The opening night presentation at the 2016 TCM Classic Film Festival (4.28 thru 5.1) will be “a 40th anniversary screening in collaboration with Warner Bros. Classics” of Alan Pakula‘s All The President’s Men. Who cares, right? Another theatrical screening of a movie we’ve all seen many times. Except it could be a significant deal if TCM and WB Classics are presenting a visually correct version of this 1976 classic. Because it needs correcting. Some of you might remember that ATPM cinematographer Gordon Willis complained about the most recent Bluray version in a 2011 HE interview.

Willis comment #1 about 2011 ATMP Bluray: “It’s all fucked up…all the medium tones [are wrong] and contrast is way higher than it oughta be…it’s overloaded.”

Comment #2: “All they had to do was use the most recent DVD as a reference because that’s fine. They don’t get it. They get on those fucking dials…it’s a disease. Their idea for a Bluray is to make it for guys who are watching football.”

I’ve never been head-over-heels in love with the TCM Classic Film Festival, but I’ve always liked watching restorations of classic films (DCPs and not the dreaded 35mm) on the big screen. I’ve been attending since 2011, or the festival’s second year, and I’ve always been press-credentialed. This year, however, I didn’t request the press pass soon enough and the Ginsberg-Libby p.r. guys are telling me they can’t bend the rules to help me out. If I want to see something I guess I can just show up and buy a ticket. Not worth fretting over but a bit of a pain.

I have two good excuses for dropping the ball. One is that I was assuming the festival would happen in either mid-April (last year it ran from 4.10 through 4.13) or late April (in 2013, or the year of the 1.37:1 Shane, it ran from 4.25 thru 4.28). This year it’s happening from 3.26 through 3.29 — a full month earlier than the 2013 fest and two weeks earlier than last year’s. On top of which Chelsea Barredo, the gracious and compassionate Ginsberg-Libby publicist who took care of me in ’13 and ’14, is no longer with GL and her replacement didn’t send me a friendly reminder or nudge about the earlier dates. She didn’t get in touch at all about anything.

The Hollywood Roosevelt is jammed with a mixture of movie lovers of this or that denomination, second- and third-tier industry hobknobbers and poorly dressed out-of-towners (many of them wearing sandals with socks, kakhi shorts and madras short-sleeve shirts) in their 50s, 60s and 70s. Really…nothing says “visiting from Flagstaff, Arizona for the weekend” like a madras shirt. Don’t these people realize that, or don’t they care? I’m walking around in my dark jacket and black shades like Napoleon Solo, casually noting their behavior and acting all neutral-like.