Ted Turner Gave Us Classic Movies, And That's More Important Now Than Ever
In a landscape where regurgitation is the name of the game, Ted Turner blazed a path all his own.
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Yesterday it was announced that Ted Turner, maverick television producer, conservationist and media mogul had died at the age of 87. In the aftermath, people started flocking to remember Turner, including his ex-wife Jane Fonda who considered Turner one of her "favorite husbands." Seen amongst those tributes on social media were fans of classic movies, celebrating and honoring the man who leant his name to the network known as Turner Classic Movies (TCM).
You probably know I spent just this past weekend at the TCM Classic Film Festival, watching classic films in the dark with a bunch of people who understood all my stray references. And upon hearing that Turner had passed so quickly after the festival that bears his name was bittersweet, even though he had stepped away from the company years before.
For me, I want to eulogize Turner through the network that brought classic films to audiences everywhere, and whose future still feels shaky in the wake of another upcoming corporate merger. Without Ted Turner, bare minimum, we wouldn't have a TCM to remind us why classic films matter while fighting to preserve them.
I keenly remember the first time I watched TCM. I was living in Sacramento, and I was either sick or it was raining (it might just have been raining while I was sick). Either way, I was flipping through the channels, eating a grilled cheese with tomato soup, when I stopped on a black and white film. It was 1946's The Spiral Staircase. I planned to watch a few minutes and ended up watching the entire thing before host Robert Osborne returned to tell me about the movie I'd just seen. It was a moment that quite literally changed my life. The network's alchemy worked on me and from that point forward there wasn't a time where I wasn't watching TCM or at least watching something I'd taped.
Turner, in a lot of ways, was the ultimate classic film fan. In the mid-1980s he acquired the MGM catalog, including a host of pre-1950 films from Warner Bros., RKO and MGM. Turner wanted to find a way to both preserve the movies he'd acquired, while also giving others opportunities to see them. Can you imagine if Turner had just decided to release on them on physical disc a few times and that's it? Unlike most linear cable channels, which spend a majority of their budget on licensing content (think of HBO in the 1980s), TCM immediately started with a strong amount of content it already owned, keeping costs down.
More importantly, Turner seemed to genuinely care about the movies themselves. Watching the splashy day TCM premiered in Times Square in 1994 you see Turner flanked by classic film stars like Jane Powell, Arlene Dahl, Van Johnson, and Celeste Holm. The look on his face is one of genuine joy. Couple that with the first few years of TCM. The set Osborne used for his intros and outros doesn't look expensive, but homey. Turner understood TCM was meant to be an extension of the living room, a place where audiences could watch these classics with someone, like Osborne, who might have been watching in his home as well. Commercial free, the interstitials and interviews had a similar nostalgic feel while presenting in-depth interviews with performers from that time (many of whom were still alive).
Turner was far from perfect, even when it came to classic films. Prior to starting TCM, Turner tried to appeal to younger viewers by colorizing older films like Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon. After colorizing forty films, and seeing audiences come to check out the novelty, the fad faded. It didn't help that major directors like Martin Scorsese were giving Turner shit for ruining the movies. Some of those colorized films still endure – Miracle on 34th Street is one I still see colorized – yet Turner realized the folly of his error.
And while TCM has weathered a string of corporate takeovers they've held on to much of what Turner espoused at the beginning: presenting classic films, uncut, uncensored, and commercial free. For that alone it remains a unicorn in today's television environment, and it's understandable why the corporate linear cable landscape of today would seek to destroy it. Warner Bros. under the Zaslav leadership certainly tried, and who knows what will happen once David Ellison and Paramount take over.
In the meantime, I have to give a heavenly thank you to Ted Turner for giving me something that brings me joy, as it does many others. It's funny to think how a TV station can bring happiness into people's lives and, more so, how its team feels more like friends. But that was the magic of Turner and the TCM he envisioned. He brought people into his living room, in Robert Osborne's living room, and let us stay. He's still doing that today.
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