Edge of Outside
8 tonight
Turner Classic Movies
These days, independent filmmakers get all the attention (and the awards, predominantly). Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it just makes you logically assume that years down the road, some documentarian is going to lament the poor ol' blockbuster movie makers, how everyone mocked their flicks, shunned them come Oscar time and left them to retire to their marble manses, utterly beaten and broken and subjected to Kate Capshaw's wandering eyes for Alejandro the pool boy. Oh, what tortured lives these multimillionaires lead! And so, we come to the mainstreamiest of movie channels, dedicating an entire month to the other guys, the “filmmakers who have worked on the edges of Hollywood.” Edges like . . . Westwood? North Hollywood? Reseda? Okay, we've seen this sort of thing 1,000 times before, which means we'll be there in front of the tele in our jammies for No. 1,001. Talking heads Marty Scorsese, Spike Lee, Henry Jaglom, Arthur Penn and John Sayles talk about that thing they do, and folks who worked closely with John Cassavetes, Sam Peckinpah, Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick and Lil' Nickie Ray talk some more. Added bonus: TCM does not run commercials or pledge breaks. Added the opposite of bonus: not enough love for the “mavericks” of independent foreign film.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.