Posted on the TCM Film Festival yesterday:

The TCM Classic Film Festival will be a landmark celebration of the history of Hollywood and its movies, presented in a way that only TCM can, with major events, celebrity appearances and screenings of classic films:

The Festival will cover a wide range of programming themes, including the story of Hollywood. All screenings – more than 50 – will include special introductions and guest appearances to provide context about each film. Specific details about this unique fan experience will be announced in the weeks and months ahead, including guest appearances by actors, actresses, directors, producers and other key figures.

Today Steven Zeitchik who writes the always excellent “24 Frames” movie blog for the LA Times, has a great observation about the TCM festival:

The movie business often frets about the relevance of film-going in the YouTube age, when entertainment is disposable, portable and inexpensive to view (read: typically costs nothing). Hollywood has been intent on trying to compete with these many out-of-theater experiences by mounting ever larger spectacles — see under: the 3-D revolution, a particular hobbyhorse for us and others these days. And theater owners, eager for anything that will give them a leg up or stave off obsolescence, have gone along, sometimes grudgingly, sometimes enthusiastically.

But the entertainment world, as it often does, offers another way. And the TCM festival shows us what that way might be — namely, creating a buzz around a screening of a previously released film. The festival provided a template on how movies can be fun and event-worthy. By creating either a one-off or a weeklong road show of any one of a number of great movies from the past 90 years, accompanied by a live element that will motivate people to leave their homes, theaters can emulate the TCM festival and offer a pretty valuable service to audiences (while also saving their own hides).

Most big cities have at least a few stars living in them and, judging by this weekend, most stars are happy to come out and talk about their film if it means sharing it with a new generation, or even if it means reliving it with an older one. Repertory houses have been doing something along these lines for years, but the bulk and costs associated with shipping prints has prevented the phenomenon from catching on in a wider way.

These days, however, digital cinema makes screening these films cheaper and easier than ever. So why couldn’t theaters show these films in a TCM-esque manner, lending them an event quality, not to mention giving viewers the chance to establish a connection to the film that’s deeper than just watching it on Netflix. The theaters would win (is there any doubt that a weeklong run of, say, “The Godfather” as introduced by Francis Ford Coppola wouldn’t sell out each night?), the libraries of these classic prints would win and, most important, film fans, no doubt feeling a little strangled by first-run movie offerings these days (when “Date Night” and “The Back-Up Plan” dueling for screens passes for diversity), would get a needed breath of fresh air.

Some of my best movie memories have been from screenings of old films at a revival theater or festival. Gone With The Wind, How Green Was My Valley, Patton, West Side Story, those are just a few of the movies I’ve enjoyed seeing on the big screen many years after they were originally released. Now imagine something like a traveling TCM Film Festival in an urban area where or near where you live featuring special live guests, maybe even participants in the production of screened movies.

What classic movies would you most love to see in a great movie theater on a big screen with superior sound?