Say what you will about the future of cable TV, but I think it’s safe to say that Turner Classic Movies, in some form, will endure. The world needs Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy—if only as a comfort zone, a link to a time when the world was a little more well dressed, and the cocktail hour was given the respect it deserves. And that’s where Daniel Zilber comes in. Zilber is the man behind the Twitter account @NextOnTCM—but he isn’t employed by TCM in any way.

He’s 48, lives in Atlanta, and has a background in performing arts (he co-founded San Francisco’s Thrillpeddlers theater company), and schedules his DVR from his phone. He hated turning on TCM only to see that it was halfway through a great movie, so he created @NextOnTCM to remind himself what was on. This was three years ago, when TCM’s actual account seemed to be random promotions for DVDs on sale in their store, and retweets from enthusiastic viewers. As he provided the simple but crucial service of a curated TV guide, @NextOnTCM grew to a film geek’s dream Twitter for its perfectly concise, poetic movie summary tweets that sometimes included little inside jokes that only a few will catch—and a rare zany aside when the mood is right.

But let’s begin with a quiz.

Can you guess this movie?

If you guessed The Thin Man, you’re right, and you have great taste in movies and, hell, you’re not bad looking either!

If that was too hard, here’s a softball:

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, you guessed it.

And if you can’t guess this, you might be in trouble:

The tweets are usually crafted from TCM’s own online guide, and then edited by Zilber down to 140 characters. He makes sure to avoid spoilers, and add some fun here and there. For example:

That tweet was for The Unknown (1927). Zilber looked up obscure medical terms to describe the plot, you know, to keep it unknown. “It was totally accurate, but completely unhelpful in terms of describing the movie.”

Zilber spends about 30 minutes a day scheduling tweets for the next day—and admits that many followers just think it’s done by a bot, and that’s O.K. (He’s incredibly modest about the success of the account, and refuses to engage with the crazies and the crossword puzzlers who reply with angry corrections.) Paring down the paragraph summaries from TCM isn’t too hard, it’s trying to have some fun that takes more time. “I’ve tried to do a limerick for Wuthering Heights, and I’m just stuck on one line. So if you ever see a limerick about Wuthering Heights you’ll know I’ve cracked it. I’ve been working on that for at least a year. It’s sitting in a file by itself, I know it’s going to come to me.”

@NextOnTCM’s relatively modest 14,700 followers include some huge names, among them Taylor Schilling, Margaret Cho, Michael McKean, director Rian Johnson (Looper), comic-book artist Jaime Hernandez (Love and Rockets), Anika Noni Rose, and Pat Sajak. “Katie Holmes even followed me for a while,” Zilber told me, “but just like Tom Cruise, she eventually kicked me to the curb.”

Despite that, he doesn’t really engage with his high-profile followers on any topics other than classic movies. “I don’t get too caught up in it. I know that that’s not who I’m doing it for. I’m doing it, primarily for me.”

Zilber says none of his 14,000 [nearly 15,000] followers are his real-life family and friends, and that’s O.K. too. When we spoke, only his wife and a few friends knew about his hobby. “I don’t intentionally keep it a secret from my friends and co-workers, it just never really comes up in conversation.”

I asked him what he predicts for the future of TCM—will black-and-white movies make it past the Internet’s current nostalgia phase?

“The really great thing that I learned early on from this account is that there is a tremendous diversity of people who watch the channel—and not only watch, they’re devoted to it. There are high-school kids, there are older people, there are lots of 20- and 30-somethings, all ethnicities, all political spectrums, everything from the very far left to the far right, which is why I tend to throw [in] a few jokes every now and then to see who’s paying attention.”

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