Day: March 11, 2016

[The post below was featured today at The Huffington Post.]

By Jason Apuzzo. The 2016 TCM Classic Film Festival is almost here, and I can hardly wait. This year’s festival – which runs from April 28th-May 1st in Hollywood – will feature Gina Lollobrigida as its special guest, a live orchestral screening of The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), and will celebrate “big-time emotions of big screen stories” with this year’s theme of “Moving Pictures.”

If you’re like me, attendance at these marvelous events long ago ceased to be optional. If you love the movies, if they’re important to you in an emotional way, then these festivals are a necessity – for the same reason that owning a physical copy of a favorite movie (whether on Blu-ray, DVD or even VHS) is a necessity: because it makes your relationship to the film closer, more permanent.

If movies are something you have a passionate relationship with, then TCM’s festivals give you the chance to seal that relationship with a personal memory – and I’m already looking forward to what this year’s memories will be.

The best part of TCM’s festivals – their core appeal – is in seeing classic movies with people associated with the film in attendance, usually introducing the film. At last year’s TCM Classic Film Festival, for example, I had the pleasure of seeing Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer at the screening of The Sound of Music, Sophia Loren at the screening of Marriage Italian Style, and George Lazenby at the screening of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Errol Flynn’s daughter, Rory Flynn, even introduced a screening of her father’s classic pirate film, The Sea Hawk.

Every one of these experiences was incredible – like watching the Dodgers play while seated next to Sandy Koufax, or enjoying a night at the Met sitting next to Plácido Domingo. Watching Sophia Loren being interviewed last year by her son, Edoardo Ponti, was especially poignant; I’ve never seen such an intense, personal interview of a major star before – let alone in person (the interview will be broadcast on TCM during this year’s festival). If it’s possible, I’m even more a fan of Sophia than I was before.

To describe these screenings as “emotional” doesn’t begin to cover it. If you’re like me, carrying around decades of memories of these films, seeing these people in person and hearing their recollections brings their films to life in a whole new way – making them even more vivid and real than they were before. Continue reading LFM’s Jason Apuzzo @ The Huffington Post: Memories Await: The 2016 TCM Classic Film Festival & The Searchers 60th Anniversary