Robert Osborne A Man for All Oscar Seasons

Posted on 09. Feb, 2009 by Administrator in Profiles

by Randy Gambill

Robert Osborne, the silver fox of film historians and primetime host and anchor of Turner Classic Movies (TCM) has a lot to talk about. It’s Oscar season and TCM’s 15th edition of its annual 31 Days of Oscar film festival is upon us this February. The nifty angle on this years festivities is the creation of the TCM University for Cinematic Education that offers courses in movie-themed categories such as The Reach and Influence of Nazi Germany (Casablanca), Speech and Language Development (My Fair Lady), and Nuclear Physics (Li’l Abner). As Osborne puts it, “I went to college. I don’t think going to college is particularly fun. This college, you don’t have to take tests, you don’t have to show up for study hall, its all fun.”

Osborne also serves as the official biographer of the Academy Awards. The latest edition of his ongoing Oscar biography “80 Years of the Oscar” is out in time for this years awards. In addition to hosting duties for TCM, Osborne has done several specials for the network including Private Screenings, an interview show featuring Hollywood luminaries. He also hosts TCM’s Guest Programmer series, and serves as a columnist-critic for The Hollywood Reporter. Osborne, whose encyclopedic knowledge of film history and charismatic, bon vivant persona has endeared him to cinema lovers everywhere, has carved out a niche for himself as America’s premier movie expert. The man who The Washington Post declared is “…so suave that he appears to glide into his entrances…” spent some time with h Magazine.

h: What is your feeling about current Hollywood? What are you saddest about losing? What do you think is getting better?

Robert Osborne: If you had asked me this last year I would have been a little more negative about it because I thought all the films were so unrelentingly grim, although well-made. I think this year’s been a pretty good year in movies. I think the thing that makes me less attracted to films today is that you don’t have specific studios planning out a year’s projects. You get so many films that are all about the same subject. You see seven or eight trailers and they all look exactly alike. In the days when they had major studios, one of the things they did, and there’s a lot wrong with that process too, but you had five major studios, four minor studios and they all figured out a years worth of product. You would have musicals, you would have comedies, you would have some film noir, you’d have detective things, you’d have dramas and all that. So you got a more well-rounded choice of movies to see. And I just think it’s too bad it’s all so independently done now. Everybody makes what they wanna make. There’s no big major plan, so you get an awful lot of just action thrillers, with cars being blown up and all of that. And its hard to go to the movies because in these dark days if you wanna go see a light comedy, there’s very little to see, and the comedies around are so light, they’re so stupid, that they’re not even really funny. The diversity is what I miss about films now. I think maybe we have better technical things than we’ve ever had in films. You can’t get better than the cinematography that we have now. It’s just incredible. And there’s so many exhibition things with sound; technical things we never had before.

h: How do you feel about the popular Oscar revisionist game where people decide certain films were undeserving of their Oscars and others should
have won?

Robert: I think that’s kind of fun. You have to realize that the world did not start today so you can’t judge things just by today. Those movies obviously meant something more in their time than maybe they mean to us today. An example is 1944 when the five nominees included Double Indemnity. Of the five films today, that’s the classic that endures and always will, it’s a brilliant film. But the film that won that year, from the same studio, was Going My Way, which was this really sweet nice story about a gentle priest with Barry Fitzgerald and Bing Crosby. You have to realize that was in the middle of the Second World War. People were interested in honesty and goodness and all those ideas were running through the minds of millions of people. These virtues became a very important thing for people in the midst of a war when their neighbors were having sons that were being killed, and women’s husbands were going off to war. During the Second World War you weren’t so attracted to two people in Double Indemnity, who were adulterers that were trying to kill and did kill the woman’s husband. So you have to take it in context.

h: In the 50’s there were a lot of gimmicky film techniques cropping up to keep moviegoers from defecting to this new thing called “television”. Now that people’s home theater systems are getting so high-tech, do you think film distributors are gonna have to come up with gimmicks again to lure people into theaters?

Robert: Yes. I think we’re doing that with 3-D now. Although, they are doing 3-D in the home now, so that won’t be a gimmick for theaters much longer. I think there will always be a certain number of people who will want to go out and have that communal experience because there is nothing quite like that. But you have to look back on the history of the world. Everything changes. There was a time when every small town, big town had a legitimate theater that you went to and they had vaudeville in these theaters and that doesn’t exist anymore. There was a time when people sat and listened to stories and dramas on the radio. That doesn’t exist anymore. There is a possibility that there will be a time when there will be movie theaters in your city, but only theaters that are opened occasionally, and then show some big spectacular thing that you can’t see at home for some reason. It’s very likely to change.

h: Are there any surprising gaps in your film viewing history?

Robert: Occasionally there will be something I haven’t seen. But that doesn’t happen very often because I’ve been interested in movies for a long time, long before there was really any nostalgia about them. Many of the films that I saw were things I had to seek out because they had already played off in theaters and they weren’t always on television or they were never reissued because they just didn’t do that much. In those days movies were made to be seen and then they disappeared. So I had to really seek a lot of them out but that was kind of my quest and it was fun because it was like looking for King Solomon’s Mines or something. I have seen most of the major movies; I don’t think there are many gaps. Wait a minute! You asked about a gap. I gotta a gap right now. The Wrestler, I haven’t seen. I know I’m gonna have to see it and I do wanna see it, so I know what I’m talking about. But it’s very hard for me, and I have a DVD screener of it; it’s very hard for me to sit down and wanna watch it. You know it’s gonna be grim, you know it’s gonna be well done, you know it’s gonna be a heart-tugger, but it’s not an arena that I’m anxious to get into.

h: Are there any genres you don’t particularly care for?

Robert: I’m very democratic in my taste. I would say I have a great appreciation for some of the films of Ingmar Bergman and Antonioni and those guys but some of those really artistic European films are not what I gravitate toward. I really do like to be entertained by movies. I think the world is such a serious place that when I go to the movies I kinda wanna go into another world.

h: Any predictions about this years Oscar race?

Robert: I think it’s going to be a really interesting Oscar year because of the people involved. When you’ve got people involved like Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Sean Penn, Clint Eastwood, Meryl Streep, they’re all people that we kind of know. It’s really tough to get interested in an Oscar race when you really don’t know who the people are. Like last year, so many of the people that were up for Oscars, the general public had not seen the movies, the general public didn’t particularly want to see the movies, and they didn’t know who those people were. So it’s very hard to get people interested in that. But when you’ve got a year where you know who the players are, it makes for a very exciting race, even if you haven’t seen the movies, you still know who those people are and you’re going to have feelings about them one way or another. So I think it’s going to be an interesting year. And I think the movies are good ones. And I must say its been a pleasure looking at the movies this year because I think they’re very entertaining. Except for The Wrestler, which I haven’t seen yet.

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