Turner Classic Movies to Celebrate Great Screenwriting with Festival Coinciding with Writers Guilds’ 101 Greatest Screenplays

April 13, 2006. Not the movie stars. Not the directors. Turner Classic Movies (TCM) will recognize the artists who first breathe life into Hollywood stories – screenwriters – during a 12-film festival on Monday, May 1, it was announced today by Tom Karsch, executive vice president and general manager of TCM and Turner South. The television event will commemorate the Writers Guilds’ 101 Greatest Screenplays, honoring the finest achievements in film writing as voted upon by professional film and television writers.

The schedule is as follows:

* 8 p.m. Casablanca (1942)
* 10 p.m. Dr. Strangelove (63)
* 12 a.m. Citizen Kane (1941)
* 2:15 a.m. The Graduate (1967)
* 4:15 a.m. Network (1976)
* 6:15 a.m. Sullivan’s Travels (1941)
* 8:15 a.m. The Philadelphia Story (1940)
* 10 a.m. His Girl Friday (1940)
* 12 p.m. Double Indemnity (1944)
* 2 p.m. Sunset Boulevard (1950)
* 4 p.m. The Third Man (1949)
* 6 p.m. The Maltese Falcon (1941)

In summer 2005, ballots were sent out asking WGA members to list up to 10 of their favorite produced screenplays. Any film, past or present, English-language or otherwise, was eligible. Many of the names are familiar to the average filmgoer – Woody Allen, William Goldman, Billy Wilder, Nora Ephron, Mel Brooks, Charlie Kaufman – and many more, like Ernest Lehman, Steve Zaillian, Budd Schulberg and Frances Goodrich, should be. The guild’s list features playwrights, novelists, film critics, writer-directors, writer-actors, three blacklisted writers and four sets of brothers.

Turner Classic Movies, currently seen in more than 70 million homes, is a 24-hour cable network from Turner Broadcasting System, Inc., a TimeWarner company. TCM presents the greatest motion pictures of all time from the largest film library in the world, the combined Time Warner and Turner film libraries, from the ‘20s through the ‘90s, commercial-free and without interruption. Expanding TCM’s role as a curator of movie history, the network recently launched TCMdb, the Internet’s most media-rich interactive movie database. For more information, please visit www.tcm.com.

Turner Broadcasting System, Inc., a Time Warner company, is a major producer of news and entertainment product around the world and the leading provider of programming for the basic cable industry.

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Julie Fetzer-Gill

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Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.

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