2018 marked my fifth year attending the TCM Classic Film Festival and over the years, I’ve sort of fallen into a routine. I fly into town on Wednesday morning, a day before the official festival activities really get started, and use that extra time to get settled, catch up with my friends, and try to adjust to the time zone difference. Aside from the travel aspect of it, it’s typically a pretty quiet day for me. This year, I feel like I got into town and got into full festival mode right off the bat.
Once I got into Hollywood, I dropped my things off at the hotel and headed over to the Roosevelt to pick up my media credentials and get a badly needed lunch at 25 Degrees. Before I knew it, I’d made four new friends at lunch (shout out to the first-timers from DC!), said hi to Ben Mankiewicz, and saw Eddie Muller as I was getting ready to leave 25 Degrees. If you’ve never been to the festival, I feel like this really sums up the general atmosphere of being there. When you’re at an event like this, you have something in common with everyone so it’s really easy to get into conversations with people you’ve never met before. And randomly running into TCM’s on-air hosts in places like Starbucks and other restaurants in the area is absolutely something that happens.
Later in the day, I stopped by an event by the Hollywood Roosevelt’s pool hosted by the Going to the TCM Classic Film Festival Facebook group. I wasn’t there for the whole event, but what I did catch was absolutely remarkable. When I got there, Barbara Rush and Cora Sue Collins were telling stories about their careers and boy, did they ever have stories to tell. Between the two of them, I got to listen to them talk about people like Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, Lucille Ball, William Powell, Hedda Hopper, and Loretta Young. For example, Rush talked about how Crawford gave her advice on dealing with her publicity photos while Crawford was a good friend of Collins’s mother. After the discussion with Cora Sue and Barbara, there was an appearance by Andrew Yang, the great-grandson of Mary Astor, who had brought Mary’s Oscar with him.
Martin Scorsese, Eva Marie Saint, and Cicely Tyson on the Red Carpet
The festival got into full swing the following day and I started things off by watching the red carpet arrivals for the 50th anniversary screening of The Producers. I’m a big fan of doing this because it gives me a chance to see a lot of the guests I don’t get to see otherwise during the festival, plus a few others who are just there for the big opening night screening. This year had a really fun group of special guests. Of course, Mel Brooks was there and it’s always a treat to see him in person. Since Martin Scorsese was being awarded the first Robert Osborne Award, he was also there — very briefly, but as a big Scorsese fan, still enough to be very exciting for me. Eva Marie Saint, Cicely Tyson, Mario and Melvin van Peebles, Norman Lloyd, Ruta Lee, Diane Baker, Rosanna Arquette, and Paul Sorvino all also made appearances. Paul Sorvino even gave us an impromptu opera performance! Since Dennis Miller was introducing a couple of movies during the festival, he made an appearance on the red carpet and seemed to be having the time of his life — he even came into the bleacher section and started shaking hands with people.
I decided to skip the first block of movies in favor of getting some dinner before checking out Throne of Blood. Even though I love foreign films, I feel like I don’t often get around to seeing them at the festival so I was really happy to be able to make my first movie this year a foreign one. It wasn’t my first time seeing the movie, but getting to see it on the big screen was a real pleasure. There was a lot in the sound that I hadn’t fully appreciated by watching it at home. And I loved being able to see it with a crowd of people audibly gasping during the legendary arrow scene. All in all, it was an excellent way to start things off.
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