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We need a happy ending to the Turner Classic Movies drama

TCM is more than a cable channel. It’s a public good, like libraries or the Smithsonian

Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman kiss in Notorious. David Zaslav, chief executive of Warner Bros Discovery, says we can learn everything from how Grant gets dressed for a date to why it’s better to be the white hat in a western than the black hat. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Maureen Dowd
Sun Jun 25 2023 - 16:59

I co-starred with Sir Alec Guinness in a movie where a submersible travels down to the Titanic, springs a leak and implodes.

Costar might be a bit strong. I walked around for a second in the background of Raise the Titanic, a 1980 film about a superpower race to retrieve a superpowerful mineral locked in the ocean liner’s vault. One scene was shot in the newsroom of The Washington Star, where I worked.

It was cool to do because my father had a ticket for the Titanic when he was a teenager. His mother cried so much, he sold it to a young woman. She survived, but her hair turned prematurely white. My Irish dad immigrated to America the following year.

Raise the Titanic pops up on Turner Classic Movies sometimes, along with other sagas like the 1953 Titanic with Barbara Stanwyck and Clifton Webb, the 1958 A Night to Remember and James Cameron’s epic 1997 Titanic with Jack and Rose clinging to that notorious wooden door.

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Some in the Twitterverse have complained that we shouldn’t have lavished so much attention on the Titan submersible tragedy, dismissing it as rich people with their toys. But thanks to books and movies, the Titanic is one of our primal stories, and the Titan echoes were stunning.

“I think that there is a great, almost surreal irony here,” Cameron told Anderson Cooper, “which is, Titanic sank because the captain took it full steam into an ice field at night, on a moonless night with very poor visibility, after he had been repeatedly warned.”

Just like Captain Edward J Smith, Stockton Rush, OceanGate’s chief executive, ignored warnings, this time from the deep-submergence community, that his uncertified, experimental design was, as Cameron put it, “completely inappropriate”.

In an email exchange in 2018, Rush snapped back at one OceanGate consultant who claimed passengers were in danger: “We have heard the baseless cries of ‘you are going to kill someone’ way too often.”

Given my father’s near miss (and by extension mine), I have studied the Titanic disaster for decades on TCM. Before we experience life, how do we learn about life? Novels, plays, TV, dance, music and movies teach us how to live by giving us examples of experiences we have never had and some that we’re not likely to have. Movies are a great expander of horizons.

I have never had a stylist, interior decorator, life coach or psychiatrist. I have used TCM for all that, and it has got me through bouts of sickness, stress, mourning and insomnia. Studying the channel’s film noir femmes fatales taught me that women could be tough and play the game better than any man. Watching screwball comedies taught me the value of a zany streak.

So naturally, when news broke this past week that Warner Bros Discovery had jettisoned the top five executives at TCM and the spectre was raised that the channel might be in jeopardy, I was distraught.

TCM is more than a cable channel. It’s a public good, like libraries or the Smithsonian. It enshrines our cinematic past. Anyone in power in Hollywood should feel it is a matter of honour to protect this legacy.

I knew that David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros Discovery, loved TCM and watched it all day long in his office and on weekend mornings. He had texted me while watching Annie Hall and Miracle on 34th Street.

He tried to reassure jittery Hollywood titans who, like me, believe TCM is part of their identity; he had a Zoom meeting with Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Paul Thomas Anderson on Wednesday.

“We need TCM as a singular source of inspiration and history that is accessible to everyone,” Spielberg told me later.

I called Zaslav on Friday, too, just to make sure my femmes fatales weren’t getting taken away.

“YOU HAVE MEDDLED WITH THE PRIMAL FORCES OF NATURE, MR ZASLAV,” I said, “AND YOU WILL ATONE.” He laughed at the line from Network.

[ Turning classic movies into plays is just plain wrong ]

“Let me start with this,” he said. “This is my favourite channel. I think it’s critically important. It’s like a trust. It tells you where America was and where America’s going. It defines how people see this country. This is a beautiful living history.”

We can learn everything from how Cary Grant gets dressed for a date, he said, to why it’s better to be the white hat in a western than the black hat. (I learned that when my older brother showed me Shane.)

Zaslav said he was keeping Ben Mankiewicz and the other TCM hosts and wanted to spend more money on the channel and market it better. He has a vision of people like Spielberg, Scorsese, Anderson and Guillermo del Toro getting involved in programming and curating, and he would love to see actors such as George Clooney talking about the movies that inspired them.

[ George Clooney: ‘I was offered $35m for one day’s work’ ]

“I think it could be bigger and more powerful with more reach,” Zaslav said. “This is going to be a magical thing.”

I’ll be watching.

– This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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