Turner Classic Movies

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Moderator Robert Osborne with a Peabody Award for TCM (2014)

Turner Classic Movies ( TCM for short ) is an American television channel that is part of Ted Turner's Turner Broadcasting System (TBS) and specializes in the broadcasting of classic films.

profile

TCM has been on the air since April 14, 1994 and is headquartered in Atlanta . The station mainly shows older feature films, both famous classics and now largely forgotten films that were often made before the 1960s. When it comes to broadcasting rights, TCM can draw on an extensive pool of older films that Turner Entertainment has acquired. Occasionally, however, more recent films from the 1970s onwards can also be seen in the program, for example if they are in context with the older films. In addition, TCM frequently shows cinematic documentaries about film stars, film classics or filmmaking. Various famous film stars or filmmakers have already been asked about their work in TCM interview series.

Ted Turner started the station with a ceremony in Times Square in 1994, exactly a hundred years after the first (more or less correct) film screening took place in New York. The first film shown at TCM was the classic film Gone with the Wind . The station is ad-free and only shows its own program advertisements between feature films. Since its creation in 1994, the film historian and journalist Robert Osborne (1932–2017) has acted as the main presenter at TCM , who introduced various films or made interviews up to a year before his death. After Osborne's retirement, the film critic Ben Mankiewicz , who had presented for TCM since the 2000s, became the main presenter. Famous people of contemporary Hollywood such as Alec Baldwin and Drew Barrymore have appeared at TCM as occasional co-presenters or guests who were allowed to choose films .

A special feature takes place in the month before the Oscar awards : Under the motto 31 Days of Oscar , TCM only shows films that have won Oscars or have at least been nominated for a month . Every other month, TCM usually has a classic star as a topic (e.g. Cary Grant , Bette Davis , Humphrey Bogart , Greta Garbo ), of whom a particularly large number of films are shown so that the viewer can follow their careers and their films closely . The Essentials is broadcast every Saturday evening , where a particularly well-known film is shown with a briefing and debriefing. Silent films are also in the program, for which TCM has also commissioned new film music in some cases. Obituaries for recently deceased film stars are also broadcast under the title TCM Remembers .

Since 2010, the TCM Film Festival has taken place every spring at the TCL Chinese Theater in Los Angeles, where films are shown and stars are interviewed.

distribution

Turner Classic Movies has the bulk of its audience in its main country, the United States. But TCM is also available in the United Kingdom, France (TCM Cinéma), Spain (TCM España), Scandinavia and parts of Asia and Africa. In Germany, however, TCM cannot be received. The pay-TV channel TNT Film , distributed by Turner Broadcasting in Germany, is largely related to TCM in terms of its programming. TCM has also been broadcast in high definition in America since 2014 .

Turner Classic has an extensive website that contains, for example, data and essays on all of the films shown. In addition, TCM has already released various films on DVD.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. "Turner launches TCM" at Multichannel News ( Memento of the original from May 10, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.highbeam.com
  2. ( Page no longer available , search in web archives: "31 Days of Oscar" at Turner Classic Movies )@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / 31days.tcm.turner.com
  3. ^ "Star of the Month" at Turner Classic Movies ; here May 2016: Ginger Rogers
  4. ^ "TCM Remembers" for 2014 on YouTube
  5. TCM Film Festival at the Hollywood Reporter