri on HBO’s “Succession.”

“The curation is fantastic,” said her husband, Kenneth Lonergan, the playwright and Oscar-winning filmmaker behind such films as “Manchester by the Sea.” “They don’t just show the old movies. They talk about the whole culture of the movie, the impact it had, how it related to other films, how it related to other things that were going on in society.”

Through that curation — and a number of savvy business moves — the small channel became highly revered. (How small is hard to say, because numbers aren’t available, but, at least in terms of its number of employees, one industry observer compared it to 0.1 percent of Warner Bros. Discovery.) TCM is still primarily thought of as a cable and satellite offering, but it is available for live-streaming through Hulu, Sling and DirecTV Stream and more.

“This very, very small business occupies a special place within this very, very large company,” said author and journalist Mark Harris. “It’s not just a basic cable channel. TCM is the single element in Warner Bros. Discovery that says we are a company that cares about its own 100-year history, and we are a company that cares about the 100-plus-year history of the medium that built this company.”

It’s able to do that, he suggested, because of a “very small staff of true believers, who not only love the mission of what they do but understand who their audience is and that there are people out there who share this incredible passion for the history of Hollywood, that view the network almost as a meeting place.”

Those dedicated fans meet in person — on TCM-sponsored cruises and at TCM film festivals — and online, often watching the same movie at the same time and discussing it in Facebook groups or through the Twitter hashtag #TCMParty.

There are TCM tote bags, TCM mugs, TCM prints, TCM candles, TCM wine clubs, TCM books. There was even a TCM-sponsored theme park ride in Disney’s Florida complex.

It’s a community, a lifestyle, an identity. Just ask Jeremy Arnold, a film historian who has written several of those books and worked with TCM for more than two decades. “It has really opened a huge community for people who love classic movies to connect to each other,” he said. “But maybe more important than that, I’ve heard countless stories over the years from people who feel TCM has saved them as they battled illness or grief or trauma of some sort in their lives. They turn on TCM, and it’s a balm.”

At its foundation, though, are the movies. Ask anyone why these aging films matter, and responses range from banal to profound. The primary thing you’ll hear is that TCM offers an education — of film, yes, but also of the past century, in America and beyond.

This can be particularly useful for aspiring filmmakers, suggested actor Michael Warburton, who said the best writers and directors have always “looked back at the history of film, the movies from the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, to learn the art of storytelling, the art of filmmakers, learning and schooling themselves from all the masters who had come before.”

And, let’s be honest, TCM is a whole lot cheaper than film school. But there’s also something for the casual viewer, the one who doesn’t much care about match cuts or dolly shots or the meaning of two-hander. For the layperson, watching these films also offers a “historical context. You get to see mores and behavior, the way people dressed for dinner even. It teaches you about the whole last century,” Smith-Cameron said. “Watching movies from different decades gives insight into human nature and society and culture.”

Offering a small example, she pointed out how they can simply show how people spoke some 100 years ago. “Language morphs. Dialects morph,” she said. Our filmed entertainment offers a window into that old slang, the cadences, the phrasing. “If someone watched ‘Succession’ 50 years from now, they’d ask, ‘Why do they talk like that?’”

“It’s our immediate cultural heritage,” Lonergan added. Asking why these old movies matter is “like asking, ‘Why do you preserve paintings?’ or, ‘Why do you preserve music from 20 years ago or 50 years ago or 40 years ago or 100 years ago?’ Nobody says, ‘Why is it important to have jazz?’”

The couple are particularly indebted to classic movies, having bonded over them early in their relationship, and TCM is increasingly one of the only places to find them.

“When I was growing up in New York, there were 15 revival houses that showed old movies on big screens with audiences, and there wasn’t really anybody who wasn’t pretty conversant with old films. One by one, they closed as they were taken over by companies that showed first-run movies,” Lonergan said. “So the next generations of New Yorkers grew up not watching these movies, and it became alien to them.”

A few years ago, Lonergan took their daughter to one of those revival theaters to see the 1936 comedy classic “Modern Times.” “There were a bunch of kids there, and it was really magical to hear 8-year-olds in 2010 laughing at a Charlie Chaplin film. There’s something really beautiful about seeing an 80-year-old joke get a laugh from an 8-year-old.”

“The art form is not much more than 100 years old, and it’s kind of incredible that it’s already vanishing in the distance — and it doesn’t have to,” he added.

Arnold, the film historian who works with TCM, pointed out the relative irony if streaming were to put the nail in TCM’s coffin, unlikely as that seems at the moment. “TCM has done a huge service to our culture by keeping classic movies alive,” he said. “There was a time where classic movies were very hard to see. The run-of-the-mill, ordinary movies from the studio era used to be hard to see,” until the era of home entertainment came along and, soon thereafter, TCM.

“Now physical media is declining, and streaming has almost totally ignored classic cinema,” he said, noting the Criterion Channel’s streaming service as one exception. “If TCM were ever to disappear or drastically change, it would be a significant loss, because movies are meant to be exhibited and seen, not sit in a vault somewhere.”

No one knows what will happen to TCM or classic films in the post-cable era. Harris suggested that it could perhaps look like that Criterion Channel service, or that it could be something completely different. While the world goes on changing, the movies won’t.

It brings to mind a more recent film, Pixar’s “WALL-E” (2008), which follows a robot wandering around post-apocalyptic Earth, essentially alone. He spends his days roaming around the lonely, burned-out planet, desperate for connection, only to return each night to a warped copy of “Hello, Dolly!”

It brings him comfort, yearningly watching what might be the last movie on Earth.