I will try to answer the rest later this evening.

myrnaloyisdope - First, I'm very lucky. My first real job out of college was as a temp at a local channel in L.A. called The Z Channel - I'm sure many of you have heard of it. I basically just worked my way up and over from there. The Z Channel became SportsChannel and I stayed there for a few years...

Time to reply to a couple questions - Lynn, as to the specific requests ("Becky Sharp," "Alice in Wonderland," etc.) all are possible. As you can tell, we get a lot of movie requests. And while we've greatly increased our access to just about every major library out there, we're ...

Nancy, as for star-of-the-month a lot depends on either stars we haven't done before or for a long time, what films we have under license, key birthdays, etc. Since a lot of films are licensed years in advance a lot depends on what we have available.

Hi Nancy - one of the great pleasures of our job is to figure out different ways to explore film history and learning so much when working on a theme. But the ideas seem endless. And we really aren't shy about stealing from people, whether it's from different people within Turner or people doing pro...

Mark - yes. That is really the balance that we try to achieve. As you suggest, our hardcore fans, and I assume most people here at Silver Screen Oasis, are excited about the rare or obscure titles. But we're also a place that many people discover classic movies for the first time. In addition - beca...

coffeedan - It is labor intensive but, of course, most of the work isn't done by us. Truthfully, I don't really know much about how film is preserved, but I do know that the people at Warner Brothers, or Film Preservation Associates or Kino or Flicker Alley (among a few others) put a lot of time int...

Hi Birdy - I probably enjoy mini-themes like "sheep night" and "how to murder your wife night" the most, but I love nights like Una Merkel as well. I like it when we can bring lesser-known (but deserving) films/actors/directors to the attention of our audience. And we have a staf...

Chris - it can happen either way. The contact is between our marketing department and the marketing department of the studios. But it's up to us in programming to determine if we want to play the films.

MissGoddess - I hope my earlier reply on hd answered your question.

Jeffrey, as usual you have more information than I do. But our best ally is Flicker Alley in trying to access the Paramount silents (including "Children of Divorce"). I don't know anything about "Lilac Time" but can ask around at Warner Brothers to see what might be happening.

srowley75 - we currently offer an upconverted hd channel. It's available to any affiliate that wants to take it and, while it isn't yet true-hd, the picture is much better and we keep the aspect ratios the same (never stretching or cropping the picture). For those that don't know, this is a technica...

Hi Lynn - other than rights the biggest issue, by far, is quality of materials. A lot of films are in very bad condition, some aren't playable at all. And even if a studio does have film elements, they still need to be transferred to video which can be very expensive (and cost-prohibitive).

moirafinnie - I'm not sure how to answer that one. I've been with TCM for almost 12 years and I don't think my philosophy as the programmer or the overall philosophy of the network has changed at all. But, as I said in my reply to Chris, we do have access to more films than we used to because we've ...

Hi Chris - I'd say it's easier now than it used to be. We actually have pretty substantial agreements in place with every major studio. Traditionally networks license films for a set period of time (1 to 2 years, sometimes more, sometimes less) and a set number of runs during that time. There are re...