Jerry Harvey
Encyclopedia
Jerry Harvey was an American
screenwriter and film programmer, best known for his work on Z Channel
, a pioneering cable station in Los Angeles
from 1974 to 1989.
(UCLA), Harvey first established himself within the film community by programming the director's cut of Sam Peckinpah
's The Wild Bunch
at the Beverly Canon Theater in 1974. Peckinpah himself was in attendance. The film played that day to a sellout crowd.
The very concept of "the director's cut" had no commercial viability until Harvey demonstrated it with this screening. After, as longer versions of such films as Touch of Evil
by Orson Welles
began surfacing from studio vaults, "director's cuts" became a staple of the Revival House theater-circuit. (In the 1960s and '70s, before the rise of Home Video, "Revival Houses" were the only way to see films as their makers intended.) Harvey's passion for film won him great friendships with such maverick filmmakers and master directors as Robert Altman
, James B. Harris
, Monte Hellman
, and such actors as Peter O'Toole
. He brought these relationships to bear on his work at Z Channel, where he became director of programming in 1981. The films whose director's cuts Harvey championed, using Z's as a showcase, include: Michael Cimino
's Heaven's Gate
, The Ruling Class
with Peter O'Toole
, Sergio Leone
's Once Upon a Time in America
, Karel Reisz
's The Loves of Isadora. John Ford
's Up the River
, Bernardo Bertolucci
's 1900
, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid.
A 2004 documentary directed by Xan Cassavetes, Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession
, detailed Harvey's life and accomplishments. Altman and Harris attested to Harvey's great sympathy and inspirational value as a champion of film. Younger filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino
, and Jim Jarmusch
likewise acknowledged the influence of Z on their own work.
The film also chronicles a tragic history with women. Harvey's two older sisters, Mary and Ann, committed suicide
in 1975 and 1978 respectively. These deaths, and the inherent despairs which triggered them, haunted and afflicted Harvey—destroying two longtime love-relationships, first with Doreen Ringer-Ross who lived with Harvey from 1973 to 1978, and photographer-filmmaker Vera Anderson, who married Harvey shortly after Ann's suicide in '78, and divorced him in 1984. Harvey's second wife, Deri Rudulph (born December 21, 1949), married him in February, 1986. They remained together until April 9, 1988, when Harvey killed Rudulph with a pistol before turning the gun on himself.
, launched in 1974, was one of the first Pay TV services in the U.S., and because it served Los Angeles, filmmakers constituted most of its subscribers. The channel enjoyed tremendous popularity and influence even before Harvey took charge of its programming in 1981. Producer Charles Joffe told filmmaker Xan Cassavetes that the primary strategic reason Woody Allen
's Annie Hall
won the Academy Award in 1977 is because it had played so frequently on Z Channel during the weeks the awards were being voted on.
Jerry Harvey's first significant coup came in 1982, when studio executive David Chasman alerted him that the director's cut of Heaven's Gate
, written and directed by Michael Cimino
, was lying fallow in a British vault. Few had seen this version since its one week run in Manhattan
, in November 1980. (The film had been so viciously attacked that it was generally believed, even by studio insiders, that Cimino's original version had ceased to exist altogether.) Harvey retrieved this one remaining print and gave it a highly publicized "world premiere
" on December 24, 1982. The success of this airing was consequential. Cimino's version was shortly released on home video, where it is now the only version available.
Although Harvey saw to it that "Z" (as it was affectionately known by its subscribers and devotees) kept commercial pace with its rivals HBO, Showtime and The Movie Channel
-- always showing the latest box office hits—Z's primary appeal to viewers lay in its devotion to films that were passionate, and personal.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
screenwriter and film programmer, best known for his work on Z Channel
Z Channel
The Z Channel was one of the first pay cable stations in the United States. Launched in 1974 from Los Angeles, California, this station was known for its devotion to the art of cinema due to the eclectic choice of films by the programming chief, Jerry Harvey...
, a pioneering cable station in Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
from 1974 to 1989.
Background
Born in Bakersfield, California, a graduate of the University of California, Los AngelesUniversity of California, Los Angeles
The University of California, Los Angeles is a public research university located in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, USA. It was founded in 1919 as the "Southern Branch" of the University of California and is the second oldest of the ten campuses...
(UCLA), Harvey first established himself within the film community by programming the director's cut of Sam Peckinpah
Sam Peckinpah
David Samuel "Sam" Peckinpah was an American filmmaker and screenwriter who achieved prominence following the release of the Western epic The Wild Bunch...
's The Wild Bunch
The Wild Bunch
The Wild Bunch is a 1969 American Western film directed by Sam Peckinpah about an aging outlaw gang on the Texas-Mexico border, trying to exist in the changing "modern" world of 1913...
at the Beverly Canon Theater in 1974. Peckinpah himself was in attendance. The film played that day to a sellout crowd.
The very concept of "the director's cut" had no commercial viability until Harvey demonstrated it with this screening. After, as longer versions of such films as Touch of Evil
Touch of Evil
Touch of Evil is a 1958 American crime thriller film, written, directed by, and co-starring Orson Welles. The screenplay was loosely based on the novel Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson...
by Orson Welles
Orson Welles
George Orson Welles , best known as Orson Welles, was an American film director, actor, theatre director, screenwriter, and producer, who worked extensively in film, theatre, television and radio...
began surfacing from studio vaults, "director's cuts" became a staple of the Revival House theater-circuit. (In the 1960s and '70s, before the rise of Home Video, "Revival Houses" were the only way to see films as their makers intended.) Harvey's passion for film won him great friendships with such maverick filmmakers and master directors as Robert Altman
Robert Altman
Robert Bernard Altman was an American film director and screenwriter known for making films that are highly naturalistic, but with a stylized perspective. In 2006, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognized his body of work with an Academy Honorary Award.His films MASH , McCabe and...
, James B. Harris
James B. Harris
James B. Harris is a film screenwriter, producer and director. He worked with film director Stanley Kubrick as a producer on The Killing, Paths of Glory and Lolita...
, Monte Hellman
Monte Hellman
Monte Hellman is an American film director, producer, and film editor.Hellman is among a group of directing talent mentored by Roger Corman, who produced several of the director's early films...
, and such actors as Peter O'Toole
Peter O'Toole
Peter Seamus Lorcan O'Toole is an Irish actor of stage and screen. O'Toole achieved stardom in 1962 playing T. E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia, and then went on to become a highly-honoured film and stage actor. He has been nominated for eight Academy Awards, and holds the record for most...
. He brought these relationships to bear on his work at Z Channel, where he became director of programming in 1981. The films whose director's cuts Harvey championed, using Z's as a showcase, include: Michael Cimino
Michael Cimino
Michael Cimino is an American film director, screenwriter, producer and author. He is best known for writing and directing Academy Award-winning The Deer Hunter and the infamous Heaven's Gate. His films are characterized by their striking visual style and controversial subject...
's Heaven's Gate
Heaven's Gate (film)
Heaven's Gate is a 1980 American epic Western film based on the Johnson County War, a dispute between land barons and European immigrants in Wyoming in the 1890s...
, The Ruling Class
The Ruling Class
The Ruling Class is a 1972 British black comedy film. It is an adaptation of Peter Barnes' satirical stage play which tells the story of a paranoid schizophrenic British nobleman who inherits a peerage. The film costars Alastair Sim, William Mervyn, Coral Browne, Harry Andrews, Carolyn Seymour,...
with Peter O'Toole
Peter O'Toole
Peter Seamus Lorcan O'Toole is an Irish actor of stage and screen. O'Toole achieved stardom in 1962 playing T. E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia, and then went on to become a highly-honoured film and stage actor. He has been nominated for eight Academy Awards, and holds the record for most...
, Sergio Leone
Sergio Leone
Sergio Leone was an Italian film director, producer and screenwriter most associated with the "Spaghetti Western" genre.Leone's film-making style includes juxtaposing extreme close-up shots with lengthy long shots...
's Once Upon a Time in America
Once Upon a Time in America
Once Upon a Time in America is a 1984 Italian epic crime film co-written and directed by Sergio Leone and starring Robert De Niro and James Woods. The story chronicles the lives of Jewish ghetto youths who rise to prominence in New York City's world of organized crime...
, Karel Reisz
Karel Reisz
Karel Reisz was a Czech-born British filmmaker who was active in post–war Britain, and one of the pioneers of the new realist strain in 1950s and 1960s British cinema.-Early life:...
's The Loves of Isadora. John Ford
John Ford
John Ford was an American film director. He was famous for both his westerns such as Stagecoach, The Searchers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and adaptations of such classic 20th-century American novels as The Grapes of Wrath...
's Up the River
Up the River
Up the River is a Pre-Code comedy film about escaped convicts, directed by John Ford and featuring Spencer Tracy and Humphrey Bogart in their feature film debuts.-Plot:...
, Bernardo Bertolucci
Bernardo Bertolucci
Bernardo Bertolucci is an Italian film director and screenwriter, whose films include The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, 1900, The Last Emperor and The Dreamers...
's 1900
1900 (film)
1900 is a 1976 Italian epic film directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, starring Robert De Niro, Gérard Depardieu, Dominique Sanda, Donald Sutherland, Alida Valli, and Burt Lancaster. Set in Bertolucci's ancestral region of Emilia, the film chronicles the lives of two men during the political turmoils...
, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid.
A 2004 documentary directed by Xan Cassavetes, Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession
Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession
Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession is a documentary about Los Angeles pay cable channel Z Channel that accompanied the DVD release of uncut version of Heaven's Gate...
, detailed Harvey's life and accomplishments. Altman and Harris attested to Harvey's great sympathy and inspirational value as a champion of film. Younger filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Jerome Tarantino is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and actor. In the early 1990s, he began his career as an independent filmmaker with films employing nonlinear storylines and the aestheticization of violence...
, and Jim Jarmusch
Jim Jarmusch
James R. "Jim" Jarmusch is an American independent film director, screenwriter, actor, producer, editor and composer. Jarmusch has been a major proponent of independent cinema, particularly during the 1980s and 1990s.-Early life:...
likewise acknowledged the influence of Z on their own work.
The film also chronicles a tragic history with women. Harvey's two older sisters, Mary and Ann, committed suicide
Suicide
Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. Suicide is often committed out of despair or attributed to some underlying mental disorder, such as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, alcoholism, or drug abuse...
in 1975 and 1978 respectively. These deaths, and the inherent despairs which triggered them, haunted and afflicted Harvey—destroying two longtime love-relationships, first with Doreen Ringer-Ross who lived with Harvey from 1973 to 1978, and photographer-filmmaker Vera Anderson, who married Harvey shortly after Ann's suicide in '78, and divorced him in 1984. Harvey's second wife, Deri Rudulph (born December 21, 1949), married him in February, 1986. They remained together until April 9, 1988, when Harvey killed Rudulph with a pistol before turning the gun on himself.
Z Channel
Z ChannelZ Channel
The Z Channel was one of the first pay cable stations in the United States. Launched in 1974 from Los Angeles, California, this station was known for its devotion to the art of cinema due to the eclectic choice of films by the programming chief, Jerry Harvey...
, launched in 1974, was one of the first Pay TV services in the U.S., and because it served Los Angeles, filmmakers constituted most of its subscribers. The channel enjoyed tremendous popularity and influence even before Harvey took charge of its programming in 1981. Producer Charles Joffe told filmmaker Xan Cassavetes that the primary strategic reason Woody Allen
Woody Allen
Woody Allen is an American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, jazz musician, author, and playwright. Allen's films draw heavily on literature, sexuality, philosophy, psychology, Jewish identity, and the history of cinema...
's Annie Hall
Annie Hall
Annie Hall is a 1977 American romantic comedy directed by Woody Allen from a screenplay co-written with Marshall Brickman and co-starring Diane Keaton. One of Allen's most popular and most honored films, it won four Academy Awards including Best Picture...
won the Academy Award in 1977 is because it had played so frequently on Z Channel during the weeks the awards were being voted on.
Jerry Harvey's first significant coup came in 1982, when studio executive David Chasman alerted him that the director's cut of Heaven's Gate
Heaven's Gate (film)
Heaven's Gate is a 1980 American epic Western film based on the Johnson County War, a dispute between land barons and European immigrants in Wyoming in the 1890s...
, written and directed by Michael Cimino
Michael Cimino
Michael Cimino is an American film director, screenwriter, producer and author. He is best known for writing and directing Academy Award-winning The Deer Hunter and the infamous Heaven's Gate. His films are characterized by their striking visual style and controversial subject...
, was lying fallow in a British vault. Few had seen this version since its one week run in Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
, in November 1980. (The film had been so viciously attacked that it was generally believed, even by studio insiders, that Cimino's original version had ceased to exist altogether.) Harvey retrieved this one remaining print and gave it a highly publicized "world premiere
Premiere
A premiere is generally "a first performance". This can refer to plays, films, television programs, operas, symphonies, ballets and so on. Premieres for theatrical, musical and other cultural presentations can become extravagant affairs, attracting large numbers of socialites and much media...
" on December 24, 1982. The success of this airing was consequential. Cimino's version was shortly released on home video, where it is now the only version available.
Although Harvey saw to it that "Z" (as it was affectionately known by its subscribers and devotees) kept commercial pace with its rivals HBO, Showtime and The Movie Channel
The Movie Channel
The Movie Channel is an American premium channel owned by Showtime Networks, Inc., a subsidiary of CBS Corporation, which shows mostly movies, as well as special behind-the-scenes features, softcore adult erotica and movie trivia....
-- always showing the latest box office hits—Z's primary appeal to viewers lay in its devotion to films that were passionate, and personal.