TCM Festival: Home Edition

The 2020 TCM Film Festival out in Hollywood was scheduled for this weekend, starting today. But of course the coronavirus came and lots of people panicked, with politicians getting their ban boners on and regular people acting like Stasi snitches. Lots of events were cancelled, with the Festival being among them.

TCM responded by programming a "Home Edition" of the festival, which begins this evening at 8:00 PM with the 1954 Judy Garland version of A Star Is Born. The Festival is going to have a bunch of movies that were shown at previous festivals, as well as some of the programming that was created at those previous festivals, which mostly means interviews with featured stars, some of whom are no longer with us.

I'm not certain if any of the short interstitial programming that came with the presentations at past festivals will be reused. I specifically remember Tony Curtis in his wheelchair cheerily talking about Some Like It Hot (5:45 PM Friday); whether that piece will run before the movie I don't know. The actual interviews kick off tonight with 100-year-old Luise Rainer from the first Festival (overnight at 1:45 AM), followed by The Good Earth.

There are also a few movies on Sunday programmed because they were supposed to show up at this year's film festival; I don't know what sort of original programming will be done for the intros there. One thing that does look to have original programming will be the Saturday night lineup. Originally this was supposed to be part of a spotlight on movies directed by Peter Bogdanovich. Those two movies were not rescheduled as far as I can tell, but Bogdanovich is returning on Saturday night to present two of the films he presented back in 2010: Casablanca at 8:00 PM and The Magnificent Ambersons at 10:00 PM.

As for pre-empted programming, the salute to New York in the 70s that was scheduled for tonight has been moved to Tuesday, April 28, so we eventually do get all five nights of that.

It's too bad TCM couldn't run a night of plague movies like Panic in the Streets and The Killer That Stalked New York.