Last weekend, the usual bustle of Hollywood Boulevard was overshadowed by unyielding crowds of lanyard-wearing film fanatics. Hordes of people shimmied between churro vendors and marched over Walk of Fame stars in a race between famous theaters on the strip.

From April 24 to 27, the annual TCM Classic Film Festival invited movie lovers to Hollywood for a weekend of screenings, panels and ceremonies to celebrate movies and the people who make them.

On Friday afternoon at the Egyptian Theatre, the festival took audiences back in time for screwball antics with “Bringing Up Baby” (1938). The comedy follows uptight, clumsy paleontologist David (Cary Grant) as he intertwines with the charming, scatter-brained heiress Susan (Katharine Hepburn).

Upon the movie’s release, audiences didn’t take to the fast-paced battle between order and chaos, but its critical influence on films like “What’s Up, Doc?” (1972) makes the movie an essential classic for countless fans. 

Lori Belle and Samantha Belle-Brown, a mother and daughter pair from Chicago, visit the film festival every year. Belle said she sits down to watch “Bringing Up Baby” any time it airs on the Turner Classic Movies network.

“Even though I’ve seen it many, many times, it stays on, and I still sit down and watch it,” Belle said. “It’s joyful. It just makes me happy.”

Later that evening, the TCL Chinese Theatre IMAX transported the audience to the blizzard-stricken town of Silver Creek with a screening of the classic horror feature “Misery” (1990). 

Based on the Stephen King novel of the same name, “Misery” concentrates on a bedridden novelist, Paul Sheldon (James Caan), as he recovers from a car crash in the home of his “#1 fan,” Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates). Sheldon quickly realizes his fate may be terminal as Wilkes reveals her psychotic obsession with his work.

Throughout the festival, iconic scores and character introductions were touched with unwavering joy from the audience. Bates’s Academy Award-winning performance as Wilkes blended with Rob Reiner’s witty direction to bring the house down, even as Sheldon’s circumstances onscreen became more harrowing by the minute.

If any viewers were unfamiliar with “Misery” before Friday night, their indifference was fully transformed into adoration within its sub-two-hour runtime. When the screening was followed by a conversation with Bates and Reiner, every attendee stood to cheer in celebration of the duo’s reunion.

During the conversation, Reiner revealed that actor Warren Beatty played the biggest role in the script’s development, working with Reiner and producer Andy Scheinman for months to tell the story correctly.

“He said, ‘This is not a horror movie. This is not a thriller … This is a prison movie,’” Reiner said. “‘That’s what you have to think about. It is a prison movie, and this man is in jail, and he has to be as smart as you guys are in trying to figure out how to get out of jail.’”

When the host referenced a prior interview in which Bates said she relates to Wilkes, the theater howled with laughter as Reiner swiftly stood from his chair and glided away from his actress.

The crowd remained enraptured by Bates’s charm as she spoke about the challenge of filming her climactic fight scene with Caan.

“Thank God I’ve never been in a relationship like that,” Bates said. “But there’s still time!”

Energy stayed high throughout the weekend, and on Sunday afternoon, fans scurried away from under gray skies and into the seats of the TCL Chinese 6 Theatres for David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” (1986). The film follows college student Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) as he unravels a mortifying mystery upon finding a severed ear in his idyllic American town.

Jeffrey is pursued by psychopathic gangster Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) all while balancing romances with his high school sweetheart, Sandy Williams (Laura Dern), and masochistic club singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini).

Festival attendee Nicole Colson flew into Los Angeles to view the screenings with her sister. She said the late director’s style and narrative focus on good and evil are timeless.

“I like to think there will always be a massive crowd for David Lynch,” Colson said. “Nobody does it the way he did it, and I don’t think that’ll ever go out of style.”

Sunday evening marked one of the festival’s most anxious crowds, as fans camped out in a line wrapping through the Chinese Theatre complex for one of the weekend’s most anticipated and final screenings, “Heat” (1995). 

Michael Mann’s crime thriller tracks obsessive detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) and professional thief Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) as the former pursues the ladder in a chase that reveals their core similarities. “Heat” was the long-awaited on-screen matchup of two titan Hollywood actors. Decades after its release, audiences still jump at its tension and spectacle.

Nearly one thousand guests shuffled past memorabilia cases and between the lobby’s shining red pillars. Yellow bags of glistening hot popcorn and prearranged ICEE cups awaited the crowds in the concession stand, but most audience members made a beeline for their seats.

After the festival’s intro segment played, a spotlight was fixed below the screen where Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz stood at a podium to thank the festival staff. After a brief applause, he introduced the “epic story of cops and robbers,” celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. 

Mankiewicz applauded its “riveting story, unforgettable shot selection, perfect pacing, [as] relentless as the characters,” before welcoming to the stage its director, Michael Mann. As the audience stood to cheer on the legendary auteur, the second special guest strided prematurely across the stage.

Al Pacino, clad in a black suit jacket and slacks, grinned and waved as he moved across the front row while Mankiewicz pleaded, “Wait! Wait! Wait!”

Once the laughter subsided and everyone took their seats, the audience hung on every word as the actor and director responded to Mankiewicz’s questions.

The conversation inevitably centered on the movie’s nexus, when Hanna and McCauley speak face-to-face over coffee. Mann said the scene’s complexity impacted his decision to set the moment in Kate Mantilini, a now-defunct, black-and-white restaurant in Beverly Hills.

“It really was a very careful moment,” Mann said. “I wanted nothing to intrude on what these two actors were gonna do.”

Pacino broadened the conversation to working with great directors and how Mann made him feel understood as an actor when he could have held himself back.

“You feel you have a net,” Pacino said. “You’re protected by their intelligence, their wisdom, their pastiche, and so that’s very good to work with in that environment, because you can trust them.”

After its nearly three-hour runtime, credits rolled on “Heat” to thunderous applause, not just for the film, but for every movie and memory on the four-day schedule. Still bright-eyed and beaming, hordes of festival goers were ushered back onto Hollywood Boulevard for the final time — until next year.