Professional Sweetheart: 8/25/23
Love Letters Straight From Your Heart / Leave Your Message on the Ansaphone
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The other day as I was driving to my brand new, two day-a-week gig teaching a single Film 101 class at a university an hour north of the city, I heard one of the local NPR stations doing a story about mail. I can’t even remember what the angle was but it got me thinking about the years I spent opening and answering mail for a living. Some of you may know, before I technically began my career programming “the pictures”, my very first job at TCM in 2004 was to be an assistant to my boss and to answer all the viewer mail. I realize this is a common trope in entertainment, people who “start in the mailroom” and are now the heads of giant corporations or something. But I ask: did they really open the mail? Are we talking actual, handwritten letters and packages that came through the post office from people wanting to contact a national television network? Had they ever had the pleasure of handling delicate, old lady stationary sprayed in perfume, presumably from one of those vintage atomizer bottles with the little ball and tassel? I sure have!
Before you start asking yourself, “I’m sorry, did she say she started this job in 2004? Did she actually mean 1894?!” — keep in mind that for the very first couple of years I was at TCM, social media wasn’t really a thing yet, at least for major companies. The extent that TCM was online for fan engagement was a message board on their website, a real wild west of extremely passionate viewers and early classic movie shitposters. It made me so nervous that anytime I was asked to go in there and monitor things as part of my job, I got acid reflux. I’ll put it to you this way — I used to have to create a regular Viewer Relations report, which was this giant, stapled stack of photocopied letters and printed-out message board posts (lol) we’d gotten that month, distributed to all the VPs at the network. Finding one positive thing anyone had said on the boards was a bit of a struggle.
Thank you for your feedback.
Another quaint detail about the early days: we also used to have a Viewer Hotline which was a phone number with an Atlanta area code that rang directly to my desk. Absolutely nutty to imagine now, but it was a thing. They used to publish it in the old print version of the TCM Now Playing guide (R.I.P.) in very small print, right in the back. I kept thinking, surely nobody reads the fine print tucked into magazines; no, people always managed to find it. The only thing I had going for me was that I had previously worked at a college radio station for many years prior to my TCM job (plus I’d worked retail, food service, and other customer service jobs all throughout my life) so I had a bit of experience talking to people on the phone. Especially a person who was primed and ready to go the fuck off on someone. As you can imagine, television network calls were very specific. A general breakdown goes something like this:
30% - people who had no idea why they were hearing people talking over the movies, a.k.a. they had accidentally pressed the SAP (second audio program) button on their remote and had no idea how to turn it off
30% - people who didn’t understand why we “cut the movies off with black bars”, either on the top/bottom or on the sides of the screen (a.k.a. letterboxing or pillarboxing) and wondered why we “wanted to make the movies smaller” in size for people “paying good money” for cable TV
30% - people who wanted to know the name of movie they saw when they were eight years old at the movie theater in the town they grew up in but had no idea who was in it, what year it was made, or what it was about
9.9% - programming requests
0.1% - any compliment or nice thing
When you would get the occasional nice person, it really was a joy. There was a married couple who called the viewer line often to request Margaret O’Brien movies. They were obsessed with her. Their favorite movie was The Unfinished Dance (1947) and they always mentioned it when they called. Once or twice, it aired on the network during regular programming and they always called to thank me, in their polite, southern accents. Over time, I just grew to love these two. It was like getting a phone call from my parents or something; they were always fussing at each other to “ask Millie if she knows about this movie” over speakerphone. I would send them little packages of TCM swag and they went nuts for it. This went on for over a year or two, and at some point I actually ended up visiting them at their assisted living facility here in Atlanta. They had collected all of the things I’d sent them from the network, like Now Playing guides and the swag, little postcards and things, and put them on a shelf in their common area. I wanted to cry, it was so sweet. In these moments, I actually loved my job doing Viewer Relations. Another fun aspect for me was getting to open fan mail for our former, beloved TCM host, Robert Osborne (R.I.P. king). He got a metric shit-ton of letters, especially from the older ladies. Some of them would send tasteful photos of themselves, in quasi-church clothes, in front of a nice restaurant or something. (Even more crucial: some would even send doubles, like the kind you’d get when you used to get film developed at the drugstore. I have no idea why this happened. Maybe in case the first one got lost? This used to KILL ME.) A woman once sent in a cassette tape of herself singing to him (she also sent double photos, with her guitar in hand). But Robert was so well-loved that he really did get fan mail from people of all stripes. One of my absolute favorites was this person who just went by “Maledonna” (or sometimes “Boydonna”), a.ka. the male Madonna. He sent over a package of photocopied headshots of himself in various reproductions of Madonna album covers and other staged scenes, signed to Robert. I was totally obsessed with him. I hope he is doing well.
The legend Boydonna, a.k.a. Maledonna
We also got a lot of mail sent directly to the programming department. We had a viewer who would send a 3 x 5 index card with one movie suggestion written on it. They would come multiple times a week for years. I kept thinking they could save themselves a lot of trouble if they just sent over one giant list but over time, I liked the index cards. I pretty much kept all of them and eventually pinned some to a board in our office. This is really the tip of the iceberg; there were TONS more.
True dedication right here
Once, I made a VHS dub (yes, you read that right) of a short film for the radio host Joe Franklin, when he was still alive. He would call the Viewer Line all the time to chat and we were phone pals for a while. I actually met him once in New York, at his office, which was right near Times Square and was filled with floor to ceiling bankers boxes and other paperwork. It was just as you saw it in The Aristocrats (2005). Afterwards, he invited me and my friends to lunch and we watched him eat soup, the only thing he ordered. Some other friends of mine who just happened to be in town were at the bar while this was happening, just watching three 20-something year old women sitting with a 79-year old man eating soup. Absolute wild times.
For the record: the restaurant we went to was NOT named after him. Also, we never went to a Broadway show.
Eventually, when I started doing TCM Underground, I would get lots of letters from prison. The prison letters always included lists of films, almost all of them really great movie picks. Sometimes there would be little drawings or hand-made stationary. They were always incredibly complimentary of my programming and appreciative of the channel. Sometimes I would look up the person who wrote in. I very much tried not to judge. Lord knows the criminal justice system is not perfect. And I have found that people have very different opinions of what the function of jail should be. I tried to keep this in mind, even if I have always had a base level belief that education and art can help someone become a better person. For years I would suggest a Prisoner Request month for the network during our yearly programming pitch session and nobody took me up on it. I think it was too on the edge for the management but I was just so grateful for anyone who was appreciative of my work, knowing that we don’t get to choose the people who like our programming. Some who wrote would tell me watching the movies I programmed helped them stay out of trouble. That made me very happy.
At some point in the mid-2010’s they basically phased out a dedicated Viewer Relations person. I think social media had finally taken over by that point. They stopped the viewer hotline, too, which weirdly made me sad. I always wondered where the mail went after that. I was really and truly connected to it, even up until the time I was laid off from the network last year. I was still collecting it from any of my coworkers who would give it to me. It’s weird to think of my mail answering days as this prototype for the ways companies now deal with fan culture or social media management. I think I’m lucky to have been able to experience it in this kind of way. You know I’d be a total disaster managing a brand’s TikTok account.
Other Things of Note:
My good buddy Shalewa Sharpe has just started a Substack, which I encourage everyone to subscribe to right now! If you love her stand up comedy like I do, you will be happy to know she’s just as funny and insightful at the written word. And not for nothing, the podcast she does with fellow comic Gastor Almonte is one of the only podcasts I listen to on the absolute regs. I could truly hear the two of them chop it up about anything.
To follow up from a previous newsletter I wrote for the paid subscribers a few weeks ago: I did the bluray rewatch of William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in LA (1985) and I have so much to say that we miiiiiiight have to do an I Saw What You Did episode about it. You’ve been warned!
I just found out that there’s going to be a live Ormond Family event with Jimmy McDonough at the Belcourt Theater in Nashville in September, which is very much within a reasonable driving distance from where I live. However, I’m going in be in Austin during it and I’m DESTROYED. If you do live in/near Nashville, you’ve gotta go and tell me all about it.
Have a great weekend, everyone!
Millie
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You should write a memoir, this is terrific stuff.
That jail list with Showgirls and The Whip and the Body etc is the HORNIEST movie list I have ever seen. Amazing.