If you’ve been online at all in the past few days, you’ve probably seen rumblings, innuendo, and tweets portending doom about Warner Bros. Discovery head David Zaslav and TCM. However, unless you’re a Criterion-buying film head, it might be hard to suss out exactly what’s going on, and why so many people from the average Film Twitter mainstay to some of our most legendary directors, are worried about the fate of TCM aka “Turner Classic Movies”—which launched in 1994 and still presents classic and otherwise noteworthy old movies commercial free. Let’s break it down.
The inciting event was Warner CEO David Zaslav laying off a big chunk of the senior management at TCM on Tuesday. As in, the people responsible for the direction of the brand for the past few decades–notably general manager Pola Changnon, who had been there for 25 years. Other execs cut included the VP of programming and content strategy, the VP of brand creative and marketing, the VP of enterprises and strategic partnerships, the director of the annual TCM Film Festival, and the VP of studio production. The company announced in a memo that Michael Ouweleen, the president of Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, Discovery Family and Boomerang, would “take oversight” of TCM. Insiders have said the TCM staff is being slashed from 90 employees to 20.
Basically, it’s hard to know, and the company line so far, as is true of virtually every layoff ever, is that none of the things people love about the brand will change, and that Warner Bros. Discover “remain fully committed to this business, the TCM brand, and its purpose to protect and celebrate culture-defining movies.”
Any time CEOs start monkeying with a beloved brand, people tend to get worried. Especially so in this case, as Zaslav, a 63-year-old former head of Discovery Inc. who took over Warner Bros. Discovery when Discovery Inc. merged with Warner Media last year, was the guy responsible for rebranding HBO Max as “Max.” This was a move many saw as watering down one of media’s strongest brands in order to remind people that Warner Bros. Discovery also owns a lot of trash now too. The app where you used to find HBO’s latest adult contemporary water cooler dramas still has those, but now with much greater space allotted to things like Ghost Adventures and a chiropractors-themed reality show called Crack Addicts. “Streamlining” a brand as all-encompassing as Warner Bros. Discovery (which isn’t unique in owning a lot of content simultaneously) can often mean making the stuff that you like harder to find. When so much of the process of watching things nowadays is separating signal from noise, these small moves have large ripple effects.
At one point Max even tweaked its “detail” pages so that rather than crediting directors, writers, and actors of films, it bundled them all under the vaguely Orwellian umbrella term “creators.” This was so instantly unpopular and widely ridiculed that they undid the change almost immediately and called it a mistake.
TCM was also widely seen as a leader in film preservation. With so many film libraries now owned by these large conglomerates, their leadership largely determines where you’ll be able to see classic films, for how much, in what format, and whether they’ll be available at all. It’s the same fear that Elon Musk will be able to unilaterally brick your Tesla with a software update, but as applied to classic movies. We don’t know that they will, but it’s clear that they can.
With the shift away from clunky physical media, content we once could own we now mostly merely rent, and not always in its original, intended form. Disney, for instance, recently cut out a sequence from The French Connection in which Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) uses a racial slur, which many viewed as changing the intention and context of the entire film, and doing so in an insidious way that’s tantamount to altering our collective memory.
No less than Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Thomas Anderson, who have appeared at TCM film festivals and in TCM documentaries in the past, convened for an “emergency call” with Zaslav to raise their concerns about what Zaslav’s recent moves might mean for TCM specifically and for film restoration and preservation as a whole. Scorsese had previously founded The Film Foundation, a film restoration and preservation organization, and Anderson and Spielberg sat on its board.
After the call, which took place Wednesday, the three released a joint statement, saying in part: “Turner Classic Movies… is truly a precious resource of cinema, open 24 hours a day seven days a week. And while it has never been a financial juggernaut, it has always been a profitable endeavor since its inception.
Earlier this week, David Zaslav got in touch to talk about the restructuring of TCM. We understand the pressures and realities of a corporation as large as WBD, of which TCM is one moving part. We have each spent time talking to David, separately and together, and it’s clear that TCM and classic cinema are very important to him. Our primary aim is to ensure that TCM’s programming is untouched and protected. We are heartened and encouraged by the conversations we’ve had thus far, and we are committed to working together to ensure the continuation of this cultural touchstone that we all treasure.”
Scorsese had earlier described leaving TCM running during his editing process, and Anderson had spoken of having TCM on 24 hours a day on his kitchen television.
“I recently saw a film I never heard of starring John Garfield — ’He Ran All the Way,’” Francis Ford Coppola told the LA Times. “And I realized that I never appreciated what a great actor he was until I saw his work in this, his final film. It would not have come to my attention if not for TCM.”
Yes, probably. Zaslav has rightly become a villain in the past few months, raking in $286 million in the past two years while claiming that the writers’ demands in the ongoing WGA strike are unreasonable. He also took heat for throwing himself expensive parties at Cannes while canceling the release of Batgirl – a nearly-finished film hundreds of people had poured years of their lives into – and writing off “between $2 billion and $2.5 billion” worth of Warner content. He’s also reportedly negotiating to sell off half the company’s film and music library for $500 million.
Which is to say, it’s a little hard to feel good about the idea of entrusting a “pillar of film history and preservation” (per Max Read) that TCM was to a guy who has effectively disappeared notable movies from his own catalog.
If you can trust what Zaslav says on the level of what he has done, he has at least paid lip service to the importance of TCM. Appearing on stage at the opening night of the 14th TCM Classic Film Festival with Spielberg and Anderson, and moderator Ben Mankiewicz (a long-time TCM host), Zaslav told the audience back in April, “I watch Turner Classic Movies all the time. It’s the history of our country, the motion pictures. […] Movies taught people the stories of America, the stories in the world, and in many ways how to be an American. And so we have a great obligation.”
Judging by how important it seemed to Zaslav that he be accepted by A-listers in Cannes, it seems likely that in the short term he will at least try to look like he’s doing right by his new friends Scorsese, Spielberg, and Paul Thomas Anderson. But as their conference call and entreaties fade from memory, and as Zaslav gets more inured to seeing himself painted as the villain (he was famously booed at a commencement speech to Boston University grads in May), how much he will actually protect the TCM brand remains to be seen.