Late host Osborne gets star billing at TCM Classic Film Festival
When Robert Osborne, long the face of Turner Classic Movies, died a month before the TCM Classic Film Festival came to Hollywood in 2017, there wasn’t enough time to establish a proper tribute to the man who for years had introduced films from the past to audiences of the present.
But as the festival returns this weekend, the network has done Osborne proud, establishing a new honor, the Robert Osborne Award, to celebrate the work of those who, like Osborne, have done great things in the realm of film preservation, restoration and presentation.
“Our thinking started last year: What are ways to keep him alive and his legacy alive as much as possible?” says Charlie Tabesh, a senior programmer for the festival. “The idea for the award was suggested, and it’s really about people who have kept classic movies alive and vibrant in our culture.”
And from the moment the award was conceived, there was little doubt whom the inaugural Robert Osborne Award should go: Oscar-winning director and passionate film preservationist Martin Scorsese, Tabesh says.
“It was our boss, Jennifer Dorian, who said, ‘Really, you have to go to Martin Scorsese; he’s just the right person to get the first one,’” he says.
Scorsese was scheduled to accept the award Thursday from actor Leonardo DiCaprio, one of his frequent collaborators, on a night when the festival opened with a 50th-anniversary celebration of “The Producers,” which was presented as a world premiere of a newly restored version with director Mel Brooks in attendance.
And while all of that makes for a star-studded night at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, as the festival unfolds over the rest of the weekend, many classic film fans will have Osborne in mind as they traipse from one screening to another, a much-loved classic here, an obscure film there.
“He was the heart and soul of TCM, and when people thought of TCM they thought of him,” Tabesh says. “That was immensely valuable to TCM. They were able to personify a channel.
“He made it personal to viewers,” he says. “He wasn’t just somebody up there reading lines. He loved and cared about the movies. He was one of the fans who watched the channel.
“He was really essential to us, and TCM wouldn’t be what it is without him.” Words and films “Powerful Words: The Page Onscreen’ is the theme of the 2018 festival, which gave programmers a wide range of categories from which to pull films. Christie’s Mysteries offers up adaptations of Agatha Christie mysteries, Hardboiled Hollywood features film noir such as “Kiss Me Deadly” based on Mickey Spillane’s detective novel of the same name. Shakespeare in the Dark includes a quartet of adaptations of the Bard’s plays into film.
And then there’s our favorite, The Power of the Press, which provides a trio of newspaper movies including the well-known “His Girl Friday” with Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant and a pair of lesser-knowns, “Blessed Event” and “Park Row.”