Can We Save TCM? Will This Movie Have a Happy Ending?

sistercelluloid ♦ June 23, 2023 ♦ 2 Comments

You head outside on a winter’s day with 90 percent of your body covered, but suddenly it’s 20 percent. Think you’d notice? You were making $90,000 a year yesterday but $20,000 a year today. Think you’d notice? Your bathroom was 90 square feet yesterday but 20 square feet today. Think you’d notice?

And yet Warner Bros. Discovery pats frantic TCM viewers on the head and says there will be “no discernible difference” after slashing the staff size from 90 to 20 and axing the entire leadership team. The only thing missing was sending us to bed with a warm glass of milk.

“We remain fully committed to this business, the TCM brand, and its purpose to protect and celebrate culture-defining movies,” cooed chairwoman and chief content office Kathleen Finch in a press release. Uh-huh. And Gregory Anton is a loving and devoted husband.

We’ve also been assured that the TCM hub will remain on the Max streaming service. Right now that includes 561 films out of the roughly 130,000 titles TCM has at its fingertips. I feel better already!

CEO David Zaslav has made a great show of his love for film history—claiming he has TCM on in the background all day from his perch behind Jack Warner’s desk, celebrating 100 years of Warner Bros. at the recent TCM Film Festival, and generally saying all the right things to reporters. (One recently banged out a long Twitter thread to claim, with horror and shock, that she now feels she was lied to. Really? A CEO was less than frank with you? You don’t say!)

Zaslav is not only a total corporate weasel but really, really bad at his actual job. WBD’s stock price has nosedived under his “leadership,” and supposed blockbusters like The Flash have bombed. And I’m guessing its CGI line alone probably rivals the entire annual budget for TCM, which is barely a blip of the $37 billion for the company overall. Zaslav slashing TCM’s staff is like a zillionaire losing big at the craps table and deciding to skip his mum’s birthday present this year to make up for it.

He is the classic example of knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. Here’s a clip of the stunning “Forgotten Man” number that closes Gold Diggers of 1933. Leaving aside the brilliant Joan Blondell and Etta Moten, cast your eyes on any of the extras—the soldiers marching along, the women reaching out to them. Every single one of them has contributed more to our culture in this one scene than Zaslav has in his entire fecking useless life. But not content to merely create nothing, he’s actively destroying, minimizing or rendering invisible the work of others, threatening to erase a critical part of our shared cultural heritage and stored memory bank.

Remember the line in Pygmalion when Eliza is warned to avoid thorny topics and stick to the weather and everyone’s health? My Mom and I, who locked horns often, usually focused on music and old movies—and TCM looms large in my memories of her. Hours and days and years of sitting on the sofa next to her, the glow of the black and white as soft and soothing as Christmas lights.

And when her sister Ruth, who once had a life-changing encounter with Van Johnson, developed dementia, we’d spend long afternoons watching musicals on TCM. By then she’d forgotten who I was but something clicked when she saw Judy Garland. One day she nodded and tapped her knees to the beat as I sang along to “The Trolley Song,” matching Judy’s every sway and swoon in a number I knew by heart. Just then her home aide walked in, and from that day on I was known as “the clang-clang lady.”

TCM is not just a vital keeper of our cultural flame. It’s part of our lives and our most cherished memories, often of those we’ve lost. Zaslav’s duty is to keep the torch burning and pass it along—not to burn bridges with it.