So if you’ve not read any other Morlock posts this week and came straight to mine – no, I’m not angry, it’s perfectly understandable… but you should give these other writers a chance some time – let me be the first to tell you that Turner Classic Movies is celebrating its 15th anniversary this year, this month, this week.  The channel was inaugurated on April 15, 1994, the specific date chosen to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the first-ever public movie showing in New York City.  When we Morlocks began swapping e-mails some time ago about potential topics for a 15th anniversary blog-a-thon I admit I was more than a little gobsmacked by that milestone - fifteen years… really?

Part of my seeming disconnect is due to the fact that in 1994 I was a resident of New York City, where it all began (at least as far as cinematic exhibition is concerned), but where Turner Classic Movies was not available until 2001.  People I knew, people in the business, fans of old time movies, people who revered classic Hollywood cinema groused and and griped and stomped their feet about this inequity (“Why should people in fricking Rhode Island have Turner Classic Movies but not people in New York City?”) and I was in complete agreement but it was all academic to me because I didn’t have cable television from 1994 until 2004.  For ten full years of my adult life, from my early 30s until my early 40s, I watched no television apart from tapes friends passed to me of THE LARRY SANDERS SHOW or other worthwhile programs.  I had separated from my first wife that year and was carrying a then-steep $900 rent on my own.  I had just scored a full-time gig working in a major metropolitan hospital with an annual salary of $25,000 a year or so (before taxes) but I didn’t know if I could pull it off.  I slashed my expenses.  I went to no movies, I attended no plays.  I was so paranoid about money that I measured the exact amount of orange juice I could drink in the morning to get the greatest value out of a carton of Tropicana.  And of course my cable box had to go.  About that, I wasn’t really very sorry.  $60 every 30 or 31 days was too high a price for the cavalcade of mediocrity they call programming in those and these days, so as Clarence Oddbody says in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE, “Cheerio, my good man.”

By 1994, either by dint of my life experience to that point or by simple serendipity, I was coming out of a cinematic latency period.  Prior to that, I just went to the movies and didn’t do much about them, think too much about them, or write about them at all.  Then a friend passed me a copy of a little film magazine called VIDEO WATCHDOG, a bimonthly digest of movies available on VHS and laser disc around the world.  Reading this magazine, which came my way second and third-hand, reawakened my love of movies.  As I hacked through the first scary, lonely years of new bachelorhood and built up my bank account a bit I was able to afford film magazines and to attend the occasional film convention.  I wrote to these magazines, made myself known, made myself a pest, and developed an e-mail friendship with VIDEO WATCHDOG publisher/editor-in-chief/star player Tim Lucas.  In 1997 wrote my first article for him.  By 1999 I was a regular contributor, sometimes turning in 12-15 reviews per issue as it made the transition to a monthly publication schedule.  I was in up to my eyeballs in movies and loving it.  Haunting The Strand used bookstore in Greenwich Village, I bought armfuls of old film reference books and fed my mind and my aesthetic.  I became a moderator at the Mobius Home Video Forum and was asked to contribute to other magazines and to books.  By the turn of the century, I was a bona fide film authority with a little money in the bank but I still hadn’t turned my cable back on.  I just got used to life without commercials and sitcoms and entertainment news.  My magazine work gave me plenty to watch and my television played movies exclusively.

Because I was so dug in to my own work, I hadn’t had the time to get worked up over not having access to Turner Classic Movies in New York.  On visits to my parents in Connecticut, however, I got to see what I was missing and I grew mighty jealous at what I and every other Knickerbocker was missing – the Hollywood classics, the Oscar bait melodramas, the flinty B-unit crime films, the backlot horrors, the pie plate sci-fi flickers of the Fifties, the serials, the series, the programmers, the good, the bad and the ugly that once ran on every late, late show but had long since been supplanted by informercials and reruns of M*A*S*H.  So by 2000 or so the fact that TCM was not available in the place where movies were first exhibited began to feel as unfair to me as taxation without representation.  So what did I do about it?  Nothing!

When TCM finally did arrive in the City (as we called it then, and I’m confident they still do), I still didn’t renew my cable subscription.  I was too busy taking my pretty new girlfriend to classic movie revivals, like a double feature of THE MUMMY (1933) and THE INVISIBLE MAN (1933) at the Film Forum or to a kiddie matineee of KING KONG (1933) at the Walter Reade Theater.  And I was still cranking out the work for VIDEO WATCHDOG.  I don’t know how many reviews I wrote between 1999 and, say, 2004 but the number is probably closer to a thousand than five hundred.  Remarried in 2002, I left New York in 2004 for California, for Los Angeles, for Hollywood, and then and only then did I pop for cable television – and in that bargain I made sure there was room for Turner Classic Movies.  So as TCM celebrates its big one-five, I’ve only had it in my home for a third of that time.  And you know what?  I still don’t watch it!

I need to clarify that.  I love TCM, I love having access to it, but by twist of fate I now write for TCM – you know this because you’re reading these words on the Turner Classic Movies website.  For the past couple of years I’ve been turning in movie reviews, actor biographies, programming notes and blog entries in addition to my other freelance gigs as a writer of liner notes and DVD box copy, of reviews and essays for other websites, and as a for-hire screenwriter for indie producers who want something fast, cheap and out of control.  I probably pound out close to 3,000 words a week for one master or another… so I don’t have time to watch Turner Classic Movies!  I do leave it on, occasionally, especially if there’s a sci-fi marathon or a retrospective of Vincent Price movies, or just to hear those great old voices and those classic film scores.  Even though I’ve seen all the films, even though I own 99% of the movies shown on TCM (I exaggerate, but bear with me), I just love the fact that someone is showing these things on television.  I grew up with afternoon “creature features” and midnight spook shows and DIALING FOR DOLLARS dinnertime  broadcasts so it comforts me to find a great old black-and-white movie or Technicolor extravaganza on my idiot box.  And Turner Classic Movies is about the only place to find this kind of programming… and the sort of interstitial behind-the-scenes, “TCM remembers” material that is the channel’s particular stock-in-trade.  When Elizabeth Taylor talks about her friendship with Montgomery Clift or Tony Curtis speaks of wanting to emulate the class and sophistication of Cary Grant, I fall in love with the movies all over again.

So Happy Birthday, TCM.  Fifteen years is one hell of a milestone but you don’t look a day over five to me.