Ernest Borgnine greets fans at the welcome reception onboard the Celebrity Millennium on Dec. 8.

When Eva Marie Saint, Ernest Borgnine, Tippi Hedren and director Norman Jewison gathered on the deck of the Celebrity Millennium to welcome 2,000 guests to the first Turner Classic Movies cruise last weekend, there were upwards of 10 Academy Awards embodied on the stage.

But the crowd gave its greatest roar of approval not to a movie star or Oscar–winning director, but to Robert Osborne, the channel’s popular, low-key host. It was not only a nod to Osborne’s return to TCM after a recent hiatus, but an indication of the close identification classic film lovers have with the cable channel.

For these people, many of them first-time cruisers, were a lot more interested in Key Largo and Casablanca than the cruise’s actual destinations of Key West and Cozumel.

For four days last week after leaving port in Miami, there were nearly continuous film screenings in four different venues on the ship, multiple one-on-one interviews with the celebrities, trivia contests, dance parties in Casablanca garb ­- lots of white tuxedo jackets à la Bogart – and general high spirits.

Robert Osborne

Nobody argued about politics; rather, they argued about whether Ingrid Bergman was a better actress than Bette Davis.

The TCM cruisers came from 47 states and England, including 246 from Florida. Laura Garmizo and her husband, Gus, are from Delray Beach, and they stand in for a lot of others.

“I have the most unbelievable passion for classic films,” says Laura Garmizo. “My husband is humoring me by coming on this trip, but I did the same thing for him when we went to Vegas a few months ago. I came because the celebrities on this voyage won’t be here much longer.

“It’s been an incredible experience. I got sick in Mexico and thought I might have to scrub the trip. But when we got back on the boat, there was a call to hold the elevator, and Eva Marie Saint and her husband got on the elevator. Just the four of us! And she was so beautiful, and she was so concerned about me being sick!

“I feel much better now.”

For people in the marketing business, the cruise is what is known as a brand extension. TCM has already established a yearly classic film festival in Hollywood, but the cruise was a bit of a gamble – one that paid off, as the cruise was sold out within weeks.

Attending the Dec. 8 welcome reception aboard the Celebrity Millennium are (front row, from left) Bruce Goldstein, New York Film Forum; Suzanne Lloyd; Chelsea Hightower of Dancing With the Stars; actress Eva Marie Saint; Jeff Gregor, executive vice president and chief marketing officer of TCM, TNT and TBS and general manager of TCM; actress Tippi Hedren; director and producer Norman Jewison; TV personality Wink Martindale; and Dennis Adamovich, senior vice president of brand and digital activation/general manager of festivals for TCM, TNT and TBS, and (back row, from left) Alonso Duralde, Christmas movie expert and author; actor Ernest Borgnine; Robert Osborne, TCM primetime host; Ben Mankiewicz, TCM daytime weekend host; and author Mark Willem.

These 2,000 cruisers already watch the channel, but marketers hope they will be the advertising equivalent of smart bombs, radiating satisfaction about the broader experience to friends and co-workers in a way that few other cable channels could equal. Really, does anybody want to go on a foodie cruise and risk being screamed at by Gordon Ramsay or humiliated by Anthony Bourdain?

The audience, as with most cruises, skewed to 50 and above – older than the demographics for the channel itself. There was a smattering of film geeks – creatures of indeterminate age and gender who are liable to amuse themselves by listing continuity errors in North by Northwest.

But there were also lots of 50-year-old daughters who took their 75-year-old mothers, husbands who gave the cruise as a Christmas present to their wives, and a good share of young people; the winner of one of the trivia contests hosted by none other than Wink Martindale, the venerable game show host whose hair remains an eerie shade of reddish brown, was a high school senior who came with her parents.

The highlight of the cruise, of course, was the chance to rub elbows with the stars and hear their recollections.

• “I told Faye Dunaway that I wanted her for ‘The Thomas Crown Affair,’” says director Norman Jewison. “But I also told her that I didn’t want her to smile much in the picture. She asked ‘Why?’ and I said it was a secret. The real reason I didn’t want her smiling was that I didn’t like the caps she had on her teeth. They were too big. I look through a camera and for some reason I’m very sensitive to actors’ teeth. I never said anything about it at the time. In fact, I don’t know why I’m telling you about it right now.”
• Cruiser Tracey Osborn teaches social studies in Dallas and uses classic films in her college curriculum. It Happened One Night serves as a bridge between romantic comedy and screwball comedy; The Best Years of Our Lives does duty for post-traumatic stress disorder; The Mortal Storm – with James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan – does the same for the rise of fascism. The kids don’t like black and white when they come in, but they’re fine with it by the time they leave.

“The students fill out an evaluation at the end of the course, and it’s always interesting,” she says. “Their favorite film last semester was The Mortal Storm. Their least favorite was Dr. Strangelove. They didn’t get the Cold War, and they don’t have any fear of nuclear war, so it just went right over their heads.”

• “On every picture I made,” says Eva Marie Saint, “I would come home after the first day and my husband – we’ve been married for 60 years now – would ask me, ‘What did you like about your leading man?’ And I would always find something. It could be his eyes, his voice, his nose. I could always find something I loved about him. That was important to me.

“My mentor as an actress was Lillian Gish. I did my first Broadway show with her – ‘A Trip to Bountiful,’ by Horton Foote. Lillian told me something I’ve never forgotten: ‘To be an actress you have to be vulnerable, and you have to have a spine of steel.’ And she taught me by example that you have to be the first one there, and the last one to leave. Her philosophy was ‘Don’t ever look back. All you’ve got is today and tomorrow; don’t complain and don’t ever become bitter.”

• Lynn Love, a special education administrator in Hutchinson, Kan., had never been on a cruise in her life, but her love of movies from the ’40s and ’50s, always excepting science fiction, won her over. That and one other thing: “I love Robert Osborne. He has such beautiful hair.”

Osborne does indeed have beautiful hair, and that’s not all. Osborne has been the on-air host at TCM since the channel went on the air in 1994. He is an avuncular, genuinely kind man who has gradually achieved the kind of bond between personality and audience that Walter Cronkite used to have. The audience doesn’t merely like him; they trust him.

Osborne started out as an actor, and he was signed to a contract by Lucille Ball’s Desilu Productions – a diligent search through You Tube will bring up at least one of Osborne’s acting appearances for Desilu, and he still counts Ball as a mentor. Osborne worked a lot – he played Palm Beach’s Royal Poinciana Theatre in a show with Robert Cummings – but he only found real success when he became a columnist for the Hollywood Reporter.

The fact that everybody in Hollywood liked him made him an effective conduit for doings around town. The Hollywood Reporter job led to writing the official history of the Academy Awards, which led to various on-air appearances at Oscar functions, which led to the job at Turner Classic Movies.

It’s a perfectly balanced three-act structure for a life, and Osborne much prefers the third act. “As an actor, I was always playing lawyers,” he says. “I’d come in carrying a briefcase and deliver some exposition. And for whatever reason, I never had the self-confidence an actor needs. I remember reading scripts and thinking ‘George Peppard could do this so much better.’

“And when I was a journalist, there were certain things I didn’t want to do. I knew Rock Hudson was dying of AIDS, and my editor wanted me to go on TV with this big exclusive, and I wouldn’t do it. He wasn’t the President of the United States, he was an actor and he was dying and it was his business. That might not be the best attitude for a journalist.

“Now, I’m doing something of value, and I don’t have to pretend about anything.”

• “I used to eat in the lunchroom at the Goldwyn Studio,” says director Norman Jewison (‘In the Heat of the Night, Fiddler on the Roof, Moonstruck’) “Billy Wilder ate there every day, and for a year or two, he never said a word to me. Nothing. I was invisible. And then he saw ‘The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming’ at a private screening. The next day he invited me over to his table. ‘Nice movie, kid,’ he said. ‘Did you get a piece of the gross?’

“Nobody knew it was going to be a hit, except Billy Wilder.”

• Unlike the channel itself, the TCM Cruise was rigorously middle-of-the-road, showing the generational favorites: Casablanca, North by Northwest, etc. (One exception: Ernest Borgnine chose his tough action film Emperor Of The North for screening over the sentimental Marty.)

But these events are mostly about pleasing the audience. As TCM programming chief Charles Tabesh says, “Last year at the film festival we had an event with Tony Curtis. We’d done a lot with Tony, and some people thought we didn’t need to do yet another event. But the audience had a great time with him, and he had a great time, and a few months later he was dead. So that reminded me that someone is always seeing Casablanca for the first time.”

But there’s something else: People can surprise you. Lynn Love says that one of the primary reasons she came was to see one movie on the big screen: Marnie, Alfred Hitchcock’s famously problematic story of sexual repression that was being shown as a tribute to Tippi Hedren.

And a retired fireman from Dothan, Ala., when asked what was his favorite movie of all time, thought hard for a good 15 seconds before coming to a decision. They Were Expendable, he finally said, referring to the famously gloomy John Ford movie about the early, disastrous campaign in the Philippines during World War II.

His wife stared at him in surprise. “You never said that before,” she said.

“Well, nobody ever asked me before,” he replied.

• “The difference between actors raised in the studio system and actors today,” says the 94-year-old Ernest Borgnine, “is honesty. They were honest. ‘To thine own self be true’ Actors like Gary Cooper and Spencer Tracy weren’t just saying lines; they were being true to themselves. There’s no heart behind a lot of modern actors. They look at you and all they’re doing is waiting for you to stop talking so they can start talking. A real actor will listen with total concentration, then respond in kind. Today, when you talk about real actors, I think of John Lithgow and Robert Downey – those are actors!”
• Given the quick sell-out of the cruise this year, and the wreathed smiles of the cruisers as they were getting ready to go home, TCM will almost certainly be doing the cruise again next year.

But Charles Tabesh thinks that the next thing the channel has to do is not event-driven, but technological. “More streaming, more viewing on demand. We have a stable niche that hasn’t gone down, and doing that will ensure that it won’t. Frankly, I think a lot of our success comes from Bob.”

That’s for sure. Dawn Chapman, of Chandler, Ariz., says that, “If, God forbid, everyone in my family was killed in a plane crash, I could turn on Turner Classic Movies and watch those movies and Bob Osborne and get a sense of comfort from his elegance and warmth.”

That’s one way of looking at it. But there’s another, deeper reason behind the success of the film festival and the cruise. And that is the fact that thousands of people from across the country, from cities and small towns, young and old and middle-aged, Republicans and Democrats, gay and straight, were all united by the simple fact that they live deeply within the movies.

As Robert Osborne says, “If we all lived in the same town, we’d all be friends.”