TCMFF 2018 – Day 1

Not everything on Hollywood Blvd is

cheesy. Here, a guy keeps RuPaul's 

star spotless.

In years passed at the TCM Film Festival Classic Film Festival (TCMFF), I've done a separate post for day 0. This year I decided to give it amiss. For one thing, day 0 isn't a real thing. It's just something I made up to refer to things that happened on the Wednesday before the festival. In addition, this year most of what I thought was really cool on Day 0 ended up in my post-partum highlights post anyway. I figured I would just move on to Thursday.

Thursday at TCMFF started with breakfast at Mel's on Highland. One of my classic movie Twitter cronies, @BeesKnees_PDX, had made the arrangements and we had about 20 people at four tables. It was the kind of a cool way to start TCMFF, despite it being too early with me nursing a hangover from the night before. Still, it was fun talking with people about all the things we looked forward to seeing, where people are from, etc. Afterwards almost everybody who was at the breakfast ended up in the TCMFF gift shop in the Sweet store in the Hollywood Highland mall. About the only official thing going on in the morning was a first timer's meet-up, which I figure I didn't need to go to. I ended up hanging out with another #TCMParty twitter friend, Ana Roland.

Ana posing with Hedda Hopper

Other than finding a new way into the Hollywood Highland mall, the main thing we did was we walk East on Hollywood Boulevard. When you go to TCMFF, you tend to spend most of your time on Hollywood Boulevard in that section between the Roosevelt and Chinese Theater and Highland. That's the absolute worst part of Hollywood Boulevard, unless of course you like people in bad Party City Spider-Man costumes, your mileage may vary. But as you go east on Hollywood Boulevard, it actually gets kind of cool.

There's Larry Edmunds Bookstore, the new and used book store that specializes in movie stuff, very cool, definitely recommended. As you go further east, there are a lot of cool little businesses, things like wig shops and vintage clothing stores. We even went by this restaurant called, Scum and Villainy. I kind of wanted to go in, just to see what was on the menu. As we are walking we passed the big crowd on the other side of the street where they were giving a posthumous star to the Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin. We ended up in a dive bar called the Frolic Room. It had a cool wall of caricatures of classic film stars.

Victoria Mature and me

We made it back in time for the meet TCM panel. I ended up sitting in the back of the room with Ana, and another #TCMParty person, Leslie Gaspar. It was nice in that we could chat without disturbing people who were really into it. About halfway through, I noticed Victoria Mature, Victor Mature's daughter. She's a San Diego local and I'd met her when she was introducing one of her father's films at the Noir on the Boulevard festival in San Diego. She was at TCMFF just attending the festival, not a guest or anything.

After the meet TCM panel all of the Twitter #TCMParty people got together for a group photo and in Club TCM. We had just enough time for Jasmine and I grab a quick snack before the So You Think You Know Movies trivia contest.

I made the mistake of getting cocky at the trivia contest. I have been lucky enough to be on the winning team two years running so I kind of started talking some smack, and it blew up in my face. The trivia questions are insanely hard. You really have to know your stuff. Frankly, even though I consider myself very knowledgeable on the subject, I felt like I was mostly agreeing with the others on the very easy questions. Needless to say our team did not win.

Jasmine going Hollywood... umm, and Wakanda. This

was taken just a few steps from our AirBnB. You can

You can see the Hollywood Roosevelt sign from there.

At this point, we had to go back to the Airbnb to change clothes for the opening night party. Jasmine and I usually dress up. I have a white dinner jacket that I wear, and Jasmine who is now a senior in high school has a brand spanking new prom dress that I bought her. A couple of months ago at WonderCon, she found a necklace that was the Wakanda Black Panther costume thing, and she wanted to build her prom dress around that. For me doing the white dinner jacket should be a no-brainer except for one thing, tying a bow tie. Yes, I can tie a bow tie. Most of the time I can do it the first try. The problem is tying a bowtie when I really need to be ready quickly, then it takes me about 15 tries. After much swearing and many many many attempts, we were back out to the opening party.

We ended up meeting and hanging out with a 40-ish couple from Colorado, I think. It was their first TCMFF. So they really weren't sure what they were supposed to do, where they were supposed to go, how the line tickets worked, etc. Turns out they were going to see To Have and Have Not which was the same film we were watching, so we walked with them  to the theater and sat with them in the movie.

We sat in the balcony. The view of the film itself isn't quite as good, but the view from of the ceiling fresco more than makes up for it. This year the staff at the Egyptian seemed to be better about letting people in the balcony even if the regular part of the theater didn't fill. In years past, they would only open in it when the regular auditorium was full or near full.

The film itself was wonderful. I can't say for sure whether I had seen it on the big screen. If I had, it would have been when I was in college [mumble mumble mumble] years ago. I know that Jasmine had not seen it period. Though To Have and Have Not is one of my favorite Bogart films, it's really all about Lauren Bacall. How a 19-year-old can take such command of the screen in her first film is amazing. She simply owns that film. Bogart, you can see him falling in love with her, both her character, Slim, and Lauren Bacall the person.

This was my introduction to both Lauren Bacall and
To Have and Have Not as a kid

That alone would be enough to make you want to watch it, but throw in witty clever dialog and great performances by people like Walter Brennan, Hoagy Carmichael, Dan Seymour, Marcel Dalio, and Sheldon Leonard, and it all adds up to a great film. As a kid, I knew the film before I even watched it. They used to show old Warner Brothers cartoons on TV after school. One of them was a parody of Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not. That shows how big of a cultural phenomenon it was when when the film was released. Most cultural phenomena are a flash in the pan. You look at them years later and wonder what everyone was thinking. Not so for To Have and Have Not. Like the cartoon Lauren Bacall, To Have and Have Not is a gasoline fire that still rages today.

I posted this before, but it's not 

every day you get to play dress

up with your drop-dead

gorgeous daughter.

Next, we went back down to the TCL Chinese for Throne of Blood. We sat with our San Diego old movie cronies, Miguel Rodriguez and Beth Accomando (collectively known as Film Geeks San Diego). The film was introduced by the new TCM host, Alicia Malone, and she assured us that we were in for a treat. Jasmine and I were psyched as we nestled into a nice dinner of popcorn and Akira Kurasawa. To be honest, Jasmine and I were both too tired to really enjoy Throne of Blood. Once we'd had our fill of popcorn, neither one of us was having much luck staying awake. Both of us intermittently dozed off, and then woke up throughout the entire movie, each time wondering just how many subtitles we'd missed.

It's not that it was a bad movie or anything, but it an adaptation of Macbeth. For me what makes Kurasawa interesting is that, while his films are often set in feudal Japan, the characters are treated with a modern sensibility. They are not all good or not all bad, but a mix of both. Toshiro Mifune and Isuzu Yamada (Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, respectively), were just corrupt and evil, as they should be in a Shakespeare tragedy. I just felt that the subtlety and shades of gray that normally draw me in on Kurosawa films being virtually absent made it hard to get into. That and falling asleep didn't help in the least. 

As we went back to our AirBnB, Jasmine said she didn't want to do late movies anymore, and I was kind of with her on that. I don't know if it's so much it being late, but after being up and running around almost continuously takes a toll. It really doesn't do you a lot of good to see a great movie if you're too exhausted to enjoy it. I'm sure that was a contributing factor to our reaction to Throne of Blood. In fact, I don't even think I went back to the Roosevelt for a drink that night like I normally would.

TCMParty people, photo stolen from TCM Party FB feed