After yesterday’s overcast chilliness, regular southern California sunshine came back to Hollywood, and with it, gaggles of tourists. The four festival venues — Grauman’s Chinese, Mann’s Chinese (two screens there), and the Egyptian Theater — are all within a stone’s throw from the Hollywood Roosevelt HQ, so getting to a film means running two gauntlets: the traffic and the tourists. The crosswalks, while a bit of a long wait, are the easy part. The tourists, however… With everyone looking down at their feet to see whose star they’re trampling upon, it requires savvy navigation and radar skills to figure out who may suddenly stop short, or who’s creating their own new photo op. The biggest hub is around Michael Jackson’s star, which is (in)conveniently located in front of the Grauman’s gift shop, adjacent to the theater.

But once you find your way inside, things get much calmer — especially before 9am. Decreeing it far too early for the psychedelic fantasia of 2001: A Space Odyssey, I decide to go old-school Hollywood with an early screening of 1952′s The Bad and the Beautiful, a behind-the-scenes Hollywood melodrama starring Kirk Douglas, Lana Turner, Dick Powell and Gloria Grahame (who won a supporting actress Oscar), and directed by Vincente Minnelli. There’s a surprisingly robust crowd for the early hour, and turns out even Robert Osborne is up this early too, and introduces Lana Turner’s daughter, Cheryl Crane, who was about 8 years old when filming commenced. They chat for about 10 minutes or so, and the conversation turns toward Lana’s sense of humor, a tangent that seems jarring — until you see the movie. This is probably Turner’s best performance ever, and as an alcoholic actress with daddy issues and an inferiority complex, she’s more relaxed than you’ll probably ever see her on screen, and handles Minnelli’s shifts from melodrama to cynical wit with amazing ease. Her tour-de-force is the quintessential nervous-breakdown-while-driving-a-speeding-car-in-the-pouring-rain scene, which she still probably owns to this day. The film itself is not perfect — it feels like a Hollywood knockoff of All About Eve, with Kirk Douglas as the schemer everyone’s entranced by — but Minnelli, who still remains an underdog in the auteur-appreciaton sweepstakes, knows how to handle a camera with balletic skill, and takes unparalleled care with his actors. There isn’t a false note in the cast, and Grahame, who’s in only a handful of scenes, waltzes off with the film as a steely, ambitious, yet loving and naive southern belle, a prototype steel magnoila.

As it turns out, directors will emerge as the theme of the day, as I next make my way to “Club TCM” for a conversation between Leonard Maltin and director Peter Bogdanovich. As the two enter, Maltin looks even more gee-whiz in person than he does on TV, and Bogdanovich is wearing what I now take to be his trademark cravat. The two get comfy in easy chairs among an audience of 100 or more, and begin talking about Bogdanovich’s early career. Things start off with The Last Picture Show, and Bogdanovich proves to be an easygoing yet compelling raconteur, talking about the casting process of the film (he let Ellen Burstyn choose her own role) and Orson Welles’ initial disapproval of the script (it was “dirty”). Being only an hour, the conversation doesn’t progress further past Paper Moon in Bogdanovich’s filmography, but does include a variety of tales about famous directors, from John Ford to Orson Welles to Alfred Hitchcock and even Fritz Lang. Two observations of Bogdanovich’s stand out: his matter-of-factness when talking about how Tatum O’Neal was “old beyond her years” even at age 8 thanks to the life-experience crammed into such a short time, and the director’s response to an audience members question about the industry: “The industry today? There is no industry… It’s gone to hell… The B picture is now the A picture,” he responded, with the caveat, “There’s always hope, I think.”

Two other directors — Douglas Sirk and Richard Rush — dominated my second half of the day, as I waited in a surprisingly long line for Imitation of Life; apparently, everyone waiting had also seen Valley of the Dolls copious times. The print itself was a tad disappointing, but the Sirk strings, after all these years, were effectively played and pulled. The audience laughed outright at Lana Turner’s oblivious racism (and numerous costume and hair changes), but when the melodrama kicked into high gear, snuffles were loudly apparent throughout the theater. Later, the film’s two Oscar-nominated stars, Juanita Moore and Susan Kohner (mother of director Chris Weitz), chatted with Robert Osborne about the movie. Dashing from there, I somehow managed to breeze into the screening of The Stunt Man at the festival’s smallest venue, the less-than-200 seat auditorium at Mann’s Chinese. Ben Mankiewicz introduced Oscar-nominated director Richard Rush before the film, which was being presented on a brand-new print just struck last week. The film, from 1980, still holds up amazingly well — Peter O’Toole is arguably at his career-best as an egomaniacal director toying with a Vietnam vet (Steve Railsback, almost crazier than O’Toole) on the run from the law. If its mix of comedy, action, drama and meta-Hollywood still strikes you as fresh now, imagine what audiences back in 1980, when Ordinary People was the year’s Oscar winner, made of this unique, one-of-a-kind, behind-the-scenes tall tale. While obviously and lovingly choreographed down to the nth degree, the movie still retains a kind of 70s/early 80s spontaneity most usually associated with Robert Altman and Alan Rudolph. And there are echoes of Fellini as well, with the driven auteur-director and the occasional bursts of circus-style music; this would make a fantastic double bill with 8 1/2. Afterwards, Railsback and co-star Barbara Hershey joined Mankiewicz and Rush for a 15 minute discussion of the movie. What was most notable weren’t bon-mots but the effortless camaraderie the three still shared after 30 years. It felt like absolutely no time had passed between what was seen on the screen and the present day.

Elsewhere today: Mel Brooks finally got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (where not a few TCM head honchos developed sunburn), and hosted a screening of the original 1968 The Producers; Jean-Paul Belmondo appeared at the screening of Breathless; Tony Curtis cameoed at Sweet Smell of Success, and special effects guru Douglas Trumbull of 2001 fame hosted his own panel at Club TCM. TCM is discouraging massive photo-taking at screenings and events (the lighting sure doesn’t help either), but is providing official photos, which we’ll be publishing throughout the weekend in our special section on the festival. And make sure to check out our Twitter feed @ IMDbLive as well.

Saturday: I’ll be following the Hustons around all day, as the festival celebrates the cinematic family with three films: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and The Proposition. If energy allows, I’ll try to pick up the 10pm screening of Saturday Night Fever, which is already garnering retro-buzz among festival-going 20-somethings who have never seen John Travolta’s disco moves on the big screen — if ever.