Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (2004) is a documentary about Los Angeles pay cable channel Z Channel that accompanied the DVD release of uncut version of Heaven's Gate.So whoever wrote this entry could only commend that it was a DVD that was released with the uncut version of Heaven's Gate. Here's a few more sentences. It's a documentary about one untold piece of movie lore in which a brilliant, though psychotic, programmer named Jerry Harvey educated the Los Angeles area about good movies. Men like Jerry Harvey, Quentin Tarantino and Roger Ebert are, I'm convinced, the ones who are actually trying to help the rest of us see why movies are important by showing us these movies. Harvey ultimately murdered his wife and then committed suicide in what appeared to be the result of his own inability to manage his deep mental illness. Despite this tragedy, he did incredible work at Z Channel. To just name a few things:
1. He brought attention to films that had been completely butchered by studios during the editing stage. For instance, it was Harvey that ended up playing the full four hour version of Once Upon a Time in American, which is arguably one of the greatest films made of that decade. Directed by Sergio Leone and starring Robert De Niro, James Wood and a young, beautiful Elizabeth McGovern, it's a movie that played poorly in a test viewing which resulted in the studio gutting it down to two hours, making the film what I can only imagine is completely unwatchable. Harvey played it on Z Channel, and managed to bring the movie to the public's attention. One critic wrote it was the worst movie of the year when she saw the 2 hour cut, and when she saw the 4 cut later, wrote that it was in the top ten films of that decade. He did similar things for such movies as Heaven's Gate, too. In other words, Jerry Harvey invented the "director's cut."
2. James Wood gives Harvey all the credit for bringing the public's attention to the Oliver Stone film, Salvador. Woods, in the documentary, notes that the movie had no budget and no money to promote the film. It showed in February, and disappeared very quickly soon afterwards. Harvey saw the movie, and contacted Woods telling him that he would play it in December on the channel. He put the movie on the cover of Z Channel's preview guide (which appears to have been, itself, a fantastic monthly zine with excellent reviews) in December during which the Bel Air festival circuit was playing the movies that would later be nominated for Academy Awards. In the end, Harvey's actions got the movie tons of exposure, which Woods credits for getting him an Oscar nomination for Best Actress as well as a Screenwriting nomination for the writers.
3. Harvey brought about the use of letterboxing films, wherein the entire film in its original dimensions would be shown on television (which has a different dimension that traditionally required cropping films). This is of course now the standard way of distributing movies to television.
There are many more such stories as these, but what it appears is that Harvey was someone who understood good movies, and was passionate and adept at getting those movies to market for people who simply couldn't have themselves found the movies. This is the work of a kind of match maker when you think about it. He knew where the good movies were - in the popular films and the obscure films, he knew where they were and because of his obsessive work for Z Channel, he managed to educate many people growing up in Los Angeles, like Tarantino who was an early subscriber, about good movies. That the last chapter of his life, the bookend if you will, involves him murdering his wife and then executing himself makes the entire story all the more horrific.
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