BY GENE TRIPLETT

Convincing kids that classic movies are cool is John Lithgow’s summer job.
The award-winning actor and children’s author reports to work at 7 p.m. Sunday on the Turner Classic Movies channel as the host of “Essentials Jr.,” a weekly series designed to introduce young people to vintage family-friendly movies.
First up is “Old Yeller,” the 1957 boy-and-his-dog favorite from Walt Disney that Lithgow first saw at age 12.
“It was the first good cry I ever had in a movie theater,” Lithgow said in a recent phone interview from Los Angeles. “I even cried when I watched it again this spring. It’s just a beautifully made film.”
The film, based on an award-winning novel by Fred Gipson about a frontier family that adopts a loving and courageous mongrel dog, is typical of most of the films presented on “Essentials Jr.,” a kids’ version of “The Essentials,” which is a Saturday evening series hosted by TCM’s Robert Osborne and actor Alec Baldwin, introducing a more adult audience to films that are deemed essential viewing.
“In so many cases, you really have to persuade people to give these movies a chance,” Lithgow said. “Because, after all, I am pitching them to families and young people, and it’s hard to persuade a young person to watch a movie that was made 50 years ago.”
This will be Lithgow’s second summer hosting “Essentials Jr.,” and it’s a role to which he’s well suited in more ways than one.
The son of a retired actress and a theatrical producer, the Rochester, N.Y., native studied acting at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts and made his debut on Broadway in 1973 in David Storey’s “The Changing Room,” earning a Tony Award for best featured actor in a play.
Since then, he’s performed in nearly 20 Broadway productions, winning another Tony, three Tony nominations, four Drama Desk Awards and induction into the Theatre Hall of Fame. Lithgow’s extensive list of film credits includes back-to-back Oscar nominations for “The World According to Garp” and “Terms of Endearment,” plus prominent roles in “All That Jazz,” “Twilight Zone: The Movie,” “Footloose,” “Kinsey,” “Dreamgirls” and four Brian De Palma thrillers: “Obsession,” “Dressed to Kill” “Blow Out” and “Raising Cain.”
His TV credits include an Emmy-winning performance in an episode of “Amazing Stories” and three additional Emmys for his performances on the long-running comedy “3rd Rock From the Sun,” which also scored him a Golden Globe, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, an American Comedy Award and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He recently earned another Golden Globe for his performance as the title character’s father on the TV series “Dexter.”
So, Lithgow has the credentials to talk about film. But he’s also well-qualified to talk persuasively to kids.
Aside from raising three children of his own, Lithgow has penned seven New York Times best-selling children’s books, created two activity books for parents and kids, developed readers for use in elementary schools and compiled 50 classic poems aimed at young people.
He’s won two Parents’ Choice Silver Honor Awards and four Grammy nominations for his children’s recordings. Simon & Schuster recently published his newest children’s book, “I Got Two Dogs.” He’s performed concerts for kids with the Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Baltimore and San Diego symphony orchestras and at Carnegie Hall with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s.
It would seem that Lithgow likes kids.
“It’s totally selfish on my part,” he said. “I just love entertaining kids. I have my own children, and when I was a kid, I had a little sister 10 years younger than I, and I was like an assistant parent to her. And I think it all began with that.”
His mission with “Essentials Jr.” is to entertain, but it’s also a different way to educate.
“It’s a matter of giving them the context, giving them some information, just enough to make them curious and sort of give them a hook,” Lithgow said. “And in so many cases, it’s a matter of telling them about the time that the movie was made, and the reason why it was such a success and spoke so much to that moment.”
Lithgow cites as an example “To Kill a Mockingbird,” released in 1962. Set in a small Alabama town in the 1930s, the film tells the story of a lawyer (Gregory Peck), also a widower and father of two small children, who defends a black man accused of raping a white woman.
That may seem like heavy viewing fare for children, but it’s included in this summer’s selection of “Essentials Jr.” films, and Lithgow will tell you why.
“You take a movie like ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ which was a movie created right at the beginning of the civil-rights movement, and what a statement that was, about tolerance and intolerance,” he said. “I don’t think that’s too much for a young person to hear at all.
“And I remember ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ as the first kind of grownup film that really meant something to me. … And in most cases I do speak from my own kind of dimly remembered experience of seeing these films as a kid, and trying to get them to look at them the same way.
“I think, of the films this summer, that is the one that kind of places the bar the highest for kids. But it is a film that’s told completely from the point of view of two young kids. And those two adorable children, those two great child actors (Mary Badham, Phillip Alford). And it’s mainly about their relationship to their dad.
“I can’t really speak for a child’s experience of that, but I think that it makes it a very, very engrossing film for them,” Lithgow said. “Yeah, it’s disturbing. I mean there is a flat-out dangerous racist, and these are unsettling ideas. But I think a lot of the best stuff for kids is kind of unsettling. If kids are untroubled by things they see and experience in movies and television — you know, the best of it — help them to learn from the experience.”
Other films
TCM’s “Essentials Jr.” schedule this summer also includes:
“Duck Soup” (1933).
“The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T” (1953).
“Bye Bye Birdie” (1963).
“Speedy” (1928).
“Beauty and the Beast” (1946).
“Buck Privates” (1941).
“The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” (1939).
“Road to Morocco” (1942).
“The Secret Garden” (1949).
“Swiss Family Robinson” (1960).

BY DENNIS KING

Spring is jam-packed with film festivals in varying shades of hipness, exclusivity and adventurousness, most of them aimed at showcasing the latest, cutting-edge works of cinema.

But for the old popcorn-munchers among us, for whom cinema dreams most often occur in black-and-white (and, well OK, occasionally in widescreen Technicolor with plush curtains and footlights), a brave new film festival is in the offing. And it’s one that’s both exhilarating in its originality and comforting in its traditionalism.

It’s the first, and one hopes annual, TCM Classic Film Festival taking place April 22-25 in that most mythic of movie meccas – Hollywood.

Turner Classic Movies has since its founding in 1994 been the go-to cable TV channel for lovers of old movies. Its extensive library is a priceless treasure trove of everything from silent films, to screwball comedies of the 1930s and ’40s, film noir of the 1950s, glamorous escapist musicals, weepy melodramas, tingling mysteries, galloping cowboy movies and virtually anything else that might be classified in film as “classic.”

So, who better to initiate such a celebration?

Over four days and nights, the TCM festival – taking place at storied venues such as Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel and the Egyptian Theatre – will feature some 50 film screenings with special appearances by actors, actresses, directors, producers and other notables. There will also be red-carpet galas, tributes to classic stars and filmmakers, first looks at newly restored films, a sneak preview of the new documentary “Moguls and Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood” and interviews and panel discussions with an impressive roster of movie luminaries.

Naturally, rubbing shoulders with Hollywood blue-bloods such as directors Mel Brooks (who’ll unveil his new star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame) and Peter Bogdanovich, actors Norman Lloyd, Tony Curtis, Martin Landau and Jerry Lewis, writer Buck Henry, film critic and historian Leonard Maltin, 100-year-old actress Luise Rainer and, of course, TCM’s own host with the most, Robert Osborne, doesn’t come free.

From out here in the deep balcony seats of Oklahoma, it’s a far piece to Tinseltown. But for those who can spring for air fare and lodging, festival tickets are now being sold through TCM’s website (www.tcm.com/festival).

Passes are available on three levels – The Classic, The Essential and The Spotlight – carrying escalating perks and access. And they’ll set you back, respectively, $499, $599 and a whopping $1,199 (which provides V.I.P. entry to all events and venues).

But the opportunity to view such classics as “Casablanca,” “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” “The Magnificent Ambersons,” “The Producers” and more on the big screen in archival prints is reason enough to celebrate this rare festival.

TCM’s website contains a list of films being screened, special events, panel discussions, invited guests and amenities for festival-goers. The site is updated regularly as new festival features are announced.