I have to admit that I haven't been paying so much attention to the TCM Guest Programmers lately. That's partly because the series became sporadic in the couple of years leading up to Robert Osborne's death, when he showed up increasingly irregularly on the channel. And I don't think it returned right away. Combining that with the TCM website redesign that makes finding information more difficult, and it's easy to start losing track of things like this.
Anyhow, the Guest Programmers have, I think, been back for a litte while, even if I've missed them. This month sees director Denis Villeneuve, most recently of Dune fame, taking over the night's programming, or at least half the night. Villeneuve has selected two films, in part because of the length of his choices: 2001: A Space Odyssey kicks the night off at 8:00 PM, followed by Lawrence of Arabia at 10:45 PM.
Originally, Guest Programmers almost always picked four films, although there were cases of Programmers only having three movies shown thanks to rights issues and the like. I don't know if this is the first time somebody only selected two films, other than in those programming blocks where TCM had multiple Guest Programmers on one night, each selecting a smaller number of films, like the fan series for the 20th (if memory serves) anniversary. I believe the month of film critics also had each critic only selecting two movies.
At any rate, it's nice to see the Guest Programmer series back on TCM, even if I don't always care for the Programmers' choices.
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