“You know you can watch that at home, right?” Such was the advice directed my way by a wisecracking passerby while queued up for a screening at the 2024 Turner Classic Movies Film Festival in Hollywood, California. They were clearly not a festival passholder, but the indifference heard right there on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was another instance of the trampling of history that both the festival and its parent channel aim to counter.

Probably the most even-handed response to that trampling would be a reminder—to flip a well-known phrase—that a home is not a house (not a movie house anyway). The folks who flock to Los Angeles every year from all over the world to attend this festival, probably all subscribers or rabid devotees of the channel that bears its name, cough up a prodigious amount of money to do so. It’s clear that for them,...