Dear Turner Classic Movies,
How did things get so terrible for the movies?
The era of Spielberg, Coppolla, Lucas, Scorsese, De Palma, Friedkin, and Bogdanovich appears to be reaching its twilight. In their place, there is no glut of movie brats to replace them. Yes, we have P.T. Anderson, Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, Michael Haneke, and David Fincher. I’m not so cyncical to believe that film is dying–it isn’t–but it is clearly in an extremely delicate time of transition, and the auteurs of today are having trouble competing with the cultural force of television and video games.
Hollywood’s rebooting Spider-man and Batman, erasing four or five year-old great movies and turning them into xerox-machine franchises. A difficult economy has rendered Hollywood decision-less, forcing me to sit through nearly ten solid years of nonstop comic book movies. Many of them have been great, but to say the least it’s getting repetitive.
Online streaming has turned movies into tapwater. For $8 a month, I can watch countless films on Netflix, all horridly devalued into bargain bin entertainment. I browse Netflix aimlessly, able to find obscure entertainments from great filmmakers but not feeling led to watch them among the vast quantities of tripe tossed to Netflix consumers like Sweeney Todd’s meat pies. The Criterion Collection has been uploaded to Hulu. Instead of $40 dvds with fantastic packaging and the best box art in the history of movies-in-a-box, we pay $7.99 a month FOR THE ENTIRE CRITERION COLLECTION. Hulu, Amazon, blockbuster, et al are not only making movies affordable… they’re making them cheap.
I’m well aware that streaming video is the wave of the future, and that it is changing fast. In the next year or so, streaming video will turn in to something akin to the cable wars of the eighties and nineties. We’ll ante up and pay much more for Netflix and Hulu, while we gradually cancel our cable subscriptions.
But one question remains: What would it take to add value back to our film viewing experience?
As an aspiring filmmaker, I sat disheartened by this until I saw–on Netflix streaming, oddly enough–a film that finally inspired me again. That film is a TCM staple: Jules Dassin’s “Night and The City.”
After months of aimless searching, the film brought back memories of what made me love film during my adolescent years. There was a sense of true entertainment, of film history, of basking in the work of an auteur. After months of gorging on Netflix movies like they were McDonald’s extra value meals, I’d finally downed a porterhouse steak. As the film ended, and I sat smug and satisfied after a film for the first time in months, I felt like only one thing was missing… Robert Osborne’s epilogue.
TCM was an integral part of my film education. I’d program the family VCR around the TCM schedule (it seemed like all the must-see movies were on at 1 a.m. or later… maybe I’m just eclectic). I still remember the day TCM aired “Apocalypse Now” uncut for the first time. I stayed up until 2 a.m. watching it with my Dad in Webster, South Dakota. I lived in an isolated town, and didn’t have access to films like that… but my sense of film history developed unabaited thanks to Turner Classic Movies. I watched countless essential films for the first time on Turner Classic Movies, from Napoleon to Singin’ in the Rain to The Seven Samurai to Raging Bull.
I’m poor now. $70-$90 a month for cable would be a laughably inappropriate addition to my budget. I am starved for classic film, and for the presentation that TCM is so famous for.
Stream Turner Classic Movies. I don’t know what the rights are, or if you can or not, but please stream Turner Classic Movies. You don’t even need to stream all of it… just put a film or two a week on hulu with an intro and conclusion. As the owners of the best film catalog in the world, TCM has the key to bringing appreciation for classic film to a new generation of cineastes. Navigating this time of change in the entertainment industry, this confusion over streaming video content, is no doubt difficult to strategize.
I, like probably every American, wish I could pay for cable one channel at a time. As Amazon, Hulu, iTunes, etc. make on demand entertainment more available to those without cable, it’s becoming apparent that paying for multi-channel cable packages doesn’t have the value it once did.
I’d pay $10 a month just to have Turner Classic Movies. I think millions would. I’d pay just to see the channel streamed–without on demand. I just miss the time when I enjoyed discovering movies, of
living in a world where the classics are loved and appreciated, of not standing over a volcano of “content” that I couldn’t sort through if my life depended on it.
Thank you for changing my life. Turner Classic Movies was easily 75% of my film education. I look forward to Turner Classic Movies bringing film appreciation to the next generation of movie brats.
Sincerely,
John Chiafos
Death to the Movies
