TCM Remembers Host Robert Osborne: Special Edition (Video)

[Previously: “Memo to TCM’s Robert Osborne: Dalton Trumbo was a Communist!”]

@spicecrop
4 years ago (edited)

“Watching Osborne host TCM made me love classic films. I remember going to work, and couldn’t wait to get home to watch him intro a movie and then watch it. I don’t want to watch classic films without his inros and outros.”

N.S. to @spicecrop Some of his intros and outros have been posted here. Not enough, to be sure, but watch all you can. I will, too.

N.S.: Every time I see one of these TCM pretenders to the throne speak, it just makes me miss Bob Osborne (1932-2017) all the more. I am sure that, with the possible exception of Red Eddie Muller, they all have ghostwriters. With Osborne, there was personal passion and knowledge that couldn’t have been ghosted. He always knew so much that he could have written every word he spoke. (He may have dictated some of his talks into a tape recorder, or to a stenographer.) However, with the other “film historian” and expert hosts... For instance, I speak at times of Ben Mankiewicz’ ghost-writer.

(There were some great story-tellers, but they weren’t regulars, like the movie historian who told an unforgettable story from the ‘50s.

Van Heflin and his wife were at a Hollywood party one night, and Judy Garland was regaling the revelers. And I mean regaling. Judy sang song after song after song, ‘til dawn. Heflin’s missus kept reminding him he had to get up practically at dawn, to work on the picture he was making, but he would always counter that they were experiencing something that would be unique in their entire lives. And he was right.)

Unfortunately, the anonymous statements in praise of Osborne here are just the usual adjectival mush, which expresses nothing but empty emotions that say nothing to anyone else, as opposed to recollections of things he’d done or said. And unfortunately, he was a communist. Maybe not a party member, because hardly anyone joined the party anymore by the 1950s, but a communist, nonetheless. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have called Communist Party members like Dalton Trumbo, “alleged” members. That practice is a tell.