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| z channel: a magnificent obsession
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THE MASTER… AND THOSE
WHO REMEMBER HIM
Below right, Z Channel programmer Jerry Harvey. Clockwise from above: Robert Altman, Quentin Tarantino, Paul Verhoeven, Jacqueline Bisset and Theresa Russell. | 
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Z Channel was the only place US audiences ever had a chance to see Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz or the full television version of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander. Paul Verhoeven reckons he owes his Hollywood career to the channel, since it screened and re-screened his major Dutch movies like Turkish Delight and The Fourth Man. A teenager called Quentin Tarantino even took a petition round his neighbourhood to get support for bringing Z Channel into the area. It was, in Harvey’s own memorable phrase, like “the Museum of Modern Art, but with a sense of humour”.
It was also the only cable channel never to experience ‘churn’: once a subscriber was signed, they stayed. This only changed in 1988, when Z Channel was taken over by a sports broadcaster and ‘Z plus Sports’ was launched. Many of the original subscribers deserted. But, by then, Jerry Harvey only had a week to live.
Cassavetes came to the film through a chance remark by Jason Resnick of Focus Features, to whom she was explaining how important Z Channel had been to her when her father, the late great actor/director, had grounded her to prevent her from going to punk-rock clubs. “If you’re so passionate,” said Resnick, “why don’t you make a documentary?”
“I was clueless,” recalls Cassavetes. “I didn’t really know Z’s history. I knew there’d been a genius programmer who died under mysterious circumstances, and that the channel folded after he died, but otherwise… nada.”
The documentary which she subsequently made - and on which a small team of producers, production associates and interns laboured to get clearances on the 52 clips shown to demonstrate the extent of the channel’s programming policy - quickly acquired another element: a reflection on the life of Jerry Harvey.
The director’s reference to Harvey having died ‘in mysterious circumstances’ turned out not to be the half of it. Born in Bakersfield, the son of a judge who liked to boast how many criminals he had sent to the electric chair, Harvey had had a troubled childhood and had been devastated later in life when both of his (older) sisters committed suicide. He was subject to extreme mood swings, which were exacerbated by legal tussles over the sports channel merger. On April 9, 1988, Harvey loaded a shotgun, shot his second wife, Deri Rudulph, and turned the gun on himself.
Researching the man was like opening a floodgate of confused memories among Harvey’s friends. “When we would contact people and invite them in for a first meeting,” recalls Z Channel’s producer, Marshall Persinger, “the conversation would never go less than eight hours.” Thus one of the biggest problems facing Cassavetes was how to respond to this final dénouement - how to balance a celebration of the channel with a balanced view of Harvey’s life.
“I’d been wary of taking part in any documentary about Z or Jerry until I met Xan,” says critic FX Feeney, who had been a consultant at the channel and a close friend of Harvey’s. “The shame of Jerry’s murder of Deri can’t be sugar-coated, yet it can be too easily served up as scandal and exploitation.
“In Xan, I felt Jerry had found his ideal interpreter - someone who didn’t know him, but loved what he was about in the creative and heroic part of his life, which involved saving movies. Yet she so immediately communicated a deep, complex view of human nature, not to mention a sense of humour, that I quickly had faith that she would be able to illuminate the killing darkness that was also in Jerry, without romanticising it or coming up with ‘easy’ answers.”
Z Channel ceased broadcasting in 1989, but its legacy lives on. “Jerry Harvey was manic,” says Ned Nalle of Universal Pictures. “He was an obsessive programmer. I want to say that’s not a bad thing, by the way.”
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