Original subtitles

Downloaded from YTS.MX

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- The first Kurosawa film I think I ever saw

was "Throne of Blood" on the Z Channel.

- A Fellini film, "I Vitelloni."

- There was a picture called "Spider's Stratagem."

- Sam Peckinpah, "Wild Bunch."

- The "Straw Dogs," "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia."

- "The Story of Adele H."

[upbeat music]

- "Sunlights."

- "Rear Window."

- "Midnight Cowboy."

- "Ikiru."

- "Song Remains the Same."

- "Johnny Guitar."

- "The Onion Field."

- "Los Olvidados."

- "Man Who Fell to Earth."

- Every film that Marlon Brando was ever in.

[upbeat music]

- Z Channel.

- Z Channel.

- Z Channel.

- Our salvation.

- Uncharted territory.

- Like tom toms in the jungle.

[upbeat music]

- Jerry Harvey.

- Jerry Harvey.

- Programmer.

- Obsessive programmer.

- Dark negative.

- Maverick.

- Nurturing.

- Skating that line between insanity and genius.

- [Interviewer] What do you think

the secret of the Z Channel success is?

- I don't know.

If I told you, then it wouldn't be a secret.

- My father says there's only right and wrong,

good and evil, nothing in between.

It isn't that simple, is it?

- No, it isn't, it should be, but it isn't.

[theme song]

- [Narrator] Panic's Newstime 606,

a Hollywood story with a tragic ending this morning.

The bodies of Z Channel programmer, Jerry Harvey,

and his wife, Deri Rudulph,

were discovered Saturday night in their Westwood home.

Police report Harvey shot and killed Rudulph,

his wife of two years,

before turning the gun on himself.

The motive is unknown.

Harvey had been chief programmer at Z Channel

which is known throughout Los Angeles

for its eclectic and innovative programming.

Both Harvey and Rudulph were 39 years old.

[upbeat music]

- So it was back in 1974

and I just started selling cable television

and the Z Channel had just started

so we came up here to the Hollywood Hills

and it was really great

because these people had terrible reception,

they couldn't see anything on their television,

and not only were we offering the good reception,

we gave the movies uncut and no commercials

in their bedroom, in their living room,

wherever they wanted it.

They ate it up, it was very, very successful.

- It was amazing.

I had friends over all the time

because they showed two movies a night as I recall,

and they were uncut, uninterrupted.

It was this phenomenon no one had ever seen it.

- Theta and the Z Channel

was the only one in the major cities

as New York did not have it at the time,

Los Angeles was the first one to do that.

- That this actually existed, you could see this stuff

was incredible so I was like, we've got to get this.

So I was living in El Segundo at the time

and my mom called up and no, Z Channel wasn't in our area.

- Not only was Theta in that area along the foothills,

but it was who was in the homes along the foothills

and those were the folks that ran the movie industry.

- They were filmed for the whole family,

but I thought slanted to adults a little bit

and those are the films I tried to get.

- "Chinatown" was on a lot in those days,

they used to run it a lot.

And it was one of my favorite movies

and I ended up seeing it

like three or four times a week at certain points.

- I publicized the shows that we were doing

in Hollywood trade papers, "Variety" and "Reporter,"

and gradually word began to spread.

- I think it's interesting too to note that in that time,

it's hard to remember this,

I tell my kids about it and they don't believe me,

but there was a time when there was no Blockbuster stores,

there was no video cassettes, none of that existed.

- You have to understand this just before HBO,

before Showtime, before any of that,

and it was really really groundbreaking.

[upbeat music]

- When I left, Hal Kaufman, he took my place.

I remember he had an assistant who we hired,

the Jerry Harvey,

and that was my first contact with Jerry Harvey.

- The Z Channel hired a person

that really made the Z Channel,

probably put the Z Channel on the map

and that's Jerry Harvey.

- Jerry probably is one of those students

that a teacher encounters every so often and thinks,

I think the students probably smarter than I am.

- I had just broken up with my girlfriend

and so I was standing at the Dixon Art Center

looking rather forlorn apparently,

and he kind of recognized the look

and walk up to me and said, I recognize the look.

And so we started talking

and we spent the entire day

having lunch and talking about movies and that's how we met.

- So many of my students,

when they're interested in movies

are only interested in the art movies, the Indies,

Jerry loved 'em all and hated them all when they were bad.

- With Jerry, you always talked about movies,

his entire frame of reference was films.

- I started getting these weekly telephone calls

towards the end of each week

from this obviously very young, intense young man

asking me for a rundown

of what the good pictures were going to be

that particular week.

- I think the first contact

or a memory I have of Jerry Harvey

was when he was booking the Beverly Cannon.

- I heard about Jerry's work long before I heard about Jerry

because I heard about his work for the Beverly Cannon.

I was going to Cal Arts,

an art school 30 miles north of Los Angeles

and everybody was talking about the Beverly Cannon,

especially when he ran the uncut "Wild Bunch,"

I mean, that was like missile blast,

everybody who loved film knew about this.

- And on a rainy day in Beverly Cannon theater,

2000 people

or however many people showed up for the screening.

- I think a great coup in his life happened

because Peckinpah arrived with the print.

And it certainly was momentous

because his bond with Peckinpah just extended from there.

- Jerry certainly was one of the people

that looked up to Sam as I guess kind of a father figure.

Jerry felt that way about a number of creative people

that he admired and appreciated.

- He was always surprising me,

it was Sam this and Bob that and I thought,

whoa, how did you get to meet these people?

- That he arranged a screening

for "Some Call It Loving" there.

You can't help but respect someone

who has taken all the time and effort to educate himself,

become familiar with not only my films,

which ones I did with Kubrick of course weren't obscure

but "Some Call It Loving" was kind of an obscure film.

- I met Jerry Harvey in my mother's living room.

She worked with Jim Harris at the time and they were friends

and I came bounding into her house

and he was standing there,

it was kind of love at first sight, I think.

We stayed on the phone

that night after he left my house for 11 hours.

He came over the next night after that

and I don't think he ever left for three years.

- He had aspirations to be a filmmaker,

or at least to start out as a screenwriter.

- We wrote a script together

about two college kids who were witness to a murder

and that's how we really started writing together

and we ended up getting the agency off of that,

meeting Monte Hellman.

- Jerry was also involved in the making of a film,

a Western that he had written I believe

and that he was able to raise the financing

and went over to Italy to do it.

[upbeat music]

[gunshot]

- Are you satisfied now?

- You ain't going to last long, son.

There ain't no softhearted gunfighters.

- "China 9" was really great fun.

I can always remember we flew into Rome, landed in Rome,

was picked up by the limo at the airport

and then went to hell Maria, had a great group of people.

Warren Oates was there, Fabio Testi,

Jenny Agutter, Sam Peckinpah, and Monte Hellman.

We just had the best time, one of the best times of my life.

[upbeat music]

- There was of course a tremendous black period

when his sister, Ann, committed suicide.

- Jerry spoke to his sister all the time,

they were very, very close, great friends and he adored her.

- Ann checked herself into a hospital when Jerry was gone

and I believe that she was waiting for him to come back.

She had left a suicide tape

that was her talking to Jerry while she died

explaining everything that had transpired in her life

that led to this decision.

She was really his anchor

and not only did she go mad, but now she was gone.

And he came back to have this happen,

and by the time I saw him, he was crazy.

I'd never seen him so crazy.

- We got married pretty quickly after that,

we got married in February 1978.

Part of what was really attractive about it at the time

was we'd already been having this affair,

but then he was just so vulnerable and reaching out

and so I blamed the things that I saw

that seemed dark and scary to me,

I blamed on the fact that he was in mourning over his sister

and assumed that my loving him

would make those things go away and be better.

- We were still very close friends,

but we weren't really partners in activity,

we didn't write anything together after that,

we never did.

- At the time, there was only Select TV and ON TV

as cable sources in the area that I lived,

we had gotten Select TV.

And in the middle of the night,

he would wake me up yelling at the television

because the programming sucked.

And at some point in time,

I just said, if you hate it so much,

they don't watch it or write a letter.

And so he wrote a letter to them

telling them what was wrong with the programming.

And they called him and said,

how do you know so much

and who are you and we wanna talk to you.

- And Jerry had said he had found these movies

that since we were playing eclectic things,

you wanna show me something.

- [Narrator] Greece withdraws from NATO.

The third guarantor power, Britain,

with Air Force and troops on the spot

sticks to her policy of strict non-involvement.

- It was a documentary

about the invasion of Greece by the Turks

and political content.

It was interesting movie,

it had just been this guy had written in this letter,

I was reading the reaction and was like,

okay, well, that didn't get them so let me try one more

and I think it was like a Laura Antonelli film

how I'd never seen before and it was staggeringly gorgeous.

And I thought anybody who could go to the kind of,

those poles to the utter peer documentary,

political documentary to sex is worth having so I hired him.

- And so that sort of set Jerry on his path

which seemed really hopeful

because then there was something

that really was about his passion,

something that he could do that was positive

and that would give him something to focus on

besides his own struggle with himself.

- Hal Kaufman, the guy running Z at the time,

called Jerry and approach him about a job.

- [Jerry] I left Select and weeks after I got to Z,

the head of programming

fell ill and left and never came back.

- Everything that predated Z and his own eminence over Z

was merely the prep, it was the years in the desert.

Boom, suddenly Jerry arrives in the early 80s

and he's known all through town.

[upbeat music]

- He got me on the phone and he said, Jerry, he said,

I've been hired

and I wanna do a new spin

on the pictures that we're showing.

- I think I got a call from somebody once,

picked up the phone and somebody on the phone said to me,

this is Jerry Harvey, I buy movies, do you have so and so.

I think so and so was probably "Black Orpheus."

- When you first met him I think he was cold and distant.

We had to generate a mutual respect which came quickly

because we found out that each of us

had an interest in old movies, different movies,

movies that were unloved, movies that had been unscreened.

- Telephone, Miss Gray.

- Thank you, excuse.

- You should take it here.

- No, nevermind, ask them to call me at home later, please.

- Bring the phone.

- What was so brilliant about Jerry was doing

was mixing the art film with commercial fair.

- I had to see everything on this crash course,

it was like the Schick center for movie addiction,

and then I had to hear him recite to me "Dr. Strangelove,"

there was a month when I heard scenes from "Dr. Strangelove"

from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to sleep.

- I agree with you, it's great to be fine.

Now then, Dimitri,

you know how we've always talked about the possibility

of something going wrong with the bomb.

- Z was great for him.

Jerry sort of found his place there

because he could come in.

I mean, Jerry's favorite way of dressing

was a business shirt not tucked in,

a nice jacket, baggy dirty jeans, and Frye boots,

and he couldn't do that working in a corporate situation.

So at Z Channel, he could do what he liked to do best

which is sit cross legged on the floor

and make his phone calls that way smoking.

- [Interviewer] When did you start looking at films?

- [Jerry] To be honest with you, when I was four.

- [Interviewer] Yes.

- [Jerry] I remember vividly a film I saw at four

and the impact it had on me.

For a great period of my life,

it had meant more to me than anything else,

movies, the history of the movies.

- This man, Jerry Harvey, this very sweet, very odd man,

called me up and very tentatively asked me,

would I like "A Safe Place," my first film,

to be on television.

I was sure he made a mistake because it was a film

that was so trashed by all the critics when it opened

that nobody wanted to play it.

- Yes, yes, I have missed you, do you wanna know why?

- [Actress] Yeah.

- Because you're very simple-minded.

- [Actress] Screw you.

- I had a film called "Images"

that I had done and shot in Ireland in '72

and he was particularly, Jerry liked that film a lot.

He said, lets run that on the Z Channel.

What we couldn't find who owned the title,

he said, well, I'll run it if you don't run it.

I said, well, I'll run it if you don't run it

so here's the print.

- Katherine.

- What are you talking about, Katherine.

I love you.

- Don't, you don't.

- These films get lost in a hurry and I would get calls,

hey, they just played your movie on Z Channel.

- I'm naked now.

- I mean, that was like a big release for me.

- If you couldn't get a studio to release your picture,

your picture did not get seen.

One of the big thing that changed that was the Z Channel.

- The Z Channel to me

was the first time I could speak French, Z Channel.

It was the first time you could turn on your television

and see something

that you would have to go to the cinema for.

- What he was doing was coming up with films

that I had never heard of or didn't know existed.

[soft music]

- People saw movies

that they wouldn't have gone to see in a theater

if they were free.

And consequently,

I think it was both a pleasurable experience

and an educational experience,

and I think it widened everybody's horizons.

- It made I think even the powers that be

realize that there was this ultimate audience

that was much larger than anybody know.

- Jerry found all these films

and was able to program them on the Z Channel

and it's sort of built a big following.

- I just think that he in a sense had blinders on

in which all he could see through his blinders was film.

- [Interviewer] And you grew up where?

- [Jerry] I grew up in Bakersfield.

- [Interviewer] How would you describe Bakersfield?

- [Jerry] In how many words?

Kind of cross between "American Graffiti"

and "Two-Lane Blacktop."

- [Interviewer] And was it easy

having an enjoyable childhood?

- [Jerry] No.

- When Jerry came aboard,

it was also the moment

when HBO, Showtime and the Movie channel

all showed up in LA.

- He was a formidable competitor

and he didn't say nice things

about people he was competing against

because he lived and slept at his job.

- They thought they were gonna carve up

the territory that belonged to Z Channel.

Z Channel was the only one in town at that time.

Well, the others thought,

well, we're gonna roll over this guy.

And in fact, a lot of people had told Jerry to his face,

you run a nice little channel, it's too bad.

And he said, well, we'll see.

And what happened was,

of course that HBO and those guys

really couldn't get a toehold,

Z Channel had what was called a zero churn rate

which means that nobody would cancel the service.

- Jerry loved Z Channel, he loved everything it was about,

but he felt a lot of pressure to perform.

- He would call you in the middle of the night,

on a Saturday night,

on a Sunday morning at seven o'clock in the morning,

he would call you and say, you got to get me this,

the channel will go under,

it was always the sky is falling if you don't get me this,

I got to get this.

- So he tried to take it all on

and what he would always do to compensate

in those kinds of situations is that he would self medicate.

So he would go around with,

he'd drink and then he'd have no dose in his pocket.

- He was manic, but he was an obsessive programmer.

I wanna say that that's not a bad thing, by the way.

- Basically, he would come back from work at Z Channel

and order pizza and fall asleep on the floor

because he was taking a lot of medication.

So he wasn't really functioning at home

but nobody knew it at work

because he would function in the morning.

- I met Jerry on the telephone.

He called me in London,

woke me up at 2:30 in the morning

'cause he got all the times wrong.

His first words to me were, how come I don't know you?

So I get this lunatic on the phone at 2:30 in the morning

giving me this long monologue

about what other films have I made,

he wants to see everything,

can I send everything over to him,

what documentaries have I made and all that?

- Will you have a dance with me, please.

- I don't mind if I do.

- Come on then.

- In the case of "Overlord,"

you have a World War Two film

which actually incorporates footage from World War Two,

but incorporates it so artfully

that you can't tell the stage footage

from the actual footage.

- There began a process of developing a screenplay

based on real material of documented material and footage,

and I began to construct a dramatized documentary

about a young English soldier.

He said we'll start by having a month of Stuart Cooper,

we'll show all the features,

we'll do the documentaries later,

we'll show all your feature work

during the month, different times,

but the deal is you have to come a month ahead

and do one on one screenings

with the four or five key critics

and have lunch with them or dinner and talk about the work.

- Gary Prebula called me up,

said they're showing two films by Stuart Cooper

who I'd never heard of.

He said, nobody's ever heard of him,

Z Channel is gonna premiere them.

I said, there's still a Z Channel.

He said, oh, yeah.

I was debating whether or not to go.

When I got there, I was glad I showed up

because I was the only one there that I knew of.

There was this other guy named Jerry Harvey

who I didn't know who I thought might be a fellow critic.

I was fascinated by this guy, Stuart Cooper,

'cause I had just seen "Overlord" for the first time,

I was blown away by it.

But I'm sitting there with Jerry

and Jerry is the one who's like talking to me

in this mild way

and I'm getting along with him

and I mean, we were laughing at each other's jokes.

- It was really a great kismet moment

because then he started doing some reviews

for Z Channel for Jerry.

- It coincided with the period that my mother was dying.

I got the news of my mother's death

and within a half an hour,

the phone rings and it's Jerry Harvey,

he's like the first call I'm getting.

I don't know how he found out,

but he called me and he was consoling me,

he said, look, I've been through several deaths in my family

and you can make it, it doesn't have to kill you.

And I said, it won't kill me,

I was like feeling super strong,

I was not hearing what he was saying.

Now, it's like unbearably poignant.

- And that was the beginning of their relationship.

And to the day Jerry died,

I mean, F. X. and he were very close.

- When Jerry brought me aboard,

my concern was as a critic,

I didn't wanna be paid

to say good things about a movie I hated.

And Jerry liked my style of reviewing

because I wouldn't so much punish the movie

for not succeeding,

I would come from a place of, well, I tried to like it.

- If I read Z Magazine religiously,

I used to write nasty letters to F. X. Feeney.

- I used to get the angriest letters,

the angriest letters of my life

I got from Z Channel subscribers.

- Yes, I think I did write letters to the Z mag

which I'd forgotten

until contacted to participate in this documentary.

I wrote I think complaining about the letter boxing bars

weren't big enough for cortisol was high and low,

and that's how I got this t-shirt.

- I remember I couldn't wait

when my Z Channel magazine would every month

because I wanted to read all the reviews

which weren't always good.

- The people that wrote it

knew that their audience was keenly interested

in what they had to say.

And what they had to say was a whole series of original

and highly controversial observations

about the films that were being shown.

It wasn't the usual pap that you get in fan magazines.

- My belief, and I know that this is Jerry's belief too,

is that if you appeal

to the most intelligent member of the audience,

everybody else follows along.

There's this feeling

that you have to appeal to the common denominator.

Jerry and I hit on the phrase, the uncommon denominator,

that's what we want

because we wanna go for the smart folks

because everybody is smart.

- Shit, that's my man, that's my man.

I don't think we'll make it past the cop.

- We'll make it past the cops,

I just hope we don't see no Muslims.

- Listen, you owe Ben Angelelli $4,000.

- You tell Ben Angelelli to suck my cock.

- Now, wait a minute, you lost that money,

you should pay your debts.

- A double suck.

- The first couple of years of Jerry's stewardship of Z

are marked by just the ability to do the unexpected.

So he was able to make simple

but effective use of his position there,

and suddenly his reputation started to take care of itself.

I have this fantasy

that in the year 2050 or the year 2075,

they're going to read about the fear

that attacked "Heaven's Gate,"

the fear of that came down upon "Heaven's Gate,"

and they're not gonna believe it,

it's gonna seem like science fiction.

- Stockbird's Association

has the names of some of you people on the list.

125 names.

[speaking in foreign language]

- The then current UA management

decided to make the film at a budget of 12 million.

The 12 million turned out to be 40 before they were through,

the picture was a commercial disaster.

- Jerry would get very angry

about what had happened to a movie,

what had happened to a director,

or how a film had kind of gotten off track,

or how somebody's been slighted

when they shouldn't have been slighted

or beaten up when they shouldn't have been beaten up.

- "Heaven's Gate" was not only clobbered,

it was basically burned at the stake.

I mean, the critics ganged up on it,

it became this huge set of headlines,

it was in every paper,

the "Herald Examiner" ran a story about it

every day for three months, every day.

- I was depressed for a year after that movie.

I was depressed about it.

I mean, really, it was just,

I mean, you do your work and you think it's good

and then nobody likes it, no critics like and it goes down

and then after two weeks,

they pull it off of the theaters and it disappears.

I mean, it was just.

- It was cut immediately

and lay there until such time as Jerry approached Cimino

and talked about reconstructing his long version.

Without Jerry's prompting,

it would never have occurred to me

to try to find an intact print

of the original "Heaven's Gate."

It was his question that set the whole process in motion.

- It became a four hour special.

We had the first screening of "Heaven's Gate,"

I mean, which was really an event

and everybody tuned into it,

they wanted to know what all the fuss was about.

- And in a different atmosphere,

a different cultural climate,

the reassembled "Heaven's Gate" got marvelous reviews.

[upbeat music]

- It was a big event,

and it was the beginning of sort of big events

happening on cable.

It was really the first time

anything like that had happened.

- You got to see the director's vision of what the movie was

even after the fact it was very hard to get out

but in some ways, that put him 20 years ahead of his time.

[violin music]

- I mean, he had a great relationship with Michael Cimino

because of that,

because he really gave life to a film

that had been so unfairly,

whether in the end you liked the movie or not,

it had been so unfairly treated.

- The effort to do something like that

was a gargantuan effort,

it'd be like saving a great edifice

that was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright or something.

- Jerry took great risks in the films that he bought

and that's why he was so respected.

- Suddenly had this position

where he was being interviewed and quoted

and it was nice 'cause he had this moment

of feeling like people were acknowledging him

for what he wanted to be acknowledged for.

- He would have liked to I think be making movies,

instead, he had such great respect for great filmmakers

that he provided a place to showcase their work.

- I remember walking behind him one day

as we were just taking a break,

I'd turned in a bunch of stuff

and he just made a bunch of buys

and just done a bunch of business

and he wanted to go and get some ice cream.

So, we file out of this little garden spot office

that we had,

which is the first office that I knew,

and we're hiking up along Bundy,

and I'm walking behind him,

it's just very hot California day,

he's wearing a tweed jacket,

he's got that cigarette lighter around his neck,

and he's just bopping along.

And I'm looking at him and I'm walking behind him

and I'm thinking,

we've just come off several months of really happy work

and I'm thinking,

this is actually one of the happiest times of my life.

- [Interviewer] What were your mother and father doing

when you were growing up.

- [Jerry] My father was a judge,

my mother was a personnel director for a hospital.

- [Interviewer] Were you able to see your parents very often,

they sound as though they were very busy people.

- [Jerry] Yeah, they were around, maybe too much.

- I was at Select TV and Jerry called

and said that he would like to talk to me,

would I be interested

and what I meet him for dinner

to discuss working at the Z Channel.

We talked about what the duties would entail

and most of all, he talked about his personality.

And he said to me, I'm crazy, you know?

And I said, oh, yeah, sure.

- Jerry would be very honest with you about his own needs.

He'd say, I gotta go to my shrink.

And he would just say it in that plain way

like gotta go see my doctor, got a doctor's appointment,

but it would happen to be a shrink's appointment.

And he would go often,

I mean, you knew that he was devoting

maybe a couple of afternoons a week to go on over there.

- One day, everything would be fine,

we'd be having a conversation,

maybe he'd go to the bathroom or go get a glass of water

and he'd come back and he would be incredibly depressed

because he looked at the corner of the room

and realize that the workmanship was shoddy

and start getting depressed

about how people don't care about anything anymore.

And somehow in those moments

that he would have had that revelation,

it would sink him into this depression

about how the planet was doomed

and nobody gave a shit about anything anymore.

- And he said, in a very serious, intense way,

I'm really crazy, I'm paranoid.

- He wrote letters to me at the time

talking about what eventually would happen to him,

that one day he would lose the struggle,

not in a threatening way, not in a,

but he talked about it.

In rare moments of lucidity,

what frightened him was something inside of him

that he didn't know how to deal with.

- I don't know how I got around

the I'm crazy or and I'm paranoid line

but I went to work there and found that to be pretty true.

- It's Black Flag.

[punk music]

- I made the movie,

the guys that paid for it

were a couple of independent businessmen from the Valley

who wanted to make a porno movie.

And I went in to talk to them

and they didn't know

I was gonna come in and pitch a punk rock movie,

but I told them that punk rock

was the next best thing to porno so hey, let's sign a check,

and they did.

[punk music]

We showed the film one night midnight,

they had to shut down Hollywood Boulevard

and 300 motorcycle cops came.

We had a letter afterwards from Daryl Gates,

the chief of police saying,

please don't ever show that movie in Los Angeles again.

- When I go to concerts,

it's like my friends get beat up on my friends.

Then it's like fucked.

It's 'cause like they're not beating up the right people,

they're not beating up the fucking posers,

they're beating up just my friends, it's fucked, you know.

- The cops recognized Eugene from having been in the decline

and arrested him.

- [Interviewer] Because they saw on Z.

- Yeah, because they saw it on Z Channel, yeah.

- Took you a little longer than I thought.

- I'm afraid it's gonna take a little longer than that,

I'm leaving now.

- Road's wet.

- It wasn't raining when I got here.

- No?

Too bad.

- People really did not understand that film,

they didn't get it, and the critics didn't get it.

- You could have a fucker, I hate you.

[speaking in foreign language]

- Stop that.

- Fuck you, fuck you.

- I was up for an audition to go do Star Wars of all things

and so I was reading Star Wars and my agent was like,

push pressuring me like go read for Star Wars,

this is gonna be this thing.

And I'm going, I don't know, man,

I'd always said as my little actress prayer,

if anybody just gave me the chance, I could just show 'em,

I know it, I could please, God, give me this chance.

And then bad timing fell on my lap and I was like,

holy shit, can I do this.

- Alex, you want me?

Come on, come on, do it now, Alex, do it now.

Here it is, Alex, here it is, look at it, Alex.

That's what you wanted, there it is, Alex.

Come here, come here,

come here, take it, that's what you want.

Here it is, come on.

- In terms of the Z Channel showing it so much,

I mean, because it had such a small release theatrically,

I mean, especially in this country,

that was really where everybody had a chance to see it.

And I mean, I swear, even to this day,

I'll have people come up to me

and tell me how much did that movie affected them.

- [Interviewer] How did you go about finding those films

because I mean, obviously it took some effort

and no one else was doing it.

- [Jerry] You look at a lot of things

that you think might be interesting based on somebody,

not everybody that was involved in

or what it's about or what it's based on

or where it was filmed or there's a million reasons.

Just like anything like,

you say, gee, that sounds interesting.

- HBO, Showtime, the Movie channel,

all of us are at this big convention in some hotel,

big table desk, pitchers of water, nameplates.

Jerry's down at the other end.

And everybody's like going down the list

talking about how many committees they've got,

how many market research,

we hire this firm from New York,

we've got this firm from Chicago, bah, bah, bah, bah.

Jerry, how many firms do you draw on

to choose your programs?

He says, I don't consult anybody, I just see movies,

I just show good movies.

Yeah, but your decision making process,

who's your committee?

I don't have a committee, just me,

I mean, we have people in the office we talk, we like movies

but basically it's just whatever we wanna see.

[speaking in foreign language]

- Jerry was an early and passionate admirer

of a film called "The Important Thing is to Love"

directed by Andrezej Zulawski.

That film had a huge cult in Europe in the mid 70s.

I would sometimes seeing European films see clips from it

because other European directors

were so in awe of "The Important Thing is to Love"

that they would run little clips in their movies,

lovers in French films would often be going to see

"The Important Thing is to Love."

It became this immediate touchstone

that automatically was being quoted in other films.

[speaking in foreign language]

But it only opened briefly, it only opened for a week

and it just was misunderstood

by the first critics who dealt with it.

And so it didn't go anywhere,

it didn't form the cult that it could have

here in the United States.

[speaking in foreign language]

- I mean, the thing about the Z Channel

is that the sensibility was offbeat and a little bit,

I don't know, I mean, they showed everything.

- It was really appropriate that it was in LA in a way

because in New York, we did have a lot of like venues

to find those kind of movies.

- When I started working at this video store

in Manhattan Beach Club video archives,

and the guy who owned the store, Lance Lawson,

I would ask, hey, do you have this movie,

do you have that movie, and he'd pull 'em out.

And as I'd watch 'em,

I'd realize that these were the old Z Channel tapes.

- And I still have probably hundreds of hours

of films that I recorded off the Z Channel.

- I saw "Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street"

from Z Channel,

I had a whole,

and he just lent me the film

and then I watch it and then it just makes me go like this

'cause the beginning of it,

our tribute to Sam Fuller, all right?

And you see all the other movies that like they also show

but Lance only taped "Dead Pigeon," all right?

Like damn, I wanna see "Fixed Bayonets," "Park Row,"

God damn it.

Tape park fucking row.

- In those days, that was the only game in town.

I mean, there's only cable channel

that you can watch real good movies

which totally disappeared from the screen.

And some of them viewed my movies

and of course, I always like to see my movie

just to see what's on television.

♪ Stay alive until the night is over ♪

♪ And just the station on your way ♪

- When "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" first came out, it was a flop.

It made less money, grossed less money, I think,

than "O.C. and Stiggs"

or some of these films in mind that were really flops.

And it's become a little kind of a mini classic.

You do a film and it's so,

it's just different from what the standard thing is.

They just don't succeed

until the audiences have time

to let themselves catch up with it.

It's hard to keep the audience's attention

when you show them everything.

And the problem with most films is that you hear it,

you see exactly what it is.

If you're talking, there's a big close up of your face

so we know that you're talking and we hear it.

So I think the mandate in the film is to hide that,

to make the audience, well, what's going on,

I don't quite see that, and oh, you think that,

so that the goosebumps can come out.

Otherwise, you're sitting there drinking Coca Cola

and eating a hot dog.

♪ You chose your journey

♪ Long before you came upon this highway ♪

- I knew Jerry personally so well.

He would say, hey, I wanna sneak your film on my channel.

I said, oh, that's good

'cause otherwise they didn't play anywhere.

They just didn't play anywhere.

[upbeat music]

- The Z Channel did great film festivals,

we'd put on Truffaut film festivals

and Curacao film festivals and Australian film festivals,

French film festivals, English film festivals,

anything that we can sort of highlight

maybe a lesser known movie around.

- Yeah, I mean, the cool thing about Z Channel

was like investigating somebody's work.

Jacqueline Bisset seemed like a fetish in a way,

which I thought was pretty cool.

- Jacqueline Bisset is so much a figure of Z Channel

I think because her great beauty,

her great beauty led itself to "Day for Night" by Truffaut,

it lent itself to a wonderful film called "Le Magnifique"

which was the quintessential Z movie,

that is to say,

a European movie that few people knew about stateside,

but which had a great deal

of American style entertainment value built into it.

[upbeat music]

[speaking in foreign language]

- You got Jean-Paul Belmondo as a poor writer

who's fantasizing himself

the superhero of his own pulp novel,

and the girl downstairs, Jackie Bisset,

is like the the iconic star of this pulp novel

in this guy's head.

[soft music]

[speaking in foreign language]

- When I did "Le Magnifique,"

Philippe de Broca asked me to play this part

which was one part was a student

and one part was this sort of Bond type character.

[singing in foreign language]

[speaking in foreign language]

Doing "Le Magnifique" was interesting,

but interesting for me was to watch Jean-Paul Belmondo

because he was the most coordinated actor

I've ever worked with

and he could do three or four things,

comb his hair, machine gun somebody,

jump from rock to rock like a light footed leper,

not a leper, leopard,

like an animal, like a beautiful animal.

♪ Hallelujah

♪ Hallelujah

♪ Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah ♪

♪ Hallelujah, Hallelujah

- It was like having a film festival in your house

every single night, a film festival,

but you wouldn't have to go to Rotterdam

and you wouldn't have to go to Berlin

and you wouldn't have to go to Cannes

and you wouldn't have to go to Venice.

It was just like your own private film festival.

And the programming was eccentric and odd and mixed.

I was angry at it many times,

I thought, why are you playing that?

You're the only voice on television,

play only the kind of art films that I like,

but it was very good enough and not catering just to me,

it really gave you a kind of smorgasbord,

it gave you a kind of open ended view of all kinds of cinema

and it gave you a sense

of the size and scope that cinema has.

- Antonioni is not necessarily

about the logical structure of a dramatic story,

but about atmosphere and nuance

and the kind of emotional tension

that exists more like weather.

One of the most striking things for me in my memory

is Monica Vitti walking across a piazza.

And then you see above

like about 25 guys just watching her move,

and it says so much about Italian culture,

about visual imagery, about femininity, about sex,

about the just being a human

and then being in a place in a like kind of classical piazza

somewhere very, very Italian and Mediterranean.

I don't know, it's just kind of haunting.

- Jeanne Moreau walking down the street in "La Notte"

did it for me,

I said, this is a woman,

this is a job, whatever this woman is doing,

I've no idea why she's so depressed.

She is obviously totally depressed

and this man is not treating her well.

I don't care about him, she is fascinating.

I don't know what that all that means,

it's just unknown material.

- For someone to sit and think,

okay, I wanna show the final break in a relationship,

I wanna see that actual, the crack.

Now, how?

What about they attend an all night party

and somehow it's the attending of that party

that makes them finally realize

that their relationship is dead,

and that's the film you set out to write.

[speaking in foreign language]

- [Interviewer] Have you been married?

- [Jerry] Yeah, I think so.

- By the fall of 1983,

it was really clear to me

that I couldn't stay in this relationship anymore,

the psychiatry that I'd had so much hope for

wasn't gonna solve the problem,

Jerry wasn't ready to solve the problem,

or perhaps capable, but I didn't care anymore.

- I went into work one day and Jerry wasn't there

and he was gone as it would prove for three weeks.

I had understood that it was a contract dispute

and he was holding a firm line.

Well, he served for three weeks later

and then in that time, he had divorced Vera.

- He continued to be in touch with me,

we saw one another a few times.

A couple of times when they were really ill fated

because we sort of had a little moment together

and then that would just make it worse

because it would give him hope.

- Jerry spoke bitterly of that period.

Not bitterly of Vera

but just of being married and being in that zone

and it was just somehow that was something we didn't discuss

except to acknowledge that love was hell.

In that three weeks

in which he had disappeared from the face of the earth,

he had dissolved his marriage to Vera

and started dating the landlady at his new apartment,

it was Deri Rudulph,

who I eventually met a couple months later.

- Jerry Harvey loved the movie

that Henry Fonda did with his ex wife, Margaret Sullavan,

it was called "The Moon's Our Home,"

and it's basically the New Year's Eve picture

and Jerry wanted to play it

as his New Year's Eve movie one year.

Very hard to get ahold of.

- Do you Sera Brown--

- I suppose you'd want me to wait around doing nothing

while you're making up your mind?

- I certainly do.

- To have and to hold from this day forward--

- If that's what you feel about it,

you might have called the whole thing off.

- I certainly do.

- Do you promise to love, honor and obey him--

- You really mean that?

- I most certainly do.

I'm sick of being made a fool, I'm through.

I never wanna see you again as long as I live,

I wouldn't marry you...

- Now all you got to do is kiss the bride and it's $3.

- It was a favorite picture of his

and the audience got to see it.

- [Interviewer] I can see

that you're definitely in love with films,

I mean, suddenly it's your life,

but it seems to be totally your life,

do you do anything outside of film, for instance.

- [Jerry] What do you mean?

- Jerry was a creature of habit

and he had his watering holes

and I think the favorite of all his watering holes

was Guido's.

And he very often went there with Michael Cimino.

When I was introduced to Cimino for the first time,

it was at Guido's.

Jerry knew all the waiters, they all knew Jerry,

the waiters all knew Cimino.

In fact, when Cimino walked through the door,

two waiters at once reached out with cigarette lighters.

- I remember going to Guido's one afternoon for,

it's kind of a late, late, late lunch.

And Jerry was there and pretty wound up.

And the thing I remember the most about it

is he was perspiring kind of profusely in the restaurant.

And I can remember exactly what he was wound up about,

but he's wound up about something,

it was something was going on

or something was bothering him,

but we had a few drinks

and I remember the waiter or one of the guys came around

and adjusted his neck for him right there at the restaurant,

kind of got behind him and said,

Jerry you're way overstressed here,

and kind of cracked his neck and I was like, oh, my God.

- He's really moody guy,

the days that he would walk into his office,

sort of skulk into his office and shut the door,

we knew not to approach him.

- I know he fought with his demons an awful lot.

At the same time,

those demons were kind of which drove him on

because he was insistent and persistent

and he refused to take no for an answer

and he was constantly trying to make things right.

- I remember when Jerry brought "1900," Bertolucci's film

and played the entire film not cut, and it was so exciting.

- I got the six hour "1900" all right from Lance

when he taped it off of Z Channel.

- I still have 'cause it took me two 120 tapes,

I still have the full "1900" recorded off of Z.

[speaking in foreign language]

- "1900" was very jinxed film

in the sense that Bertolucci had spent too much money on it,

the Grimaldis were unhappy with him

for spending too much money on it

and so his version was under lock and key for many years,

almost in a fit of peak.

- Jerry insisted to the Grimaldis for five years

that they had an uncut "1900,"

a five hour version of "1900."

They said, no, no, it no longer exists,

maybe it existed once, but it no longer exists.

And he pressed them and pressed them

and eventually he managed to get it released

and so we showed it on Z Channel.

And there you could see in all its splendor

what Bertolucci had intended.

- So another amazing thing about the Z Channel to me,

like I don't even know

how you could get the rights to show these things

with all those politics involved,

but to just have access to the the vision of the director

is amazing, invaluable.

- You just never know when you're living in a golden age.

- I saw Berlin Alexanderplatz.

Now, that was the most extraordinary revelation,

where else are you gonna see this 12 or 14 hours

of his magnificent novel

turned into this extraordinarily brilliant film

which nobody in commercial filmmaking to this day

will ever put on television.

It was like some enormous meal that kept coming

and you saw the whole thing, it was breathtaking.

[speaking in foreign language]

- One day he walked into the office and said,

come into my office, please.

And I went into his office and he said,

he sat back in his chair and he said,

I don't like the air that you breathe,

I don't like the ground that you walk on,

I can't stand to be in the same room as you are,

you are a horse unrestrained.

And I looked at him

and I was completely flabbergasted and shocked.

I mean, I think I even laughed

because it was so out of nowhere.

And I remember laughing,

I remember at one point laughing and saying,

well, I guess there's no room

for me to grow in this organization.

And he told me

he'd write a letter of recommendation or something.

- The day Peckinpah died, Jerry had to leave work early.

Jerry got the phone call that Peckinpah had died

and as someone who knew Jerry well,

just came over to the office

and took him out for the rest of the day.

It was just understood that that was just gonna be

something Jerry couldn't work past for a bit.

- He was like family, Sam and Jerry,

and Jerry had a very strong sense of family

and that you don't see that much anymore.

Really if you felt

that you were part of this undefinable idea of a family,

you could turn your back and he'd cover it.

We were all quite devastated over Sam passing

and the fact that he wasn't able to get work.

There was nobody in this town

that would finance him at all for anything,

I think the last thing you did was a Julian Lennon video.

- Well, Peckinpah's recent years had been so difficult

that one could see, one could sense

that he was moving toward that one way or another.

Yeah, yeah.

[soft music]

- As a receptionist,

I was literally sitting right outside Jerry's door,

so quietly sat there

and occasionally would bring up some film talk with him

and he began to realize that I knew a little bit about film.

Then he brought me into the programming department.

- And he usually had Tim Ryerson in with him

and they'd be like two guys

baling hay on an intellectual level.

They'd just be, why don't we do this, why don't we do that,

and they'd be moving their way down the board

trying ideas out on each other.

- We stood at that board

and move those magnetic stripes around

that represented the different films.

I can remember many times

just it was like standing there and looking at it

and it's just dreaming

about all the wonderful possibilities that you could do.

- Claude Chabrol,

in fact, that was one of the other directors, all right,

that Lance gave me.

I'd never seen "This Man Must Die," all right,

and they showed it on Z Channel and I got it from him,

you still can't see that goddamn movie.

- It was the great thing about Z right from the get go

that they were running European films.

That was how they got the reputation

that they programmed them well

and they were making a hit with it, who knew?

[upbeat music]

One interesting aspect of "Das Boot,"

it had a career as a film in theaters

where it really wowed audiences around the country.

But then, we discovered

that it had been a mini series in Germany,

that it was actually six hours long

and that there were six hour long episodes.

Makes sense, we showed it.

[speaking indistinctly]

There's this tragic irony under "Das Boot"

that these guys who are just hard working guys

who don't think politically

who just love the sea and are under it and in it

and involved with their work

and whose reality is one another,

they have no idea

that there in a sense like the Monty Python character

is about to be crushed by a big foot from the sky.

And in a way, it's because it's played in slow motion,

we can feel the tragic melancholy behind that.

[upbeat music]

- HBO was a thorn in the side

of everyone that worked at Z Channel

'cause they feared that HBO would muscle them off the dial.

HBO had buying power so they could give monies to studios

which were very alluring.

- The Z Channel had budgets that restricted

and you couldn't just pay for everything

that you really wanted to do.

- There was always somebody saying to him,

do we have to spend money on this program guide?

Gee, if we didn't have the program guide,

then we could be more profitable.

Do you have to spend so much money on the movies?

Do we have to spend so much in marketing the Z Channel?

There were all these pressures on him.

Sometimes they would take money away from him

that he couldn't spend the next year.

- He had to figure out what his limitations were.

And Jerry was very good about doing that,

he had a very strong business sense

so he knew what he could do and what he couldn't do.

But he realized that what he could do was a lot

based on simply his own knowledge of movies.

[soft music]

- Not only did Jerry champion

the full version of "Heaven's Gate,"

but he also felt the same way

about Leone's "Once Upon a Time in America."

- Because you still think

like some schmuck from the streets.

Now, if we'd listened to you,

we'd still be rolling drunks for a living.

- It was a famous day, you broke?

- Don't bust my balls, Noodles,

I am talking about real money.

- This is real money to me.

It's a lot of money, you want any of it?

- You'll carry that stink of the streets with you

the rest of your life.

- Well, when we did "Once Upon a Time in America,"

it was clearly from a personal point of view,

an extraordinary opportunity.

I think this is potentially one of the greatest movies,

one of the great epics ever made.

I mean, it was, Bob De Niro was at the height of his career,

I mean, he still is, he's always great,

but I mean, he had just come off "Raging Bull."

Sergio Leone was a genius.

It was a 12 year project for him.

We shot for 11 months,

and because of one test screening,

Warner Brothers and The Lead Company

decided to take the three hour and 43 minute version

of "Once Upon a Time in America"

and cut it down to two hours and something,

and they used the assistant editor

of "Police Academy 2" or something to cut it.

- It broke the director's heart.

He was cut by a group of people

who should never have been allowed in the cutting room

and they massacred it, they ruined it.

They made a test showing of it in Chicago or Illinois,

something on a cold night,

they didn't get the results they wanted.

- Any problem.

- No trouble, good stuff.

- It was a really grueling, miserable experience,

it was hugely frustrating and disappointing, discouraging.

- The full version was a masterpiece

as compared to like a routine film

in a butchered shortened version.

- Come here, look at this, come here.

Sudden death, fucking tragedy.

26 years old.

- 26?

What a shame.

- Great stiff, she died of an overdose.

- And I'm ready for another.

- Jerry actually showed both versions side by side

on the Z Channel.

And I mean, there was no doubt,

no doubt how stunning it is

to allow your creation when you're an artist

to be manhandled by other people who are maybe not as adept

at understanding the vision as you the filmmaker is.

[soft music]

- Your brother's a real friend.

- He's a romantic.

- When it came out in it's aborted version,

Sheila Benson, who was then also a critic for "The Times,"

called it the worst movie of the year,

and then it was restored to the director's cut

which was also shown,

and eight years later,

she picked it as either the best

or one of the five or 10 best pictures of the decade,

which goes to show you what a little editing can do.

[soft music]

- In a way, what Z Channel was and what Jerry did

is it became an alternative voice,

a voice which said, not only you're wrong,

but here's why you're wrong,

here's how it should play and here's how they played it.

And then they shut up

because a picture's worth a million words.

- [Interviewer] And do you feel you've arrived where you are

by accident or by design.

- [Jerry] Initially by accident

and then subsequently by design.

- Deri was so warm, she was so bright,

and I met her at her house,

she had a party for Jerry at her house.

And that in itself was a very welcoming gesture.

It was a birthday party at the end of 1985.

- She was a lovely woman,

both in spirit and physical beauty actually.

- And I immediately felt glad

that if Jerry had to leave Vera for anybody,

that at least he'd found his way to Deri

because she seemed to be such a positive spirit.

- Deri grew up with a mother who had been an iron lung

and needed an awful lot from Deri.

As I recall her mother been in a wheelchair a lot.

So Deri grew up taking care of people.

That's what she tried to do with Jerry.

- To know her was to just have a crush on her,

she was just so amazing.

And she was becoming a stand up comedian,

she was starting a newspaper in Westwood,

she owned a lot of property in Westwood,

she'd inherited a lot of property.

And she felt a great loyalty to the community.

- She's very optimistic, open, outgoing person

and wanted sincerely to support Jerry

and give him what he needed emotionally.

- [Interviewer] Are there any points in your life

where you can look back and see

that you might have done something else

at that particular point?

- [Jerry] Many, many times.

- [Interviewer] Really?

- [Jerry] Yeah.

I think there are myriads of crossroads in one's life

where one stops, says, do I go this way or do I go that way?

- I was very happy when I'd heard that he had remarried.

I thought, well,

since it finally didn't work out with Vera

after a substantial number of years together,

I thought, well, this is nice that he's met somebody else.

- Their marriage was a very colorful affair

held at the Westwood Marquis,

and Jerry, in his contribution to the ceremony

was to add lines from "Ride the High Country."

He had the the minister say, I am not a man of a cloth.

- And this is not a religious ceremony,

it's a civil marriage

which is not to be entered into unadvisedly

with reverence and soberly.

A good marriage is a kind of simple glory of mind,

a good marriage is like a rare animal, it's hard to find,

it's almost impossible to keep.

You see people change

and that's important for you to know at the beginning,

people change.

- It was a occasion at which Jerry's circle of friends

was small but very potent and in attendance.

There was me, Michael Cimino was best man at the wedding,

and let's see, there was James B. Harris.

There were a whole group of really terrific people there.

And Deri's very large family,

they all were in love with Deri, and who wouldn't be,

I mean, it was just a really terrific gathering.

[upbeat music]

The market had been created after "Heaven's Gate"

for director's cuts,

and "The Leopard" had been in a botched cut,

and even the studio knew to be a botched cut.

And so "The Leopard" was restored to its full strength

when I toured the video market.

And Jerry was there

the night they screened it for the first time

and he made sure there was an offer on the table

and that when we showed it on Z Channel, we highlighted it.

- I have seen the uncut version of it, all right?

And they restored it

to more or less it's IB Technicolor stature.

It's fantastic.

- "The Leopard" is about one night

in the life of a Sicilian prince.

And this prince may be dying,

there's a feeling of mortality that's plaguing him,

he's got a bad heart it seems

and he's just sort of

moving through the chambers of his life

in a kind of melancholy way.

But really what's happening

is that an era is ending around him.

Because of the length that Visconti gave to that story,

that prince in this single night of his life,

we actually feel the world moving through this man

and we feel that when he goes, a world goes with him.

- I met Jerry in 1986 or '87,

I was working at a video store in Westwood

called Videotec

and I was going to college here at UCLA

and I was a clerk there

and Jerry was one of the many industry customers

who used to come in.

He made me a bit uncomfortable, he just seemed very strange,

he gave off an uncomfortable vibe.

His wife on the other hand was a sweet charming woman

and she gave off a great vibe.

- Jerry would go in there and rent videos

and they would get into conversations,

and Jerry realized,

hey, this guy knows what he's talking about.

- Then he asked me if I'd be interested in working at Z

as a programming assistant.

And at that point, my attitude changed greatly,

and I was very happy to see him

- I think one reason Jerry was such a great programmer

was the knowledge and the taste,

the showmanship, the creativity,

and then the passion to do it or the commitment to do it.

- HBO and Showtime each launched a second channel

that was more movie-focused more film buff-focused.

Showtime did The Movie channel, HBO did Cinemax

and they certainly were aware of Z Channel

and tried to steal some of our thunder,

we didn't think they were doing a very good job of it.

- I mean, if we ran it,

even certain foreign films

would end up running on the other places,

they would have to pretty sexy usually,

our night owl films tended to show up a lot

on Movie Channel and Showtime and HBO

just because that's like, well, tits and ass.

[speaking in foreign language]

- Much to my surprise when I asked Jerry

what was the most successful aspect of our programming,

he said, the night owl series.

I said, you've gotta be kidding.

He said no, we're killing night line,

we're killing the 11 o'clock news.

- Night owl programs

where our late night kind of soft core things,

movies with sex TNA, stuff like that.

- My objectivity breaks right the fuck down

when I think of those night owl films

because those girls,

the women in those films were so pretty.

I mean, they always found

even in the lamest of the night owls,

even the one that has like no plot

or it's just like why am I watching this?

I know I'm only watching this till the next nude scene

but I'm gonna stay in there.

"The Lady on the Bus," I remember.

Someone like Laura Antonelli or Sonia Braga

would hit a big with a respectable film,

but their backlog

was full of all kinds of early nudie kind of films

and we would get them all

so basically we would have Laura Antonelli festivals

that had every last movie she'd made

with all the nude scenes.

- Laura Antonelli, it's like, whatever happened to her?

I think she was like the first actress

that I ever like fell in love with in a movie

that I went into like see her films

and they were genuinely sexy.

I mean, I don't think I knew what sexy was before then,

I had crushes on actresses

and I thought I was in love with them, all right?

But I'm watching "Life Mistress,"

there's a scene that she's with this actor

who's trying to get into his room

and they're making out on the stairs.

And he reaches out and grabs her in her crotch.

And it was really sexy to see that.

And when he did it, she went, oh,

and she almost like collapsed in his arm.

- Please take me to bed, please.

- And then they didn't go into the room and I was pissed.

- The great divergence between European cinema

and American cinema really is about sex.

- If you want to do nudity in a movie,

you have to do it in a certain way,

it's interesting because it's so natural

because you see things that people do with each other

that you were not aware of that could be done.

I get many many calls after "Turkish Delight" say,

you enriched our sex life so.

[singing in foreign language]

"Turkish Delight" was a great book, you know,

I loved the book.

It was like in Holland

was going with the wind in the United States,

everybody was interested and it was having an opinion

if it should be Vivian Lee or not, isn't it,

and who should be her lover, Clay Cable or anybody else.

And this was like, this is our book,

it was so phenomenally important that book

in Holland at that time.

[soft music]

I had worked with Rutger Hauer

on the television series was called "Floris."

Because he was a television person,

I didn't even think about him strangely enough.

My producer of ours said,

well, what about this nice guy that you used in "Floris."

He's a nice guy and he seemed sympathetic,

why don't you test him?

I said, he's more a farmer.

He goes like, bum bum, bum, he was like that.

And he said, yeah, but you never know, you have to test him.

And so I tested everybody and at the end,

I tested Rutger Hauer too,

and then I realized that Rutger Hauer is phenomenal.

That there was absolutely,

that I couldn't have been more wrong

in thinking that he couldn't do it.

Because that was Rutger Hauer,

and that was of course for everybody that knew the book

was like, are you an idiot,

how can you do this wonderful character of Eric

that is so beautiful

and has all these feelings versus woman?

[soft music]

So, I was right, I was right.

I've been right a couple of times,

I've been wrong many times.

The fact that I immigrated to the United States in '85

had to do not only with the fact that I got a job here,

but with the fact that people got me the job

because they knew my work,

and they knew it because of Z Channel.

- [Interviewer] Is there anything else

you would like to have done with your life

than what you're doing at the moment?

- [Jerry] Oh, there's many things.

Be president, run a major studio,

more than anything though,

I think I would like to have been able

to play professional football.

Throw passes, be a quarterback, buy things like that.

- Jerry felt excited about what he was doing,

he'd be excited about a new deal,

he'd be excited about being able to announce a Warner's deal

or something along those lines,

but at the same time, I always felt that Jerry felt beaten.

I think he felt he was fighting that uphill battle.

- [Interviewer] The whole time or just later though.

- I think the whole time, I always felt that way of Jerry.

- When you were a friend of Jerry's,

you were kind of immersed in his whole being, his whole life

and that was quite a lot of stuff.

- When Deri suggested marriage,

Jerry said, I have got to be honest with you,

I don't want children.

I mean, if you're okay with that, then we can talk,

but you just need to know that before you get your hopes up.

- Jerry was so hurt by his family,

it was difficult for him to get married.

And when he did get married,

initially inconceivable to have children,

so much so that he had had a vasectomy.

- He certainly did give me the outlines

of a very, very dysfunctional family life.

Very tormented.

- His father was a judge who at some point in his career

had sent more people to death

in the county of whatever Bakersfield county is

than any other judge.

I mean, this was a family

full of pain and darkness and strangeness.

- Jerry's father was a fundamentalist Catholic,

someone who was so much a traditionalist,

so hidebound that he wasn't even close to his family.

When his own daughter was coming to him in a suicidal state,

he slammed the door in her face.

- For what Jerry said, Jerry's father was a drunk,

rather sadistic towards his kids.

Jerry didn't really have a lot of nice things to say,

would tell stories about his father coming in

and throwing water on him to wake him up in the morning

and there were no specific references

to specific abuse or anything else,

but it was something he really didn't talk about that much.

- He expressed actually more active,

active anger toward his mother.

- She was a extremely monotone person.

I never saw her angry, I never saw her cry,

I never saw her really laugh that much.

It was like she was almost in a drugged state.

- Maybe she was shut off emotionally

because she had done things

and not been there for them

or allowed abuse to happen to them.

We'll never know.

- He told me that he had another sister

that the family really did not know what had happened to,

but had come to the feeling that she had committed suicide.

- Jerry never really made that big of a point about it,

except that Mary had disappeared,

and he kind of just said that as a toss away line

and that's all he would refer to it,

it's the only way he would refer to it.

- He had told me stories of struggling with depression

and what he sort of identified as evil thoughts

and dark thoughts when he was growing up.

- Jerry was always volatile,

he always had a very bad temper.

But he didn't drink until in the late 70s

when he started drinking.

When Jerry drank, he was dangerous.

I can remember once in Rome,

we were all having a great time, we were drinking,

and I made the comment,

God created whiskey to keep the Irish from ruling the world.

And Jerry took a cigarette

and flicked it right at my face from across the table,

hit me in the eye, fortunately I wear glasses.

- We both looked for him for therapists

and found this doctor that he went to

that we were really excited about.

He was smart, he was as smart as Jerry,

he could challenge him,

and it started out to be a really good thing

and Jerry really looked forward to it

because he could talk to somebody,

he found somebody that could really challenge him

and talk to him.

Unfortunately along the way, it fell into other traps

and I don't think in the end, it was such a good thing.

I didn't live in fear,

I mean, the day I was afraid it was over,

the day I got afraid

and something happened to make me afraid,

we weren't together anymore.

I just had this really bad feeling

and I tried to call the house

because he should have been there,

and he didn't answer the phone

and I just had a bad feeling

so I got in my car and I drove back to the house.

And I came in and he had taken a lot of pills

and he was waving a gun

that was the gun that Sam Peckinpah had given him.

And I just went to look for his doctor's phone number

because I just thought

this is like something terrible's happening here.

And when I came back, he held the gun on me.

And basically, in one form or another

had the gun at my head and in my mouth

and up against my head for the next three or four hours.

He had called the doctor before

and left him a message that he was in trouble.

So he had reached out already,

the doctor had arranged

to come and take him to the hospital.

And it was basically from that moment,

we were never together.

- I didn't see Jerry for seven years

while he was married to Vera.

When Vera and Jerry started to break up,

I guess I was the first phone call.

And Jerry showed back up in my life

and it was like the thing I had dreamed of

for all of those years.

One night, we were having dinner somewhere in Westwood

and I remember Jerry starting to get angry for no reason.

I mean, we were having a very pedestrian conversation

about something and out of nowhere,

he started to become infuriated.

So he got to the point where he stood up

and he walked out of the restaurant.

So I went trailing after him and when I got up behind him,

I remember grabbing him by the shirt going,

what's a matter, what did I say, what happened,

and he turned around and all of a sudden

I found like his fist was in the air

and he was about to pull me with it.

And he looked up at his hand and he looked down at me

and he looked up at his hand

and he kind of caught it and he pulled it back to himself

and it was as if it was somebody else's hand.

Jerry and I

changed the nature of our relationship after that.

I think on some level, he was trying to back off

and protect me from being subjected to that.

But the subtext to all of that also

is that he had moved out from his place with Vera

into another apartment

and the landlady was Deri.

- What the fuck is this?

- Maize.

- Maize for what?

- Wild dogs.

- Yeah, wild dogs, that's bullshit, Boyle,

you've lied to me straight through.

- You want me to be honest with you?

- No.

- "Salvador" was not the kind of picture you would expect,

it wasn't a studio picture,

it didn't have any studio juggernaut behind it,

there was no money to promote it,

it show for two weeks as I said in two theaters

in February 10 months ago so it was forgotten.

[speaking in foreign language]

- Holy shit, they're gonna fucking kill us now, Boyle,

God damn it, I thought you knew your way around here, Boyle,

they're gonna fucking kill us, Boyle, God damn it.

- Stop it, shut the fuck up, just be cool.

- It was clear that both Jerry and Chuck Champlin

thought it was just a terrific picture

and the kind of picture

that should have gotten attention, but didn't.

Charles Champlin wrote a front page article in the LA Times,

it was a two page article

about this great forgotten classic.

And then Jerry Harvey called up and said,

hey, that was great that Chuck did that.

He said, I really believe in this film,

and he said,

I believe Z Channel can have a little bit of influence.

[speaking in foreign language]

He said I'm gonna give this film a shot,

he said I'm gonna show it during December.

So he said while all the studios are screening their movies

at every private screening room on the ballot,

what's called the Bel Air of Beverly Hills circuit,

and while they're showing them at theaters and so on,

this film, which is not being shown anywhere

is gonna be shown on the Z Channel.

So there was the cover of Z Channel

which everybody in the business got

and everybody's now saw "Salvador" this month, right?

And the next thing you know.

- Paul Newman in "The Color of Money,"

James Woods in "Salvador."

- I get nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor

and Oliver and Richard Boyle who co-wrote the screenplay

got nominated for Best Screenplay.

- [Interviewer] What's the most exciting thing

for you about movie making?

- Tonight, tonight is the most exciting thing

about movie making, believe me.

It was an amazing year

and had Jerry not sort of pushed

to have Chuck do the interview at the right time,

put Z Channel magazine out with the "Salvador" picture

on the cover with the whole cover,

shown it during that month,

that picture would have been completely forgotten

and the kind of work that I'm most proud of just personally

would never have been seen.

[speaking in foreign language]

- Are you kidding.

- So I think personally,

I've always felt at that particular day

with Chuck Champlin and with Jerry Harvey

and what came of it

was really the turning point in my career without a doubt.

[soft music]

- HBO and the other competitors, they had been wanting,

they had been wanting Z Channel gone for a long time,

many people were taking bets

on when Z Channel would finally slide off the cliff.

And it was Jerry's tenacity

and the stubborn reputation of Z Channel,

the fact that it was really beloved in the community,

those things work together to keep Z

kind of like floating like a castle in the air

beyond its normal mortality.

- Z Channel had at its peak

I think about 100,000 paying subscribers,

there were others who I think were stealing it.

- We had people calling up to say,

would it be possible to subscribe to the magazine

without subscribing to the channel.

And I was like why would you like to do that?

- I remember we had some new owners come in,

the CEO ordered Z Channel for his home.

The cable man drove up to the home

and said to the CEO's wife not knowing who she was,

give me 20 bucks or whatever

and I'll give you Z Channel for free.

- Jerry was very stressed at that time

and unhappy at that time

and I guess that somewhere in there

is where the salute to Z

became something we intended to do.

- The AFI tribute in January of 1987 was a real highlight

in I think Jerry's life

and I think in the life of Z Channel.

We were about to be sold,

this was a moment of marshaling the troops.

Everybody who had benefited

because of Z Channel's existence was invited

to come take part in a day long series of panels.

One person that Jerry became very close to

in the last couple of months of his life

was film director Richard Brooks,

who directed "Elmer Gantry," "In Cold Blood,"

"Looking for Mr. Goodbar."

Jerry located certain films of Richard Brooks

that had been forgotten

such as "Something of Value"

with Rock Hudson and Sidney Poitier.

- When it comes time to kill the lion,

I want to shoot the gun too.

- It's just Shaw and how he feels about Africans and guns.

- I want to shoot the gun too.

- I'm sorry, Mathyla.

- Always when we hunted is the same,

you have all the fun, I do all the work.

- But when we were little and played together.

- But we're big now and things are not the same.

- Hit him.

Hit him, hit him hard.

Do what he says now and better hurry.

- "Something of Value" is a movie from the early 50s

which deals with apartheid,

it deals with the Mau Mau uprisings of the 1950s in Africa

which is a topic so relevant to contemporary history,

it was painfully relevant

to the situation that was in South Africa in the late 1980s.

Nelson Mandela was still in prison

when we played "Something of Value" on Z Channel.

- Remember me?

- Kimani.

What do you want?

- I've come home.

- When Richard Brooks did "Something of Value,"

he managed to get Winston Churchill

to do a short prologue.

Winston Churchill said, the situation in South Africa

is the most important thing in the world today, blah, blah,

turning a globe or something very important.

- The problem of East Africa are the problems of the world.

This was true in 1907 and it is true today.

- But the studio had said,

get rid of the old fat guy, right?

It's like get really old fat guy, it's Winston Churchill.

So Winston Churchill got cut out of the picture, right?

It's a small bit but Churchill had done them a huge favor.

So it did Richard Brooks's heart a lot of good

to see that put back in the picture.

- There was a cause for hope in about September 1987

when the Rock Group bought the Z Channel,

and it had very ambitious plans,

they came to all the studios and said,

we're gonna take it national, we need your support,

we're going to really grow the subscriber base.

- The vision was to do a sort of national satellite channel

that would compete with HBO and Showtime.

- Jerry was happy,

he felt like he'd found the right kind of wildcatters,

the right kind of cowboys

that would understand his temperament

and just the future looked golden.

- What do they call this place?

- Just over the rise be a big town called Tombstone.

Fine town.

- Tombstone?

Yeah, I heard of it.

Well, me and your brothers might ride in there tonight,

get ourselves a shave maybe, a glass of beer.

- Yeah, you would enjoy yourself.

Wide awake, wide open town Tombstone,

get anything you want there.

- Thank you.

- [Interviewer] You want to get any children?

- [Jerry] No.

- They had agreed not to have kids,

they were both content with it.

And there was a point

when Jerry made an ironic remark late in '87,

he said, well, I could have predicted this would happen.

And I said, what do you mean?

He said, well, I'm gonna have to go in

and have my vasectomy undone.

I said, really, what's up?

And well, Deri wants kids?

- And reverse vasectomies usually don't work

and so there was some frustration going on there

between Deri and Jerry.

- Jerry had told the doctors, look, I have a problem,

I used to have a drinking problem,

please don't give me any painkillers

after the surgery is over,

that way I can recover faster.

And they agreed, he had the topical anesthetic,

but after that, he was cold turkey

just surviving it with gritted teeth,

the pain of what followed,

unfortunately, an infection followed.

And this time, the doctors told him,

look, we have to perform the entire operation

all over again.

And he said,

all right, this time you use painkillers though.

He had the bins that he predicted,

but he was able to manage it 'cause he saw it coming

and he and Deri went off to Bora Bora

and within a week and a half, he was back up on top

and he arrived from Bora Bora

pretty much in time for the stock market crash.

- Sadly, just after the Rock Group bought the Z Channel,

the stock market went south in a big way in October 1987.

And all those ambitious plans were backburnered

and unfortunately, they were ultimately never realized.

- I could see the stress but he really did,

he was more concerned about his staff

and that they not be worried or afraid or what have you

than he seemed to be about himself.

- One night in October of '87,

I go to the movies with Jerry and Deri

and we watch "The Sicilian" directed by Michael Cimino.

It's about to come out the next week,

it's a preview screening.

We're watching this film, it's got very witty dialogue,

it's got tremendous energy to it,

but the official opinion on Cimino

was he's a downer or something.

And Jerry said, the two hour 25 minute cut

is actually opening next week in Paris.

I said, it is?

He said, yeah, Deri and I just made plans to go over.

And I said, oh, well, I'm there too.

Oh, it was such a wonderful time that we spent there

in terms of getting to know them both.

It was again to be in Deri's company.

I mean, she just loved being in Paris

and it was just all positive

and there was a special screening for us

'cause we'd come all this way.

And my feeling was

that it was one of the three best films of the year,

but films getting clobbered back in the United States.

- And when he came back,

he called me to tell me that he was back

and relayed to me how upset he was.

I mean, it almost went beyond like you had to say,

Jerry, Jerry, relax, calm down,

you're making yourself sick

over someone else's trials and tribulations,

one has to worry about themselves a little more,

stop killing yourself

worrying about other filmmakers' problems.

[speaking in foreign language]

- Jerry had been receiving these inquiries from Joe Cohen

who was an executive with Spectre Core which owned Prism

which had had some success back East

showing sports and movies, combining them in one channel.

And it was Joe's idea

that the same could be done for Z Channel.

Given the conditions of that month of October,

it made a lot of sense.

- The way to salvage all of this

was to add sports programming.

And that was it.

- And thus was born Z Plus,

which was everything you love about Z Channel,

plus the Dodgers and Angels.

[upbeat music]

- [Jerry] The movie, "The Wild Bunch"

had a pretty profound effect upon my life.

It was about men in a changing world

where the values were changing

and they had kind of outlived a different world.

[soft music]

- March 17th of 1988, we all went to Guido's.

And that was another great evening,

that was like the Parisian trip all over again.

This time, Michael Cimino was there

and because I had sort of gone to the war

for "The Sicilian,"

he and I are now very comfortable with each other

and so we were all of us there

and there was a cake

that Deri had ordered from like this really special bakery.

I mean, it's the most amazing chocolate cake I've ever had.

And Michael had chosen the inscription

which comes from John Ford from "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,"

which is lest we forget.

So that was on the cake.

And it was Michael's way of thanking me and Jerry both.

And boy, it's so amazing how the fates work

because this was the last time we were all together

and they could not have been more luminous as a pair,

we could not have all been happier.

I mean, that night

is now surrounded by a strange aura for me

because it was so happy and we were also together.

And the cake says, lest we forget.

- One of the risks of taking on a partnership

with a sports channel

is that sporting events often run commercials.

- Because there was this precedent

in premium or paid television

was defined as not having commercials,

we got into a battle with HBO

which escalated unfortunately into a lawsuit.

- Z Channel felt that HBO

had teamed up with four other studios

to prevent Z Channel from getting access to their films,

and Z Channel instituted

a restraint of trade type lawsuit against them.

Jerry was going to be the star witness in this lawsuit

and was preparing to testify.

- When I tried to understand what Jerry's state of mind was

in the last couple of weeks of his life,

I think that it had a lot to do with the fact

that he was going up against his friends

and old collaborators, old business partners in court.

- I was quite worried about him the last time I saw him

and express concern to my partner

and anyone else that would listen about it

and didn't know what to do,

but he's seem that he was imploding.

- The night that we inaugurated the sports channel,

I mean, they had all these baseball players

up at the building

and Jerry and I took a long kind of Socratic walk

around the block, we circled the block several times

just talking it through.

And I was full of dread and apprehension

about how things were gonna work

and Jerry was being very positive.

- Jerry was very at ease at the party

and he had to say a few words

and a lot of us all showed up in support of Jerry.

- Up to the end, he was telling me and other people,

it's going to be all right,

I know we're going to prevail, it's good.

And he had the flu.

And basically, that was it.

He had the flu, he stayed home

and then we did not see him again.

- My college girlfriend, the day of Jerry's death,

saw him kind of wandering through the sculpture gardens

here at UCLA.

Didn't talk to him or anything,

but she knew him

and she saw him

just kind of walking through the sculpture gardens

in a melancholy way the day he died.

I'm sure when she saw him,

he didn't know it was gonna be the day he died.

- We got a call to come into the office on Sunday.

- Somebody called me at home and said,

you need to come into the office right now.

- 10:00am on a Sunday, yeah, okay, I can be there.

- Jerry didn't kill himself for an hour

after he killed Deri.

And I know during that time,

the lucid part of him probably resurfaced.

I know he called his psychiatrist,

I know in a really sort of eerily calm way,

he described what he had done to his psychiatrist.

And it's interesting, I know Jerry so well

that I didn't even need to read the police report

to corroborate the vision that I had in my head,

but I knew he would go to his bed

and I knew he would sit down in that spot

in a sort of slumped position that he sat in.

And I know that he must have spent an hour

contemplating what it was that he had done,

and that he had come to the conclusion

that there was just no way that what he had done

was acceptable enough to go on living.

And he put the gun to his temple

and he self executed himself.

- I think one of the more painful events in my life

was sitting at the breakfast table,

cup of tea in front of me, picking up the LA Times,

and that's how I learned what happened to Jerry.

- People are always asking why

when something dreadful happens.

Truth is, it doesn't matter why, it happened.

- I was angry at him, I was angry at him for doing that,

and I think many other people have felt the same way

and that may be one of the reasons

the story hasn't been told for so many years.

Maybe people need to go through a healing process for that.

But did I see it coming?

- When Jerry died, his mother called me that day,

a few months after that,

I started to see her on a regular basis.

Maybe I just wanted to know the answer,

maybe there was a reason why everyone at a certain age

came to this realization that they'd come from a bad seed,

we don't know.

And maybe part of my association with her

was sort of because I was really curious to know as well

because as much as I pushed Jerry away,

I wanted to understand the story.

- After Jerry died,

it was right at the time within a week or two

of when Z Channel started broadcasting sports.

And I guess you could say Z Channel died when Jerry died,

Z Channel died when sports came on.

- Well, there was a year between Jerry's death

and the end of Z Channel.

So while those events

were certainly clearly linked in people's minds,

they weren't directly linked perhaps.

- We were showing "The Silence" by Ingmar Bergman,

the end very climactic scene,

it's all about the quest for God,

is there God or is there just silence.

And here we reach the climax of the movie

then comes on at the bottom of the frame

a yellow chiron that says,

don't miss the Dodgers game coming up next at seven o'clock

on Z Channel.

- The Z Channel was really about content,

here's what we love, we love movies,

and here's a whole bunch of them

and here's some really interesting people

talking about them.

- To be included within all these great filmmakers

and to hopefully have opened somebody else's eyes out there,

I mean, 'cause that's what Z Channel did do,

just show the ordinary film goer

that there was a whole other world out there.

And so I feel very privileged to be a part of that.

- There's been no place since in my mind

that has done quite what Z Channel's done

in sort of bringing all different kinds of film together

in a way that really brings out the best in films

by showing it in a context of everything that is movies.

- The Z Channel being what it was

and being a remarkable achievement,

if you compare that with what Jerry eventually did

and how he died and what he did prior to his death,

there's this sense of creating a hero

where perhaps one is inappropriate.

And I had problems with that.

- Whatever I think sort of positive feelings

that were about Jerry at that point,

and it's sort of trumped everything,

you weren't gonna get around the fact

that he murdered his wife.

- I had a feeling in my mind that Jerry had other options,

that there was other options for him.

That doesn't make it right,

I'm not saying anything

about how you leave this earth or don't leave this earth,

I just always had in the back of my mind and still do

that he had other options.

- They can't be diminished

when we all stand up and have to say our names

about who's responsible for this piece of shit

or this masterpiece, who's responsible.

Everybody wants to take credit,

but he was an intricate part

of all of those films that he touched.

Even though he had nothing to do with them

when they were made,

there was still a living

nurturing that brought those films

that otherwise I think would been lost forever.

I like him.

- Louise Brooks, one of Jerry's favorite actresses

and one of mine, always like to quote Gerter,

Gerter would say, a human life remains of consequence,

not because of what we leave behind,

but because we act and inspire and rouse others.

Damn it.

Sorry, a human life remains of consequence,

not because of what we leave behind,

but because we act and inspire and rouse others

to action and inspiration,

we act and inspire and rouse others to action and enjoyment.

And so, when I think of the legacy of Jerry Harvey's life,

I think of it in those terms,

I think, he's not a guy who left much behind,

what he left behind was in a lot of way wreckage

and very tragic and costly wreckage.

The films that got left behind that he midwifed

are part of the action and inspiration of his life.

He acted and inspired others

to value these things of beauty.

- [John] You're listening to Castaway's Choice,

I'm John McNally.

Our castaway this week is Jerry Harvey,

who is the program director of Group W's Z Channel.

Why did you choose what letter?

- [Jerry] For me it's the greatest love song.

- [John] It's that simple?

- [Jerry] Yeah.

[soft music]

♪ Gone is the romance that was so divine ♪

♪ 'Tis broken and cannot be mended ♪

♪ You must go your way and I must go mine ♪

♪ But now that our love dreams have ended ♪

♪ What'll I do when you are far away and I am blue ♪

♪ What'll I do?

♪ What'll I do when I am wond'ring who is kissing you ♪

♪ What'll I do?

♪ What'll I do

♪ With just a photograph to tell my troubles to ♪

♪ When I'm alone

♪ With only dreams of you what won't come true ♪

♪ What'll I do?

[upbeat music]