Alexandra “Xan” Cassavetes’ involving Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession documents the all-consuming movie love of former Los Angeles-area pay-cable outlet Z Channel’s programmer Jerry Harvey, who, with little warning, killed his wife, then himself. The picture stops just short of overtly connecting the mania of a life lived through celluloid heroes with the demons that drove him to his ignoble end, but the suggestion is there, lurking in the margins–it’s the spectre that looms over the luminaries Cassavetes assembles to discuss the influence that Z Channel had on their early appreciation for film and, in some cases, their careers. As Robert Altman, Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch, Alexander Payne, Alan Rudolph, Vilmos Zsigmond, Henry Jaglom, James Woods, and so many others speak in glowing terms of the opportunities provided them by Harvey’s brilliant, elastic, iconoclastic programming aesthetic, there is the faint whiff of discomfort as we begin to recognize that the same devouring love which swallowed Harvey whole is shared by not only these filmmakers, but also, likely, the audiences for their films, for Z Channel, and, now, for Cassavetes’ documentary. Knowledge that Xan’s father John Cassavetes is also the father of independent cinema only thickens the broth.
A champion of the primacy of a director’s vision, Harvey’s Z Channel was the first to broadcast Stuart Cooper’s films as well as unexpurgated versions of Sergio Leone’s astonishing Once Upon a Time in America, Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch–acts of critical integrity and what conventional broadcast wisdom branded poison that won Harvey the friendship of Cimino and Peckinpah, for starters. (As Cassavetes’ documentary progresses, one of the more startling (and startlingly poetic) revelations is that Harvey appears to have committed his murder-suicide with a pistol given him by Peckinpah.)
The most affecting testimonial comes courtesy LOS ANGELES TIMES film critic F.X. Feeney, who became fast friends with Harvey early in Z Channel’s run and remembers Harvey’s legacy not in the darker terms of many of the interviewees, but as one where the noble pursuit of exposing others to your obsession with knowledge and passion yielded a bounty of valuable commentary from a generation of filmmakers and scholars.What elevates Z Channel beyond the level of interesting, if unexceptional, documentaries is the unusual extent to which Cassavetes herself is inextricable from the film’s subtext of being reared on a steady diet of unusual, maverick cinema.
Clips from some of the more obscure entries in the oeuvres of Nicolas Roeg, Alan Rudolph, and Paul Verhoeven seem to have been chosen based on their full frontal nudity or surprising violence–mute commentary, perhaps, on just how outside the pale Harvey was but a challenge, too, intended or not, for Cassavetes to assess to what extent Harvey’s genius was reliant on unearthing lost or underestimated treasures and to what extent it was due his ability to program high-class porn.
Cassavetes consistently juxtaposes clips from a regal costume drama like Peau d’Ane with heaving bosom stuff like Dance of the Vampires, or Theresa Russell showing her crotch in Roeg’s Bad Timing with the chamber classic The Important Thing is to Love. Even clips from McCabe and Mrs. Miller and 1900 tend to showcase moments featuring frank nudity, correlating the success of an independent movie store that stocks Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s fourteen-hour Berlin Alexanderplatz with the size of its porn section.
source: http://filmfreakcentral.net