Tag: Classic

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Turner Traditional Motion pictures Is Altering. And Attempting to Keep the Identical.

Turner Classic Movies Is Changing. And Trying to Stay the Same.

Sometimes a classic also needs a little retouching.

Turner Classic Movies will get a facelift from Wednesday. TCM, the cable television that is home to countless vintage films, will have a colorful new aesthetic in its on-air promotions, new openings for shows like “The Essentials” and “Noir Alley,” new sets for hosts like Ben Mankiewicz new logo and branding that emphasizes the interplay between past and current cinema history.

And as Mankiewicz said recently, he is already preparing how these changes will be received.

“My first reaction had nothing to do with me and everything to do with our audience,” he said. “What was, ‘Uh-oh'”

TCM executives and talents say the overall mission will stay the same and that this latest update is an aesthetic one that is meant to help keep the cable channel relevant and reach a wider audience.

While preserving and celebrating the past, TCM also thinks about its future. In an era increasingly dominated by streaming television, how can it continue to thrive as a linear cable channel and transfer its experience to other platforms? How can TCM, owned by WarnerMedia, add to that company’s own HBO Max streaming service without being swallowed up?

At the same time, TCM does not want to alienate its existing audience, which appreciates the curation of films and their commentary. And as TCM is rebranding, it realizes that even cosmetic changes can seem like harbingers of fundamental changes in philosophy.

As Mankiewicz said, “I want the fans to understand that what is important to them does not change. But they will still have a small heart attack. “

Pola Changnon, a veteran TCM executive who became general manager in January 2020, said she and her colleagues had been thinking about updating the channel for several months.

Looking back on TCM’s 27-year history, Changnon said the channel has always satisfied a core audience “who really just want their Doris Day films, the expected classic catalog. But there are people who are more adventurous, who want to learn differently and want to get involved. “

To that end, TCM has already started adding programs like “Reframed,” a series that re-examines films like “The Jazz Singer,” “Gone With the Wind,” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” which have been criticized for their outdated treatments by race , Gender and sexuality.

“You can still enjoy the movie, but you acknowledge some of the things that can be difficult for contemporary eyes,” said Changnon. “We don’t want to cancel these films – we prefer to talk around them.”

The redesign, introduced on Wednesday, features a light palette that is supposed to be reminiscent of the Technicolor logo. The TCM logo has a new font and an animated letter C on the screen that takes on various shapes and sizes before resting in a shape that resembles a camera lens or a movie running through a projector.

A new advertising campaign and slogan, “Where Then Meets Now” will highlight the connections that TCM seeks to make with its program to appeal to Cinephiles while inviting newcomers. For example, visitors to this month’s Telluride Film Festival will be greeted with banners with works of art, scenes from the remakes by George Cukor and Bradley Cooper of “A Star Is Born” or the John Wayne and Jeff Bridges incarnations of Rooster Cogburn from their versions of “True Grit “.

Tricia Melton, Chief Marketing Officer of Warner Bros. ‘ Global Kids, Young Adults and Classics Division, said these changes to TCM should emphasize “how the past can affect the present.”

While other channels and streaming sites can offer large film libraries, TCM was characterized by “the ability to bring curation and context into these films – why they are still resonating today, why they are important”.

“You don’t want a brand to ever stagnate,” Melton said. “We also have to move with the culture.”

That cultural shift was accelerated by the advent of HBO Max, which debuted in May 2020 and has since become a pivotal stage for WarnerMedia’s films and television programming. On this page, TCM only exists as one of several hubs with a library of several hundred films. (The channel also has its own on-demand service, Watch TCM, which offers live streaming and part of its catalog.)

Tom Ascheim, the President of Warner Bros. ‘ Global Kids, Young Adults and Classics Division, said it was simply a reality of the current media landscape that TCM needed to develop a streaming presence.

“To get one of the most obvious things about our industry, more people are streaming than before,” he said. “It would be pretty silly for us to ignore that.”

While he and his colleagues are looking for new ways for TCM to use HBO Max, Ascheim pointed to this year’s TCM Classic Film Festival, which took place in May as a virtual event entirely on TCM and HBO Max, as proof that the two platforms can coexist and complement each other.

“We have the chance to make the power of curation on a streaming service much louder than some of our competitors who compete on volume and algorithm,” he said. “Barrel TV is not that great. A television that was carefully selected for me, by someone I really trust, who feels good all day. “

Ascheim said the broadcaster’s expansion of its streaming presence is not a sign that TCM is giving up traditional cable television or its own underlying values.

“There is no intention of converting TCM to Cinemax, just like a number of films from the current moment,” he said. “As long as Linear is around, we will be there with pride.”

But even the reference to changes in TCM is enough to arouse skepticism among the audience. When a short teaser video was posted on Twitter last week showing Mankiewicz painting his own set, it generated a number of questioning comments. Sam Adams, a senior editor at Slate, tweeted: “Suppose this means a change to ‘HBO Classic’ or something similar”

But TCM staff said this type of second guess was part of the process. Mankiewicz said he faced a similar test when he joined TCM as a permanent host in 2003 – a role that until then had only been played by the network’s signature personality, Robert Osborne.

“Not for a month or two, but for years I felt: Who the hell is this guy?” Mankiewicz remembered. “It was only after two or three years that they said, this guy is talking about the films, it’s okay, we’re fine.”

All that was updated, Mankiewicz said, was the network’s outward appearance and logo, its set, and perhaps its clothing. “My wardrobe is likely to change a bit,” he said. “I can’t come out in shorts. That will not happen.”

As technology and platforms continue to evolve, Mankiewicz said, TCM’s goal remains unchanged of getting its films and commentary to all of these places.

“I am very confident that what you are experiencing at TCM will be what you will be able to experience in 25 years,” he said. “I’m not smart enough to say exactly how it will be delivered to you. But will you see curated films with an introduction by the host who puts the films in context? And will everything look as amazing on the channel as it does now? Yes, I’m 100 percent sure of that. “

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Business

Richard H. Driehaus, Champion of Traditional Structure, Dies at 78

Richard H. Driehaus, Champion of Classic Architecture, Dies at 78

Richard H. Driehaus, an avid investor who built his elementary school coin collection into a fortune that he used to preserve history and classical architecture, died March 9 in a Chicago hospital. He was 78 years old.

The cause was a brain hemorrhage, said a spokeswoman for Driehaus Capital Management, where he oversaw assets of around $ 13 billion as chief investment officer and chairman.

Mr. Driehaus (pronounced DREE house) restored landmarks in the Chicago area and donated a palace museum to the city celebrating the Gilded Age. As a counterbalance to the $ 100,000 Pritzker Prize, which was funded by another Chicago family and viewed by them as an affirmation of modern motifs, a “homogenized” rejection of the past.

He dived into the stock market from the age of 13, bet nosebleeds on risky stocks, and was named one of the 25 most influential mutual fund figures of the 20th century by Barron’s in 2000.

While he won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Institute of Architects in 2015 for sponsoring competitions that led to better designs, he never officially trained in the field. But he knew what he liked and what he didn’t.

“I believe architecture should be of a human dimension, form of representation and individual expression that reflects the architectural heritage of a community,” he told architect and urban planner Michael Lykoudis in an interview in 2012 for the Institute for Classical Architecture and Art.

“The problem is, there is no poetry in modern architecture,” he said in a 2007 interview with Chicago magazine. “There is money – but no feeling, no mind and no soul.” Classicism has a mysterious power. It’s part of our past and how we evolved as people and as a civilization. “

When asked whether he thought buildings designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, for example, appropriate, he told Architectural Record in 2015: “They are mechanical, industrial and not very human. It’s like my iPhone, which is beautiful, but I don’t want the building I live in to look like this. “He added,” Architects build for themselves and for the public. They don’t care what the public thinks. “

The first Richard H. Driehaus Prize, awarded by the Notre Dame University School of Architecture, was awarded in 2003 to Léon Krier, a designer from Poundbury, the British model city built on the architectural principles of the Prince of Wales. The first American award winner in 2006 was Allan Greenberg, born in South Africa, who redesigned the contract room suite in the State Department.

In 2012, Driehaus’s opposition to Frank Gehry’s original design for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington was attributed by many critics to improving the final design.

In a statement following the death of Mr. Driehaus, A. Gabriel Esteban, the president of DePaul University in Chicago, the alma mater of Mr. Driehaus (and recipient of his philanthropic generosity), wrote the success of Mr. Driehaus to a “curious mind, relentless determination” to learn and insatiable desire. “

Mr Esteban said Mr Driehaus’s approach was the result of part of his “training in neighborhood parish schools”. Mr. Driehaus himself credited the nuns who taught him at the St. Margaret of Scotland Catholic School in southwest Chicago. “In addition to reading, writing, and arithmetic,” he told Chicago magazine, “they taught me three things: you have to keep learning all your life, you have to be responsible for your own actions, and you have to give something back.” for the society.”

Richard Herman Driehaus was born in Chicago on July 27, 1942, the son of Herman Driehaus, a mechanical engineer for a company that manufactured coal mining equipment, and Margaret (Rea) Driehaus. He grew up in a bungalow in the Brainerd neighborhood.

With his father rooted in a dying industry, his hopes of bringing his family to a better home were never realized. (His mother returned to work as a secretary when her husband developed Alzheimer’s disease in his fifties.) “I knew I would never work as hard as my father and couldn’t afford a house he wanted for us,” Driehaus told Philanthropy Magazine in 2012, “What my father couldn’t do, I wanted to do.”

As a coin collector in third grade, he raised money for the family. He subscribed to a coin-operated magazine, he later recalled, and “looked in the back of the publication to see what they actually wanted to buy for their own accounts rather than what they wanted to unload in public.”

When he was intrigued by a page in The Chicago American at the age of 13, “with company names, numerous columns and numbers showing many minor changes in the fine print,” he decided that “this was the industry for me” and invested the money, with which he earned delivery from The Southtown Economist in stocks recommended by financial columnists. The stocks fueled and taught him to research the growth potential of any company on his own.

He graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago, enrolled at Southeast Junior College, and then moved to DePaul, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1965 and a master’s degree in business administration in 1970. He worked for investment bank AG Becker & Company, becoming its youngest portfolio manager and for several other companies before founding his own company, Driehaus Securities, in 1979. In 1982 he founded Driehaus Capital Management.

He married when he was in his early 50s; The marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by three daughters, Tereza, Caroline and Katherine Driehaus, and two sisters, Dorothy Driehaus Mellin and Elizabeth Mellin.

“I didn’t do anything until I was 50,” Driehaus told the New York Times in 2008. “I spent my first few years making money for my clients. I’m ready to have fun now. “

He hosted his own extravagant themed birthday parties for hundreds of guests in his villa on Lake Geneva (he made his grand entrance on an elephant at a gala) and indulged in his passion for collecting.

He started with furniture that he made available to a bar called Gilhooley’s, then switched to decorative arts and art nouveau for the iconic Samuel M. Nickerson mansion, a palazzo that he restored as the Richard H. Driehaus Museum. He also collected a fleet of vintage cars.

He gave hundreds of millions of dollars as best he could to DePaul and Chicago theater and dance groups, Catholic schools, and other organizations often overlooked by great philanthropy. And he felt quite comfortable being a very big fish in a smaller pond – but a more hospitable one.

“In New York, I’m just another successful guy,” he told the City Club of Chicago in 2016. “You can’t do anything in New York. But you can do that in Chicago because it’s big enough and small enough and people actually get along enough. “

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Entertainment

Good Luck Is a Curse in This Traditional Movie From Senegal

Good Luck Is a Curse in This Classic Film From Senegal

Neorealism was born in post-war Italy. However, in the mid-1950s, the largest examples were made abroad. “Mandabi” (“The Payment Order”), the second feature film by the dean of the West African filmmaker Ousmane Sembène (1923-2007), is one of them. Filmed with a cast of non-professionals on the streets of Dakar, Senegal, it’s a pickling fable of happiness gone bad. The newly restored film from 1968 can be streamed from the Film Forum from January 15th.

“Stop killing us with hope,” exclaims one of the two women of the dignified but unhappy protagonist of the film, Ibrahima, a devout Muslim who has not worked for four years. The postman just told them that out of the blue a money order from Ibrahima’s nephew had arrived in Paris.

News travels fast. Needy neighbors, not to mention the local imam, arrive with their hands outstretched. In the meantime, Ibrahima learns that he must have ID in order to redeem the money order. In order to receive an ID, he needs a birth certificate. To get a birth certificate, he has to have a friend in court – don’t mention a photo and the money to get one. Being illiterate, Ibrahima will also need someone to explain each procedure. Dakar was once the command center for the African colonies of France and has no shortage of bureaucrats.

While it is never clear how Ibrahima managed to support two women, seven children, and his own vanity in a city where fresh water is a cash asset, his wives wait for him as if he were a baby. A real child whines off camera as Ibrahima is pampered, but a deeper irony involves his identity. His mission to cash his nephew’s money order shows that, at least in the official sense, he doesn’t have one. Worse still, his quest for a stroke of luck that doesn’t even belong to him sets him up as a sign of all kinds of cheaters, hustlers and thieves – in a word, society in general.

Most of the people Ibrahima encounters are consumed with selfishness. “Mandabi”, however, is quite generous – rich in detail, a feast for the eyes and ears. The colors are vivid and saturated; The theme song was a local hit until the Senegalese government apparently recognized its subversive power and banned it from the radio. (Based on a short story by Senegal’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor, the film has a complicated relationship to authority, which may be responsible for the less than convincing optimism of its pinned ending.)

New York Times film critic Roger Greenspun reviewed “Mandabi” when it was shown at the 1969 New York Film Festival and wrote, “As a comedy dealing with the misery of life, it exhibits a controlled sophistication.” Indeed, “Mandabi” may at first seem like a story from Kafka or the Book of Job, but essentially criticizes a post-colonial system that pits classes against classes in the exploitation of almost all classes.

It is also a satire of self-deception. Years ago, Sembène told two Film Quarterly interviewers that “Mandabi” had been shown all over Africa “because every other country claims that what happens in the film only happens in Senegal.”

Available for screening January 15; filmforum.org.