A NIGHT AT THE MOVIES: THE GIGANTIC WORLD OF EPICS looks at Hollywood’s biggest screen spectaculars from all sides, including the genre’s beginnings, literary adaptations, great epic directors and actors, the challenges of making big-budget movies, classic set-pieces and epic music scores.  The special also looks at how the genre fell out of favor with audiences and filmmakers in the ‘70s and ‘80s, only to be reborn with more recent films like Gladiator, Dances With Wolves, Braveheart and The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Throughout, the special is packed with classic scenes and behind-the-scenes images from such films as The Birth of A Nation, Gone with the Wind, The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur, Samson & Delilah, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, El Cid and King of Kings.

The special will feature interviews with such figures as TCM host Robert Osborne; filmmakers Jean-Jacques Annaud (Quest for Fire), Kenneth Branagh (Henry V), Jeffrey Katzenberg (Prince of Egypt), John Milius (The Wind and the Lion), and Steven Spielberg (Saving Private Ryan); author Ken Follett (Pillars of the Earth); actors Omar Sharif (Lawrence of Arabia) and Martin Landau (Cleopatra); stuntmen Loren James (The Ten Commandments) and Diamond Farnsworth (Pearl Harbor); production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas (Elizabeth: The Golden Age); assistant director Michael Stevenson (Doctor Zhivago); film historians Gary Allen Smith, Melvyn Stokes and Rudy  Behlmer; and biographer Natasha Fraser Cavassoni.  Also included are reminiscences from director Fraser Heston, son of Charlton Heston; Cecilia DeMille Presley, granddaughter of epic filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille; William Bronston, son of producer Samuel Bronston; and Nina Mann, daughter of director Anthony Mann.