The Occidental Weekly

When you want indie films, you go to Sundance; when you want glamorous premieres, you go to Cannes; when you want Academy contenders, you go to Toronto, but where do you go for the classics? Until now there wasn't a festival for the classics, but the Turner Classic Movies (TCM) Classics Film Festival changed all that: It showed films that spanned the gamut of cinematic history.
Overtaking the Hollywood and Highland district from April 22-25, the screenings were spread out amongst Grauman's Chinese, the Mann Chinese and the Egyptian theatres. It was appropriate to have this festival in the cinematically historic area of Hollywood, surrounded by famous handprints, the Walk of Fame and every costumed character imaginable milling about.

The festival was open to the public with options for individual tickets or a festival pass, and people came out en masse, everyone from teenagers to octogenarians, sitting side-by-side to relish their favorite classics, some for the first time, others for the 50th.

The festival kicked off with a showing of a restored print of "A Star Is Born," starring Judy Garland, and continued with comedies of all varieties from Billy Wilder's "Some Like It Hot" to Mel Brooks' "The Producers" and dramas like "In a Lonely Place" and "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" introduced by Eli Wallach. As though projecting these timeless films on the big screen wasn't enough, a handful of classic movie stars, including Mel Brooks and Eli Wallach, appeared to introduce their films.

Everyone loves going to the movies, but there seems to be a minority of individuals who actually cherish the cinema adventure; who appreciate the phenomenon of a group of strangers gathering in the dark to embark on a collective journey; who are devoted to the occurrence when the members of this unfamiliar company become travelling companions and share in the emotions as the on-screen events unfold.

That is what the TCM Classics Film Festival was for: to enable these celluloid addicts to congregate and get their fix.
After a weekend of conversations, symposium and screenings on film, the first annual TCM Classics Film Festival proved to be the preeminent film festival for film lovers. It will hopefully return next year, with even stronger numbers and more screenings to delight audiences of all walks.

The festival was an opportunity for people to congregate in the heart of Hollywood, not to see the latest indie pic, box office sensation or Oscar hopeful, but rather to celebrate great works past.

Like a museum exhibit where hundreds of people gather to stare at the paintings of Picasso, van Gogh and da Vinci, this festival provided a filmic equivalent to a trip to the Getty. But instead of staring at Cubist woman or a Modernist self-portrait or a Vitruvian man, the audience viewed a Bogart, a Huston, a Lemmon. Just like how paintings in a museum are discussed and reminisced over in the viewers' minds, so too did the audience value the experience of taking the journey of these films.

Additional reporting by Ashly Burch and Martin Cramer.

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