Some Film Buffery

The other day I mentioned that I felt a series of movie reviews coming on as content for this blog. Partly that was because I watched a fair amount of film this weekend while my wife was out of town. But I'm not going to go all out in that regard. I have enough other work-related writing to do to try and wax all eloquent about recently-viewed cinema. Also because I got a little shook up from watching a documentary, "Z Channel - A Magnificent Obsession." It's the story of Jerry Harvey, a fanatical cinephile who was a true pioneer of cable television in the 70s and 80s. He programmed content for the Z Channel, which made a big impact (apparently) on a lot of people in the Los Angeles area when the station operated. He had a deep devotion to a wide range of films, and did a brilliant job in putting schedules together, arranging for retrospectives of great directors, actors and genres and exposing people to movies that might otherwise have been long forgotten. It's hard to measure the impact that he made on pop culture, but the documentary features quite a few contemporary filmmakers (like Tarantino, Jarmusch and others) who have gone on to affect public tastes themselves, each of whom give heaps of credit to Harvey as an inspiration and consciousness-raiser re: the power of film.

Eventually, the Z Channel succumbed to the pressures exerted upon it by corporate giants like HBO and Showtime, and went out of business. The story of the channel and how this small-time operation got the rights to air a fantastic variety of great movies would be interesting enough if that's all it was, but the fact is, Jerry Harvey was a very disturbed individual, despite of or maybe because of his "magnificent obsesssion." The tragic element of the story is really sad and horrifying, actually, because as the station was in the process of making a last ditch effort to remain viable, he wound up killing his wife and then committing suicide. (That's not a spoiler - this information is mentioned in the description of the film on the DVD case.) Basically, he was so far gone in his absorption into the world of cinema that he lost his bearings somewhere.

Part of the reason he got that way was that he had a very painful childhood, though the details of what he suffered appear to be shrouded in some mystery. He had two sisters, each of whom also took their own lives. His mother was described as extremely flat in her emotional affect, and his father was a prominent judge in the city of Bakersfield, of all places (hello, Bilbo!) So as I was watching it, I was thinking of Bilbo and Julie B. who were both somewhere in the vicinity of the Z Channel during those years, wondering if they ever got cable or checked out any of Harvey's programming? I'll wait for them to answer for themselves...

Anyway, the documentary is really very compelling, and it's full of excellent film clips, that definitely pique my interest to track down a bunch of DVDs ranging from famous to obscure. But what a sobering splash of cold reality to think about what can happen when escapist entertainment becomes too central to our way of life. I'm not saying that movies turned him into a killer, but there was something really sad and desperate that it seems Jerry Harvey was trying to fill, but could never quite reach. It's a great shame, because in many ways he seems to have been quite a remarkable and beautiful person.