| “LIKE THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, BUT WITH A SENSE OF HUMOUR…”
z channel: a magnificent obsession
XAN CASSAVETES’ DOCUMENTARY, Z CHANNEL: A MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION, ABOUT A LOS ANGELES TV
LEGEND AND ITS TROUBLED
PROGRAMMER, PROVOKES A
FEW MEMORIES FOR FORMER SUBSCRIBER
NICK RODDICK.
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In the summer of 1981, I moved into a rental house in Los Angeles. That first week, the furniture consisted of a bed, a table, four chairs (courtesy of the Long Beach Salvation Army repository) and a television. The previous owner of the house had either not had a television (unlikely) or had taken the antenna with him (along with the light bulbs and doorknobs), so the first task was erecting a new one.
This involved climbing onto the roof, fixing the antenna to a chimney, and trying to point it towards Mount Wilson (which is where Southern California’s main TV relay station is). To do this, you had to turn on the TV, plug in the lead, climb up on the roof, do a rough positioning of the antenna, climb down, check the picture, climb up again, adjust the antenna… Some way into this process, I became aware I was being watched.
“How it’s going?” asked a voice, which turned out to be that of my new neighbour. I explained what I was doing. “Don’t want to do all that,” he said. “Just sign up with Z Channel.”
Cable television was in its infancy in those days, and my neighbour’s advice ushered in a love-affair with Los Angeles’ quirkiest channel, where - although I had no idea about it at the time - a guy called Jerry Harvey had just taken over as programmer. What I did know was that Z Channel had more interesting movies than almost anyone else (unless you counted the classic Warner Bros gangster movies KTLA ran between three and five am) and, within a year, would be running 24 hours a day.
Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession, Xan Cassavetes’ IFC-produced documentary about Harvey and his mission to unearth lost masterpieces and restore butchered movies to their full length, proves that I was not alone in my little obsession. Jim Jarmusch, it turns out, used to ask friends to tape films from Z Channel - which broadcast under the supposed auspices of ‘Theta, Goddess of Television’ - and mail them to him in New York. Woody Allen’s Annie Hall apparently owes its Oscars at least in part to its repeated broadcasts on Z Channel, since most Academy members were subscribers. Too bad the channel no longer exists, think of all the fuss that could have been saved over screeners.
Harvey more or less invented the idea of the ‘director’s cut’, screening the original versions of such films as Bertolucci’s 1900, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, and that masterpiece maudit of the ‘new Hollywood’, Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate.
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