The Classicist

Film historian and TV host Robert Osborne returns to Athens with The Classic Film Festival.

originally published April 2, 2008

“I’m gonna do this again.”

Robert Osborne, the 75-year-old host of Turner Classic Movies, takes a few steps back on the living-room set of Studio C, nestled inside Turner Broadcasting’s Techwood Avenue complex. He’s having a hard time wrapping his lips around the name of the 1966 western “Alvarez Kelly,” directed by Edward Dmytryk and starring William Holden and Richard Widmark.

It’s the “Alvarez” part that keeps tripping him up, and he knows it. The monotone suggestion “Slow it down” comes over a speaker from director of studio production Sean Cameron. They’re longtime collaborators, and it’s a long workday. They both know verbal gaffes come with the territory. Over five days during Osborne’s monthly visit to Atlanta from his home base in New York City, they need to knock out 280 two-minute intro and conclusion segments for 140 movies.

In a minute, an assistant who’s been with Osborne for seven years hustles onto the set to touch up his feathery silver hair and to adjust his tie, while Osborne takes a sip of hot water from a TCM coffee mug. There are times, he admits, when he just can’t get into a rhythm.

“I can tell the minute I get out of bed if it’s going to be a good day or not,” he says offstage later. “Sometimes even my head will be clear and I get out of bed and it’s just clouded. Or the mouth doesn’t work sometimes, or sometimes you get phlegm in your throat.”

Osborne finally nails “Alvarez” on his third try and gets back into a groove. In just a few minutes he delivers a Trivial Pursuit round’s worth of movie nuggets. It all flows naturally from Osborne’s light, measured baritone - that the 1927 silent Wings, debuting as part of February and March’s “31 Days of Oscar” programming, was the first movie to win an Academy Award and was one of Gary Cooper’s first major roles; that the 1933 Busby Berkeley-choreographed musical 42nd Street featured the debut of Ruby Keeler; that the 1948 Powell-Pressburger musical The Red Shoes inspired a generation of young ballet dancers; and that the 1954 sea drama The Caine Mutiny required protracted negotiations with the U.S. Navy to guarantee its cooperation.

So it goes with Robert Osborne, whose trademark segue in between movies, “Up next,” is as familiar as the trivia he mines with TCM staffers. Though his once-settled network underwent a rare corporate shake-up last year, he remains a fixture: the tenured professor in Turner Classic Movies’ film school of uncut and commercial-free presentations.

Osborne brings that same passion to the Athens classic film festival that bears his name, which screens eight movies over the course of this weekend. This marks Osborne’s fourth year hosting the event after partnering with Nate Kohn, the University of Georgia associate professor of telecommunications who’d started a similar festival in Illinois with Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert.

“He loved the idea,” Kohn says, when he contacted Osborne through a mutual friend. “For the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia, the festival is fantastic outreach event, bringing the university and the community together in a high profile event.”

For Osborne, it was a natural progression from his hosting duties with TCM. “I’ve thought, ‘It’s so great to have TCM to show all these great films,’” he says, “but how fun would it be to take these movies... and show them on a big screen?”

“It’s been great for me,” Osborne says of his job at TCM, after taping his segments. “I’ve been very lucky here, and also with my job at the Hollywood Reporter” - where he’s been a columnist since 1982 - “in that I’m part of the package but I’m not in any corporation, and I understand how that works. Here I kind of work in my own unit. So I don’t get into all that kind of stuff. I realize in any kind of corporation that’s going to happen, but I’m lucky in that I don’t have to get involved with that.”

Robert Osborne is the last of a dying breed, a once-aspiring actor who turned into a Hollywood insider and historian - an authority but a friend, a public face revered in private. He’s always seemed to be in the right place at the right time, and if luck is when preparation meets opportunity, Osborne has prepared with the charm and knowledge to move up in a business swimming with sharks.

He talks about his career like he does movies, never making a cinematic reference without context. He mentions his Seattle stage work after graduating from the University of Washington with a journalism degree and recalls landing a role in a 1958 production: “The actor I was doing the play with was Jane Darwell, who’d won the Academy Award for playing Henry Fonda’s mother in The Grapes of Wrath. And she said, ‘You should come to California.’ I could stay at her family’s house, and I had some friends there.”

His run of luck came in succession. He scored a six-month studio contract with 20th Century Fox - easy to get back then, he says - and started taking acting classes.

“Paul Henreid, who played opposite Bette Davis in Now, Voyager, came to visit a friend who was giving the class,” Osborne recalls. “And he saw me, and he said, ‘You know, I’m doing a TV western called “The Californians,” and I’m directing an episode, and you’d be right for the guy for it.'”

The studio that owned the show, Desilu, was run by Lucille Ball and her husband, Desi Arnaz. He wound up being an assistant to Ball while trying to get his acting career going. She was more impressed with Osborne’s curiosity and knowledge of movies and actors than his acting talent.

“She was fascinated by the fact that I was staying at Jane Darwell’s house, because Lucy loved all the character actors she worked with. She was fascinated with the Edward Everett Hortons and the Donald Meeks, and those guys... She was fascinated that I knew who they all were. So that’s kind of what attracted her attention to me, was my attention to old movies.”

While Arnaz was off on his various extramarital affairs, Osborne says, Ball often turned her mansion into a repertory movie theater, inviting Osborne and his friends over to watch old movies and talk about the stars. Back then, there was no concept of “classic cinema" - new movies opened, played and closed, never to be shown again.

“They were all [film] buffs like me,” Osborne says, “and we all had these 16 mm projectors, and we had no money, but you’d borrow a print from somebody or somebody had a print, or you would get to know someone at a TV station who had a print and lend it to you for the weekend. And then you’d gather your friends together, and you’d pool your money together, and get some spaghetti and wine and watch these old movies.

“I had a friend who was a dancer in one of Ginger Rogers’ nightclub acts... and he’d show a movie and he’d get Ginger to come over to watch with us, and she would talk about how they did this or how they did that,” Osborne continues. “These people loved us because we knew who they were and we cared who they were and we cared about the process.”

Osborne’s acting career lagged. He may be best remembered for a spot in “The Beverly Hillbillies’” 1962 pilot episode. Ball warned Osborne that a nice Midwesterner like him couldn’t hang with the cutthroat New York actors in Hollywood. (“There’d be this part for a TV show that I’d go read for, and I’d say, ‘Well, George Peppard would be much better for this part!’ The completely wrong attitude.”)

She encouraged him to match his journalism degree with his encyclopedic movie knowledge. Write a book, she said. Even if it’s not good, it’ll be impressive at a job interview. And so Osborne wrote a book on the Oscars that was unique in its inclusion not just of winners but also the nominees.

If a star went to the hospital, TV stations would ask Osborne to appear and provide a career overview for the evening news. And no matter how many stars he met, he never seemed starstruck.

“I could watch Lana Turner arrive at a premiere and be so impressed because it was like, ‘Oh my God, this great star is coming to a premiere.’ And then I could have dinner with her the next night, and I wouldn’t mix the two up.”

Turner Classic Movies has undergone a series of changes at the corporate level over the past two years as it has become tucked more snugly underneath the Turner Broadcasting umbrellas. Where in years past it was run more autonomously, now TCM answers more directly to the corporate structure, which includes Steve Koonin, who, as Turner Entertainment Group’s president, assumed control over TCM last spring. His hiring signaled the departure of several top TCM executives in a fairly substantial shakeup as the network sought new ways to maximize revenues.

Amid the personnel shuffles, new lines of business and programming changes, one thing is constant: Osborne. His stature in the movie business is cemented - literally. He earned a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2006, and this past December was given the William K. Everson Film History Award by the National Board of Review.

Even at his age, Osborne remains a part of the network’s long-range plans, insists Koonin, who will renegotiate his contract extension this year. “Whether it was a man half his age, they couldn’t do as good a job as he does,” Koonin says. “We have every intention to renew him for as long as he wants to be with the network.”

As the curator of his own film festival - he picks all eight films - Osborne’s reputation continues to grow, his devotion to his mission infectious.

“Robert is amazing to work with,” says Kohn, the UGA associate professor. “He is generous with his time and his ideas. He inspires us all with his professionalism, his work ethic, and his graciousness.”

Even out of makeup, Osborne could pass for 65, lines and all. He seems to pace himself in everything he does or says. “I would love to keep doing it as long as it’s still viable for Turner,” Osborne says. “There obviously will come an age when you’re too old to be doing it, I guess, but I’d love to keep doing it. I feel good, and I love the people I work with. And I love this product.”

For a man who once pondered an acting career where youth is everything, Osborne has put his years and knowledge to perfect use. Even with the network keeping an eye on younger viewers, Osborne remains unfazed. “I’ve thought of myself as making choices as to how it would affect TCM,” he says, “but I’ve made choices like that all my life. My dad was a high school principal and a superintendent in this small town I grew up in. There were certain things I wanted to do that I knew I shouldn’t because it would reflect badly on my dad.

“So I was not a problem child, but I never felt I needed to rebel because everybody always gave me a lot of space, and kind of let me do what I wanted to do. But all I wanted to do was go to the movies.”

David Lee Simmons

Simmons is the senior arts writer for Creative Loafing, which originally published a longer version of this article.

WHAT: Robert Osborne's Classic Film Festival
WHERE: The Classic Center
WHEN: Thursday, April 10-Sunday, April 13
HOW MUCH: $60 passes ($45 for students); $10 per film, $5 parking.

Special guests at the fourth annual Robert Osborne’s Classic Film Festival include “Young Frankenstein” casting co-director Mike Fenton (Thursday, 8:30 p.m.); “The Way We Were” music composer Marvin Hamlisch (Thursday, 8:30 p.m.); and “Lawrence of Arabia” editor Anne V. Coates (Saturday, 11 a.m.).