David Gerber spent time as a POW during World War II, but the veteran producer and executive is revisiting a different war over the Memorial Day weekend.

Gerber approached Turner Classic Movies some time ago with the idea for a WWI marathon this Memorial Day, helping program a night of movies that includes the Gary Cooper classic "Sergeant York," "Dawn Patrol" with Errol Flynn, "The Fighting 69th" starring James Cagney, "The Big Parade," and director John Ford's "The Lost Patrol."(TCM is airing a number of World War II films over the weekend as well, including one of my personal favorites, "The Bridge on the River Kwai," and "They Were Expendable.")

A long-time history buff (his credits include the miniseries "George Washington"), Gerber produced the 2001 World War I movie "The Lost Battalion" for A&E and, more recently, the Emmy-nominated Sept. 11 pic "Flight 93" for the same network.

TCM's World War I block will be co-hosted Eli Paul of the National World War I Museum.

For the last week, thanks to one of those free-trial periods, I've been receiving 30 pay movie channels. And the really remarkable part is how often I've surfed through them without finding anything that I had even the most remote interest in watching.

Thus far, pay TV appears to have weathered the recession, perhaps in part because people are staying home more and thus hanging onto their entertainment options. Yet even with all those channels available -- and strictly from a movie standpoint, I'd expand this to include Turner Classic Movies, AMC and other basic channels that air movies regularly with commercial interruptions, like FX and TNT -- it's odd how much dreck there is out there.

TCM, in fact, has become a kind of default channel for me, the place I go most frequently between bouts of watching new-program DVDs to breathe in a few minutes of an old classic. The other night I found myself watching about half of "The Bridge on the River Kwai," for example. There are also recent movies that are easily consumed (or re-consumed) in 10-minute bits, so when HBO was running "300," say, I probably watched it two or three more times, albeit in non-linear increments. (Occasionally I'd flip to HBO and land smack dab in the middle of the same section of the movie I had just watched, a phenomenon that Variety editor Tim Gray once rather brilliantly referred to as "deja view.")

Obviously, this is extremely subjective, but beyond the fact that I already see a lot of movies, this strikes me as an indictment on the general quality of movie-making today and the way movie channels use library crap to augment the mediocre new titles in their scheduling rotations. At any rate, I'd be curious to hear others' thoughts and experiences in this regard -- and whether anybody is rethinking or cutting back on the elective portions of their cable bill due to the recession.