Speaker 1: The Projection Booth podcast is sponsored by Scarecrow Video cry Out.
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Speaker 2: Today you are watching the Z Channel, a service of
Speaker 2: Theta Cable Television.
Speaker 3: Oh gez folks, it's showtime.
Speaker 4: People say good money to see this movie.
Speaker 5: When they go out to a theater, they want clothed sodas,
Speaker 5: hot popcorn, and no monsters in the projection Booth.
Speaker 1: Everyone for tend.
Speaker 6: Podcasting isn't boring, cut it off.
Speaker 7: The first Kursauer film I think I ever saw was
Speaker 7: the Throne of Blood.
Speaker 1: On the channel.
Speaker 8: Fleeting Filmy Iva Tolone, there was a picture called Spider's Stratagem.
Speaker 7: Tan Begging Bo Wild Bunch.
Speaker 1: The straw Dogs, Uh bringing the Head of Our Freedom Garcias.
Speaker 9: The story of adele Ah.
Speaker 10: Suddy Lights Rear Window, Midnight Cowboy Song means the same.
Speaker 11: Jeremmy guitar, The Onion Field, The other Man who Fell
Speaker 11: to Earth, every film that Marlon Branda was ever.
Speaker 7: In on Our Salvation uncharged territory.
Speaker 1: Like Tom Thumb's and the Jungles.
Speaker 7: Jerry Harvey, Jerry Harvey programmer, obsessive programmer, dark negative and
Speaker 7: Maverick Nurtury.
Speaker 12: Skating that line between insanity and genius.
Speaker 1: What do you think the secret of the Z channel
Speaker 1: success is?
Speaker 7: I don't know.
Speaker 9: If I told you, then wouldn't be a secret.
Speaker 2: My father says, there's only right and wrong, good and evil,
Speaker 2: nothing in between. It isn't that simple, is it. No,
Speaker 2: it isn't. It should be, but it isn't. Okay.
Speaker 13: Next use Time six six saw Hollywood story with a
Speaker 13: tragic ending. This morning. The bodies of Z Channel programmer
Speaker 13: Jerry Harvey and his wife, Darry Rudolph were discovered Saturday
Speaker 13: night in their Westwood home. Police report Harvey shot and
Speaker 13: killed Rudolph, his wife of two years, before turning the
Speaker 13: gun on himself. The motive is unknown. Harvey had been
Speaker 13: chief programmer at Z Channel, which is known throughout Los
Speaker 13: Angeles for its eclectic and innovative programming. Both Harvey and
Speaker 13: Rudolph were thirty nine years old.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Projection Booth, I'm your host. Mike White
Speaker 1: joined me once again. Is mister Josh Adley. Been a while,
Speaker 1: but yes, I am here. I am still alive. I'm
Speaker 1: still in college and still useless. Also back in the
Speaker 1: booth is mister Adam Long.
Speaker 6: It's been an.
Speaker 12: Even longer while, but hey, I'm glad to be invited back,
Speaker 12: and I'm excited to talk about this film. What can
Speaker 12: I tell you?
Speaker 1: We're starting off the new year with a patroon request
Speaker 1: from Projection booth listener Andrew Hendrickson as we talk about
Speaker 1: the two thousand and four documentary from the Zan Cassavetties
Speaker 1: Z Channel, A Magnificent Obsession. The film looks at the
Speaker 1: titular pay TV channel, its inception, its impact and demise,
Speaker 1: and an ambitious to our work. Moreover, it looks at
Speaker 1: the channel, not necessarily founder, but the main programmer, Jerry Harvey,
Speaker 1: and his rise and fall and very depressing end. We
Speaker 1: will be spoiling this documentary. I guess you can spoil documentaries.
Speaker 1: We're going to spoil it as much as we possibly can.
Speaker 1: So if you haven't seen Z Channel, it's really worth
Speaker 1: your while go check it out. We will still be
Speaker 1: here when you come back. Adam, when was the first
Speaker 1: time you saw Z Channel? A magnificent obsession, and what
Speaker 1: did you think?
Speaker 12: I saw it originally when It's I Believe was on
Speaker 12: the IFC channel in two thousand and six, and I
Speaker 12: liked it a lot. I mean, it really hit me
Speaker 12: in all the right places. But it was ten years later.
Speaker 12: I was out in LA and just visiting friends basically,
Speaker 12: and just so happened they were having a Cassavettes film
Speaker 12: Festival thing or whatever over at Tarantino's theater, the New Beverly,
Speaker 12: and this film was included on the Saturday night midnight screening.
Speaker 12: Tarantino likes to brag everything's always on film, and so
Speaker 12: it was thirty five supposedly the only thirty five millimeter
Speaker 12: print of the film in existence.
Speaker 6: So I saw it in that way.
Speaker 12: And leading up to this, I write for this publication
Speaker 12: I've been writing for It's an All Weekly, I've been
Speaker 12: writing for for fifteen years. And the movies that I
Speaker 12: was seeing at that time were really depressing me, and
Speaker 12: I was thinking, maybe I'm falling out of love with
Speaker 12: my you know, my love affair with movies has been
Speaker 12: there since I was four years old, and I thought,
Speaker 12: I'm just really not feeling it. And I sat down
Speaker 12: and watched this in that theater with this I think
Speaker 12: it was sold out at midnight in November twenty sixteen,
Speaker 12: and I just my spirits were lifted.
Speaker 6: I can't even.
Speaker 12: It was just an elated feeling seeing these clips on
Speaker 12: the big screen, and I thought, it's not me, it's
Speaker 12: the movies that are that we're seeing now, that's the problem.
Speaker 12: And so this film was kind of I know that's
Speaker 12: a long winded way to tell the story, but it
Speaker 12: just it just lifted me to a better place. And
Speaker 12: when I walked out, I mean, even though it's a
Speaker 12: sad story, it just really made me feel so positive
Speaker 12: when I came out, just the love of film. So anyway,
Speaker 12: I'll shut.
Speaker 1: Up for now, and Josh, how about yourself.
Speaker 6: I also saw it when it first aired on IFC.
Speaker 6: I had not thought about Z channel when I saw
Speaker 6: the documentary for decades. I had read about it, you know,
Speaker 6: here and there in magazines, and I saw this documentary
Speaker 6: and I'm like, it kind of reignited my you know what,
Speaker 6: get to remember this is pre streaming era. We really
Speaker 6: need a channel like this again, because you know, Turner
Speaker 6: classic movies pretended to kind of be z ish if
Speaker 6: you will, but they were never going to show From Beyond,
Speaker 6: they were never going to show Forbidden World, they were
Speaker 6: never going to show some of the weirdo shit that
Speaker 6: Z Channel showed. And I was started to think we
Speaker 6: really needed a channel like this again, and so I
Speaker 6: saw it on TV. I saw it on IFC.
Speaker 1: I think TCM has shown a lot of those weirdo titles.
Speaker 1: I don't know if they specifically have shown the ones
Speaker 1: that you talked about, but especially that midnight movie series
Speaker 1: that they had at twelve o'clock on Saturdays, they definitely
Speaker 1: have shown some really fucked up shit, which is great
Speaker 1: and I absolutely love it.
Speaker 6: That was called TCM Underground before Discovery bought Warner Brothers
Speaker 6: and then they tried to kill turner Classic movies and
Speaker 6: one of the things they did kill was TCM Underground unfortunately,
Speaker 6: so it was there for a little while and then
Speaker 6: it wasn't.
Speaker 1: So my history with this movie is I just watched
Speaker 1: it last week for the first time. I had played
Speaker 1: around with seeing this for a long time but never did.
Speaker 1: I don't know what kept me away. It might be
Speaker 1: somebody that we've already mentioned in this podcast, Quentinarantino, because
Speaker 1: he is so fucking obnoxious in this documentary. There was
Speaker 1: a period of time where you couldn't turn on a documentary.
Speaker 1: I mean it could be on ice fishing and Tarantino
Speaker 1: would be in a documentary. It just seemed like that
Speaker 1: was his career for the longest time, was just being
Speaker 1: in documentaries. And it's really a shame because I've got
Speaker 1: friends who have tried to get him in documentaries and
Speaker 1: didn't show up for those. I don't know what it
Speaker 1: is like if you just hit him on the right day,
Speaker 1: give him the right bag of weed, what it is
Speaker 1: that he's going to show up for. But holy shit,
Speaker 1: not counting Tarantino, this was a very delightful documentary. And yeah,
Speaker 1: super sad, super depressing. I kind of knew, you know,
Speaker 1: they do the whole We're going to start at the
Speaker 1: end and go back to the beginning kind of thing.
Speaker 1: Very very typical documentary structure when it comes to this movie.
Speaker 1: But I was there for it, especially when it came
Speaker 1: to just the idea of these director's cuts. We'll talk
Speaker 1: about this as we go along, and just how Jerry
Speaker 1: Harvey was so into digging out very rare films and
Speaker 1: if anybody knows anything about me. They know how much
Speaker 1: I love rare films and trying to unearth things that
Speaker 1: people aren't able to see normally and trying to make
Speaker 1: those much more public. And I think I would have
Speaker 1: loved to have had a z channel in my life.
Speaker 1: I did have, and I think they mentioned on TV on.
Speaker 2: TV will now be presenting it's optional programming immediately following
Speaker 2: VIA that was only option on TV.
Speaker 1: Thewi Zoom is.
Speaker 7: Regular program schedule. This is on TV subspression.
Speaker 1: Television I did have on TV when I was younger.
Speaker 1: That was my very first foray into pay television. Though
Speaker 1: I don't necessarily remember all of the titles. I only
Speaker 1: really remember watching Star Wars when you could pay an
Speaker 1: extra premium and watch Star Wars through on TV. I
Speaker 1: don't remember that much more of the programming I remember
Speaker 1: more of once we got into cable and HBO, who
Speaker 1: seems to be kind of the nemesis. They're the enemy
Speaker 1: when it comes to this. Which is funny because right
Speaker 1: now as we're recording this, we're going through all of
Speaker 1: these bidding wars for different movie companies, and we're just
Speaker 1: making the conglomeration even bigger, and yeah, pretty much putting
Speaker 1: anything that's programmed like this and seems to have a
Speaker 1: real love of film. It feels like film is so
Speaker 1: subsequent to commerce, you know, just is all about the
Speaker 1: money right now and the entertainment slash art of it.
Speaker 1: Be damned. Z channels seem to really embrace the art
Speaker 1: as well as the trash, all the good stuff.
Speaker 6: I would like to add that Z also, and I
Speaker 6: mean this in a pretty positive way, they were sort
Speaker 6: of a film snob channel because I've looked through a
Speaker 6: lot of their old listings. They didn't do exploitation very
Speaker 6: much like you'll It's very rare to find them showing
Speaker 6: a slasher movie, even at the height of slashers. They
Speaker 6: wouldn't show a lot of drive and stuff. You weren't
Speaker 6: going to see the great smokey roadblock here. So I'll
Speaker 6: push back a little bit on the trash angle, because
Speaker 6: they really kind of tried to elevate themselves to a
Speaker 6: film snobbery sort of channel, and that was both a
Speaker 6: turn on and to turn off for a lot of people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I will say I'm not that familiar with the
Speaker 1: channel itself. I'm mostly going by some of those guides
Speaker 1: that they would show. So yes, they would show things
Speaker 1: like Chinatown, and I guess they showed China Town a lot,
Speaker 1: but I know they also showed the Blackbird, which I
Speaker 1: would consider absolute trash.
Speaker 12: A friend of mine was that asking me I ran
Speaker 12: this documentary to watch it again in preparation for the
Speaker 12: program that we're recording, and a friend of mine, who's
Speaker 12: also a film but I inviting him over to watch
Speaker 12: it with me, had not seen it and he said,
Speaker 12: asked me, well, how did you first hear about the
Speaker 12: Z Channel. I said, well, I remember reading a book
Speaker 12: about the Oscars, the History of the Oscars, and it
Speaker 12: was Give Them Hell, Harry. And this story wasn't mentioned
Speaker 12: in the film, which is interesting because James Whitmore was
Speaker 12: nominated for Best Actor for Give Them Hell, Harry, which
Speaker 12: is a film stage play about Harry Truman in the
Speaker 12: mid seventy I think it was seventy four, and it
Speaker 12: was because of the exposure from the Z Channel that
Speaker 12: he got that nomination, and it was a story that
Speaker 12: I was surprised that he didn't cover it. Maybe it
Speaker 12: was in a different cut of the film, because I
Speaker 12: know I listened to the commentary and they said the
Speaker 12: original cut was like five hours, but that was where
Speaker 12: I first heard about the Z Channel. Probably I was
Speaker 12: in my teens at that point, and I was fascinated.
Speaker 12: I was like, what's this all about? And the more
Speaker 12: I came to read about it, I was just completely
Speaker 12: envious that I didn't get that experience in today's age.
Speaker 6: You know, twenty years on, they could have done that
Speaker 6: five hour cut and I would have sat through all
Speaker 6: five hours of that. I think they should go back
Speaker 6: and read cut this into a five hour mini series
Speaker 6: because they talk on the commentary about a whole lot
Speaker 6: of Z Channel lore and controversies. Oh we cut that.
Speaker 6: They didn't want to talk about that. That was a
Speaker 6: sensitive subject and we can talk about that later. Because
Speaker 6: I think, Mike, we should set the stage for what
Speaker 6: Z Channel was. The documentary glosses over it. They make
Speaker 6: Jerry Harvey sort of the heart of Z Channel, and
Speaker 6: he was after a while, but he didn't start it.
Speaker 6: He didn't show up till like six years into Z
Speaker 6: Channel's existence. Because before that, to set the stage a
Speaker 6: little more, Adam you might remember this too, you had
Speaker 6: HBO Showtime, and then you know, down the line you
Speaker 6: had Movie Channel and Cinemax and then Mike you brought
Speaker 6: up on TV, and then there was Select TV, and
Speaker 6: there were a couple other weirdo pay channels like that.
Speaker 14: Monsters do have their place in the zoo, in your nightmares,
Speaker 14: in the deep, in your favorite horror movies, but not
Speaker 14: in your living room on your TV.
Speaker 2: Don't let PayTV be the monster in your living room.
Speaker 2: PayTV and cable TV companies are seeking the right to
Speaker 2: charge you for the very programs you now get free.
Speaker 2: If you want to stop PayTV and save free television,
Speaker 2: sign the petition in the lobby of this theater. Let
Speaker 2: your lawmakers know how you feel in the fight against
Speaker 2: PayTV and cable TV.
Speaker 6: And Z was the only one that had real balls
Speaker 6: in their programming because between On and Select and HBO Showtime,
Speaker 6: they were all showing the same basic movies. I mean, yes,
Speaker 6: you had exclusives here and there, but they were showing
Speaker 6: the basic stuff. You were never going to see nineteen
Speaker 6: hundred on HBO. You were never going to see the
Speaker 6: Leopard on HBO. You were never probably going to see
Speaker 6: Forbidden World on HBO, but you were going to see
Speaker 6: it on the Z channel. And that's the stage. VHS
Speaker 6: is a blip on the radar, you know, This is
Speaker 6: back when tapes were one hundred dollars a tape and
Speaker 6: a player was two thousand bucks. So if you wanted
Speaker 6: to see a movie not on television, and what I
Speaker 6: mean by like, you know, NBC Night at the Movies,
Speaker 6: you got Z Channel. Problem is it was only in
Speaker 6: Los Angeles and that really hurt them, especially down the line,
Speaker 6: because everything else was more or less national.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 12: I will give some props to the Movie Channel because
Speaker 12: I remember I was in tenth grade. This was nineteen
Speaker 12: eighty five, and they used to run cult films at
Speaker 12: midnight on Friday nights on the Movie Channel and that's
Speaker 12: where I first saw Eraserhead. And that is also where
Speaker 12: I first saw the Groove Tube. So I know that
Speaker 12: they were doing something, but that it was about the
Speaker 12: closest that we could get to what you're talking about
Speaker 12: about cult films are off the mainstream path. But I
Speaker 12: do remember that the Movie Channel did something because I
Speaker 12: remember that is distinctly where I saw Eraserhead and the
Speaker 12: Groove Tube for the first time.
Speaker 6: I think that was Drive in Theater even before Joe
Speaker 6: Bob Briggs took over Drive in Theater. It existed long
Speaker 6: before him, So I think that's when they were doing there,
Speaker 6: and I'm doing air quotes drive in movies, although I'm
Speaker 6: not sure Eraserhead conchs as a drive in movie. I'm
Speaker 6: not bashing the movie. I just don't know how that
Speaker 6: well that would have played at a drive in.
Speaker 1: You probably know this, Josh, and I'm so glad that
Speaker 1: you're on the show. This episode Max Headroom was Max
Speaker 1: Headroom on the movie channel. I swear I watched Max
Speaker 1: Headroom late at night, like not the TV show Cinemax Cinemax.
Speaker 6: Okay, Max Headroom was a co product because okay, the
Speaker 6: original Max Headroom in England that was a coal production
Speaker 6: with HBO. HBO owned Cinemax obviously, and it was we
Speaker 6: will give you half the money to make the initial
Speaker 6: sixty minute pilot for the UK as long as we
Speaker 6: can er it over here on Cinemax. And then that
Speaker 6: version added some music videos to get it to feature length,
Speaker 6: and then they spun the talk show that I think
Speaker 6: you're thinking of and the music video show that was
Speaker 6: spun off of HBO's involvement in the original twenty minutes
Speaker 6: into the Future movie. So you're in the right era,
Speaker 6: wrong channel.
Speaker 1: That's also around the same time. I remember either Cinemax
Speaker 1: or the Movie Channel or one of those showing Forbidden Zone.
Speaker 1: And that was my first exposure to the Forbidden Zone
Speaker 1: was watching it late night table and as a probably
Speaker 1: thirteen fourteen year old, I mean that movie just worked
Speaker 1: my mind.
Speaker 6: The era we're talking about here, Z Channel is a
Speaker 6: unique little entity. They're an eye of i'll just say
Speaker 6: thoughtfulness in an era of mainstream path And now that's
Speaker 6: not to say they didn't show mainstream movies either. They
Speaker 6: showed Rocky, they showed Empire Strikes Back, they showed Jaws,
Speaker 6: they showed the Expressiest. Because when you have so many
Speaker 6: people that look back at it, they're like, oh, that
Speaker 6: was that artsy fartsy channel, right, it's like, well, yes
Speaker 6: and no. But they had a big audience of I'll
Speaker 6: almost i'll steal a line from the president of National Lampoon,
Speaker 6: well to do nobody's because they being in LA and
Speaker 6: LA only, they were kind of talking to the film
Speaker 6: industry and the people who surrounded the film industry, and
Speaker 6: they didn't really get out of that until the bootleg era,
Speaker 6: which is where I started to see them.
Speaker 1: I remember with on TV, it started at eight o'clock
Speaker 1: at night and they ran it for I don't know,
Speaker 1: five hours or something like that. It was not a
Speaker 1: twenty four to seven channel like HBO any of those
Speaker 1: other things where you were paying for cable. I can't
Speaker 1: even remember the original cable company that we were dealing
Speaker 1: with way back when. But when it comes to Z channel,
Speaker 1: was that twenty four to seven or was that another
Speaker 1: only at night thing.
Speaker 6: I'm not sure if it started as twenty four to seven,
Speaker 6: but by the late seventies it was a twenty four
Speaker 6: to seven channel. But even HBO wasn't at first. I've
Speaker 6: got an old promo of for HBO in like seventy
Speaker 6: six or seventy seven, now twenty four hours a day.
Speaker 5: H we in the new year with more great entertainment
Speaker 5: than ever before, as HBO goes twenty four hours a day,
Speaker 5: plus sports and specials for less than taking your family
Speaker 5: to a single movie. HBO twenty four hours a day
Speaker 5: starting in January, to.
Speaker 10: Install HBO in your home till sixty seven.
Speaker 6: Wait, so what was it before that? Six eight? Do
Speaker 6: you just show two movies a night or something?
Speaker 1: Josh, You've shared some stuff with us as far as
Speaker 1: like a lot of there's like a. I don't even
Speaker 1: know how many hour video of Mick Garris interviewing directors.
Speaker 1: It sounds like he's interviewing them before they show a movie, right,
Speaker 1: Is that what that program was?
Speaker 6: Yeah? They had for their fantasy film festivals what they
Speaker 6: called it, and that's where the horror, sci fi and
Speaker 6: even vaguely defined fantasy films would go. And they would
Speaker 6: have on guests and I think in a weird way
Speaker 6: who they could get for some of their programming because before,
Speaker 6: like they had Roger Korman on there, they had never
Speaker 6: showed a Roger Corman movie on Z Channel before, so
Speaker 6: I think it was, well, Roger's willing to come on, well,
Speaker 6: we'll show piranha, I guess because Rogers coming on the
Speaker 6: Fantasy Film Festival was a big deal. And I shared
Speaker 6: with you guys a whole lot of what rare programming.
Speaker 6: I can find so much of this because it was
Speaker 6: in such a relatively niche market and at the early
Speaker 6: end of VCRs, so much of their promos and their
Speaker 6: bumpers and their interviews and their host segments just aren't
Speaker 6: out there anymore. I would love I want to put
Speaker 6: out a call if anybody has old Z Channel programming
Speaker 6: that's not already on YouTube. Contact Mike to get in
Speaker 6: contact with me. I'd love to create an archive of
Speaker 6: this stuff because I think I set you guys nine hours,
Speaker 6: like a giant nine hour block of all that stuff,
Speaker 6: and that's all I can find. And for a channel
Speaker 6: that lasted like fifteen years, that's pathetic. There should be
Speaker 6: a lot more.
Speaker 1: Than that ruined the movie. It sounds like once the
Speaker 1: sports programming came in, according to the commentary, and we'll
Speaker 1: talk about the commentary, once the sports programming came in,
Speaker 1: they started taping over the old tapes. Because I will
Speaker 1: admit that as someone who sounds like I was working
Speaker 1: in like an industry kind of proto to what you're
Speaker 1: working in at them, like commercial insertion on a cable channel. Basically,
Speaker 1: those three quarter inch tapes, they're not cheap, and we
Speaker 1: would recycle those things as much as we possibly could
Speaker 1: until the quality just degraded.
Speaker 6: That's the way it used to be.
Speaker 12: And you know, I cringe when I think about that,
Speaker 12: about things that were lost to the sands of time
Speaker 12: because of that. I mean, we just, I mean, it
Speaker 12: was a different time. We weren't thinking of, you know,
Speaker 12: the future when we would just wish and give anything
Speaker 12: to have these things. And you know, but yeah, I
Speaker 12: really appreciate what was what you sent us with these
Speaker 12: the blocks of programming here, because I tried to get
Speaker 12: through as much of it as I could, and it
Speaker 12: was fascinating. It was really just a window because yeah,
Speaker 12: I had done some YouTube research as well, and I
Speaker 12: just wasn't finding much of anything. It's really sad that
Speaker 12: it's not available. So I second the emotion. If if
Speaker 12: anybody has any of that, I would love to see it.
Speaker 6: Well. In a quick diversience on what you just said,
Speaker 6: Adam and Mike Places didn't save anything, and I mean nothing.
Speaker 6: I remember I don't know, maybe ten years ago the
Speaker 6: Sci Fi Channel tried to do you know, our first
Speaker 6: twenty years on the Air special and they hadn't saved
Speaker 6: any of their old bumpers and promo as they put
Speaker 6: a call out, Hey, all of you people that tape
Speaker 6: shit off of TV, if you've got the old bumpers,
Speaker 6: can you send us copies? That's how dumb this industry
Speaker 6: was back then.
Speaker 1: Oh, I'm sure it's still dumb.
Speaker 6: Do we even need to bring up doctor who? I mean,
Speaker 6: there are still how many lost episodes of who.
Speaker 1: We need the tapes. We have to have these tapes.
Speaker 1: Tapes are expensive, we need them.
Speaker 12: The Johnny Carson story is another famous one, you know,
Speaker 12: or infamous one. I guess you would say, yeah.
Speaker 6: Z channel kind of became a taste maker when Z Channel,
Speaker 6: you guys kind of hinted at it before Adam, you
Speaker 6: hinted at it with the Oscars thing. When Z channel
Speaker 6: championed a movie, like when they ran into I think
Speaker 6: it was was it Salvador with James Woods and Jim Belushi.
Speaker 6: James Wood straight up says if Z channel had not
Speaker 6: championed this movie and pushed it as hard as they did,
Speaker 6: they probably would have never gotten the Oscar nominations. And
Speaker 6: there are a couple other instances where Z channel just
Speaker 6: went to the wall, and I think sometimes they had
Speaker 6: blurred vision, because like they went to the wall for
Speaker 6: Chimino's The Sicilian and I don't think it's a terrible movie,
Speaker 6: but they made it seem like it was just an
Speaker 6: Oscar winner that everybody overlooked. And it's like, well, you
Speaker 6: guys are friends with Michael chim You're not distance enough
Speaker 6: to go. You have Christopher Lambert in a French accent
Speaker 6: playing a full blooded Sicilian hitman. I think we already
Speaker 6: have problems with this movie. Yeah, Chiminos stood up in
Speaker 6: Jerry's wedding, right. Yeah, they were super close friends, so
Speaker 6: fx feeni. I loved him in this documentary. Now, I
Speaker 6: don't know much about the man on his own, but
Speaker 6: he just came across as such a passionate film fan,
Speaker 6: and it seemed like whenever it came to a Michael
Speaker 6: Chimino movie, he had blinders on because he just couldn't
Speaker 6: admit I'm friends with this guy, and I can't say
Speaker 6: his movie's not the greatest movie of all time because
Speaker 6: Mike Heaven's Gate. It's a fucking disaster and even the
Speaker 6: longer cut is is it a better movie? Yes, it's
Speaker 6: still a fucking disastrous, bloated train wreck, and they championed
Speaker 6: it hard man. Let's not forget they flew to Paris
Speaker 6: to see the Sicilian doo. So what's forgetting? Ah, the
Speaker 6: Harry Knowles treatment.
Speaker 12: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was very shocked with all of the talk of
Speaker 1: Chamino that he wasn't in this documentary, and you know,
Speaker 1: he's still alive at the time. I think he was.
Speaker 1: I don't know if he had started his plastic surgery
Speaker 1: journey where he was turning himself slowly into an alt
Speaker 1: rock singer from nineteen eighty four. But it was weird
Speaker 1: that he wasn't in here, And I'm sure that there
Speaker 1: were a lot of people that just didn't want to
Speaker 1: talk about this because the way that they, you know,
Speaker 1: to your point, they do hang this movie on the
Speaker 1: Jerry's story, like he becomes the central character, even though,
Speaker 1: like you said, it wasn't just him doing this, but
Speaker 1: they really it's tracking the rise and fall of the
Speaker 1: Z Channel and it's tracking the rise and fall of
Speaker 1: Jerry Harvey at the same time. So it's a very
Speaker 1: tempting narrative to put into place where you're just like, Okay,
Speaker 1: this man was the response, was responsible for everything. But
Speaker 1: then as you're watching it, you're like, no, there's other
Speaker 1: people in here. It sounds like he was probably the
Speaker 1: loudest voice in the room or the person you didn't
Speaker 1: want to tangle with. It sounded like he had such
Speaker 1: a mercurial temper that you wouldn't want to fuck around
Speaker 1: with this guy.
Speaker 6: Now, they wouldn't have used this term back then. I
Speaker 6: think he was a totally toxic person from everything they say.
Speaker 6: They say, you know, the way he would just flip
Speaker 6: on mood swings and just lash out at people, and
Speaker 6: then of course you know the ending of his story.
Speaker 6: He just seemed like he was an incredibly toxic, toxic person,
Speaker 6: and whether they wanted him to or not, he became
Speaker 6: the face of Z Channel. He became the face of
Speaker 6: not even just Z Channel, but of alternative programming to
Speaker 6: the mainstream in general. Because at the time, okay, you
Speaker 6: know TNT existed, you know TBS existed, a and he existed.
Speaker 6: You might get some of these more weirdo movies on
Speaker 6: basic cable, but Z was the only one that was
Speaker 6: going to The way they put it in the documentary
Speaker 6: I think is actually quite brilliant. I can't remember who
Speaker 6: says it, but it was, here's why this movie is great,
Speaker 6: and if you disagree, here's why you're not allowed to disagree.
Speaker 6: Something like that, like, here's why you're wrong for not
Speaker 6: liking this movie. And that's the stance they took, right
Speaker 6: or wrong. That's the stance they took. But I want
Speaker 6: to touch on something, Mike. You said way earlier, you
Speaker 6: said they would show movies multiple times. I was looking
Speaker 6: through these guides, and there are a couple of the
Speaker 6: video guides that I sent you guys, you know the
Speaker 6: Z channel of them on the air kind of thing
Speaker 6: they would show if because they only had like HBO
Speaker 6: would have maybe two hundred movies in a month that
Speaker 6: they would rotate through. Okay, Z channel had about twenty five,
Speaker 6: so you could I was looking at one month of
Speaker 6: the schedule, I don't remember what year, and the Wiz,
Speaker 6: Forbidden World and Chinatown were on every single day of
Speaker 6: that month, just different times. They did not have the
Speaker 6: well that the other channels had, and I can see
Speaker 6: that I like watching a movie more than once. I
Speaker 6: don't think I could sit through the Whiz more than
Speaker 6: twice in a month, let alone twenty eight to thirty
Speaker 6: times in a month.
Speaker 1: True, though, I used to watch a lot of shit
Speaker 1: on those cable channels, thank goodness when we had cable.
Speaker 1: Once we finally got in, I think my parents sported
Speaker 1: the whole thing of like all four of the movie
Speaker 1: channels that we've mentioned before, HBO, Showtime, Cinemax in the
Speaker 1: Movie channel. But even then, it felt like there were
Speaker 1: certain movies that would be on and I would just
Speaker 1: watch them over and over and over again. So there
Speaker 1: were so many films where it's like maybe I saw
Speaker 1: it at the theater, but for sure I saw it
Speaker 1: on cable, and it just became a staple. Like there
Speaker 1: are so many things that are just like drilled into
Speaker 1: my brain of watching those. I agree with you, I
Speaker 1: don't think I could watch The Whiz that often. But
Speaker 1: at the same time time, it's like there were certain
Speaker 1: things that they would play on cable or I'm just like, well,
Speaker 1: it's on, gonna watch. It might be in the background,
Speaker 1: but it's gonna be there, or I might pay attention
Speaker 1: to it. It probably turned on a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: people to The Whiz and they probably still remember it
Speaker 1: finally watching it back then when you didn't have that
Speaker 1: much option to see much else.
Speaker 6: You know what, the slang term for HBO in the
Speaker 6: eighties was, right.
Speaker 1: No, I remember TBS the Beast Master station.
Speaker 6: HBO was hey, beast Masters on there we go nice.
Speaker 6: The other two I remember watching endlessly, and one of
Speaker 6: them I showed Mike later for a radio drome would
Speaker 6: be Malibu Express and Ninja three The Domination played all
Speaker 6: the time. Now Ninja three, Mike, I could watch that
Speaker 6: thirty times in a month.
Speaker 1: Well, I could watch Beast Masters so many times, I
Speaker 1: know I did.
Speaker 12: The Canniball Run was the one for me that just
Speaker 12: seemed to turn up all the time, and I probably
Speaker 12: watched it about every time time it was on. Though
Speaker 12: it's like, I can't it's an indefensible movie, but it
Speaker 12: still puts a smile on my face to this day.
Speaker 12: If I'm in a terrible mood, the Canniball Run is
Speaker 12: gonna snap me out of it. Even though I admit
Speaker 12: it's indefensible, I'm gonna die on this fence. I like
Speaker 12: the Canniball Run too better, It's more fun, and Mike
Speaker 12: will know probably no longer talk to me.
Speaker 1: Now, Why would I have a problem with that? I
Speaker 1: know I definitely saw that many, many many times. Now,
Speaker 1: that's the one with Jackie Chan was in both of them, right,
Speaker 1: but then in the second one it was with him
Speaker 1: and Richard Keel.
Speaker 6: Yep, that's the one where they are the James Bond car.
Speaker 1: Okay, Yeah, so yeah, I definitely love that one, and
Speaker 1: I think you are probably right. I think it's a
Speaker 1: it's a more favorite. I can't say it's better, but
Speaker 1: it's more favorite than the other one. But for me,
Speaker 1: it's really Dino and Sammy and them playing priests.
Speaker 2: Because if I had enough time, I would take those
Speaker 2: rosary bleeds and stuff them up your notes, these bleeds,
Speaker 2: those bleeds.
Speaker 4: If you're gonna take you shut up here.
Speaker 1: That's the classic for me. Those fucking end credits Man
Speaker 1: and Burt Reynolds slapping the shit out of Tom Telouise
Speaker 1: every time he starts laughing. That's the gold right there.
Speaker 6: Actually, my favorite is when he gets the hay in
Speaker 6: his mouth. How do horses live on this shit? We
Speaker 6: should swing back to Z Channel. We should talk about
Speaker 6: the fact that the documentary, while being very good and
Speaker 6: like I said, I would sit through, you know, another
Speaker 6: three hours or what at least the what the version
Speaker 6: we got is a lot out a lot of people
Speaker 6: who just were tangentially, you know, either they heard stuff
Speaker 6: or they watched it, or you find an old La
Speaker 6: Times article or something, and they even do kind of
Speaker 6: bring this up in the commentary track a little bit,
Speaker 6: that there was just things that didn't seem as important
Speaker 6: and they kind of glossed over. But the the Z
Speaker 6: Channel was I think a lot more tumultuous and they
Speaker 6: seem to always be on the verge of going out
Speaker 6: of business. Even when you get to the later stuff
Speaker 6: where money is a big problem, they always seem like
Speaker 6: they're on the verge of going out of business.
Speaker 1: Me, not having any knowledge of the Z channel, I
Speaker 1: wouldn't know that. But it's interesting that when you watch
Speaker 1: a documentary where you know the subject matter, and you
Speaker 1: probably know the subject matter as much, maybe sometimes even
Speaker 1: more than the filmmakers. Because I've been in that spot
Speaker 1: where I'm watching a documentary like that, they might be
Speaker 1: giants documentary. I feel like that did not tell nearly
Speaker 1: enough of their story, and what they ended up telling
Speaker 1: was not very well told. There was just a whole
Speaker 1: lot of problems that I had with that. And there's
Speaker 1: other docks where you're just like, oh, they left out this,
Speaker 1: they left at that, Da da da da da. I
Speaker 1: watched this one, I'm like, I have no idea. So
Speaker 1: this two hour and one two minute doc mentory, it
Speaker 1: seems jam packed with as much information as they could
Speaker 1: possibly get into the memory banks. But it's funny to
Speaker 1: hear you say that, because for me, it's like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is the complete picture. But for you, knowing more
Speaker 1: about this stuff. You're like, oh, they left at this,
Speaker 1: I don't know, Oh gosh, it could have been so
Speaker 1: much more. So I'm curious, what are some of those
Speaker 1: things that they left out that you think that should
Speaker 1: have been in here?
Speaker 6: A lot of it is more on the tail end,
Speaker 6: you know, when Z Channel was on its last legs,
Speaker 6: because they never once bring up how VCRs killed Z
Speaker 6: Channel's audience because they were showing, you know, all of
Speaker 6: these super rare, weirdo movies. Who's the only place you
Speaker 6: were ever going to see that until that tape came
Speaker 6: out from Media home Video, until that movie came out
Speaker 6: on tape from Anchor Bay, Eric, Well, Anchor Bay didn't exist.
Speaker 6: But you know what I mean. Once these movies started
Speaker 6: to come out on table or on tape, their ratings
Speaker 6: would go down because they were losing the audience that
Speaker 6: would go to see these and they did get into
Speaker 6: a little bit of trouble, not to the degree the
Speaker 6: American Triple Ecstasy Channel got into, but sort of like that,
Speaker 6: are either of you familiar with the American Triple Ecstasy Channel,
Speaker 6: because we should take a little diversion into that. I
Speaker 6: can't say that I am actually it was a short
Speaker 6: lived that lasted less than two years. It was a
Speaker 6: hardcore porn pay channel where they would show two hardcore
Speaker 6: porn movies a night. Mike I sent you the promo
Speaker 6: in like nineteen eighty six or eighty seven or whatever
Speaker 6: it was. For only three hundred and eighty nine dollars
Speaker 6: a year, you could get two uncut porn o movies
Speaker 6: on night.
Speaker 11: I'm ginger from American Ecstasy. When you see a scrambled
Speaker 11: picture on this channel, don't worry. We'll be testing the
Speaker 11: uncensored American Triple Ecstasy every night at ten pm Eastern.
Speaker 15: It's so hot we have to scramble.
Speaker 11: You can de scramble the channel with the American Triple
Speaker 11: Ecstasy de scrambler box. Three hundred and ninety nine dollars
Speaker 11: include everything you'll need for the first year. The second
Speaker 11: year is only one hundred and.
Speaker 9: Twenty dollars guaranteed.
Speaker 11: Members of American Ecstasy can use the twenty percent discount
Speaker 11: and pay only three hundred and nineteen dollars. These are
Speaker 11: the original versions, no editing. When we start officially, that's
Speaker 11: when your first year begins. You will not be billed
Speaker 11: for the Triple X testing period.
Speaker 6: I don't know how reasonable that was, but they were.
Speaker 6: The thing that killed them was some kids whose parents
Speaker 6: subscribed to American Triple Ecstasy started taping the movies and
Speaker 6: then selling copies at their middle school. And when they
Speaker 6: got caught, guess who got blamed the channel for not
Speaker 6: having more parental locks, not the parents the channel and
Speaker 6: so Z Channel kind of had a small controversy around
Speaker 6: that same sort of thing.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 6: Z Channel didn't show hardcore porn. They had a softcore
Speaker 6: series called the night Owl Series, which was their most
Speaker 6: popular series because eighties and guys and porn. So but
Speaker 6: they would have like the just this side of hardcore,
Speaker 6: you know, European films and all that, and some assholes
Speaker 6: started taping those and selling them on the bootleg market,
Speaker 6: which also started to cut into Z Channel. Why do
Speaker 6: I need to pay for Z Channel if I can
Speaker 6: just buy the tape of Emmanuel nineteen Emmanuel blows up
Speaker 6: the movies or whatever. So VCRs were a huge bane
Speaker 6: to Z Channel and keeping their viewership. As was that
Speaker 6: they bring it up in the documentary They briefly the
Speaker 6: magazine The magazine which I do want to say, if
Speaker 6: you guys listening or you two here, You guys need
Speaker 6: to buy the DVD of Z Channel and Magnificent Obsession
Speaker 6: because the book there comes with a seventeen page booklet
Speaker 6: reprinting reviews for all of the movies that they show
Speaker 6: clips from in the movie exactly is how they appeared
Speaker 6: at the same fonts and everything. So if nothing else,
Speaker 6: buy the DVD to get the booklet. I do have it.
Speaker 6: It's great. Yes, they left out other things because you'll
Speaker 6: notice they would jump from like a year to then
Speaker 6: like an event three years later in Z's timeline, and
Speaker 6: they were Mike you brought up earlier. They had a
Speaker 6: nemesis in HBO HBO and eventually escalated into lawsuits, but
Speaker 6: initially it was just little bits of in fighting because
Speaker 6: HBO would try to poach some of their programming. HBO
Speaker 6: would poach some of their people, and there was Jerry
Speaker 6: Harvey and interviews never I don't think said the word HBO,
Speaker 6: but he would talk about competitors and he would basically
Speaker 6: attack them for you know, how much money they waste
Speaker 6: and bad practices and things he's heard, and they leave
Speaker 6: out that kind of stuff they leave out. I don't
Speaker 6: know about Jerry Harvey. I mean, you know, everything maybe
Speaker 6: is in the documentary, but the Z Channel itself, they
Speaker 6: went through like five different owners and they only mentioned
Speaker 6: two of those in the documentary. That's the kind of
Speaker 6: stuff I'm talking about, Mike when I say the documentary
Speaker 6: leaves out a lot because it just breezes past certain things,
Speaker 6: and maybe it's nobody wanted to talk about it. Like
Speaker 6: did you ever see that National Lampoon documentary Drunk Stone,
Speaker 6: Brilliant Dead. We all know National Lampoon went to shit
Speaker 6: after the hostile takeover Tim Matheson made in the early
Speaker 6: nine As soon as they get to that point, the
Speaker 6: documentary stops because everyone goes, I don't want to talk
Speaker 6: about that time. Those were bad times. I don't want
Speaker 6: to I don't want to talk about And it's like, well,
Speaker 6: that makes me want you to talk about it, because
Speaker 6: that's more interesting the fact that you don't want to
Speaker 6: talk about it. And I think that is one of
Speaker 6: Z Channel's problems here. Unless all that stuff is just
Speaker 6: in the cut footage, you know, maybe they didn't breeze
Speaker 6: over that and it just got lost in the edit.
Speaker 6: So I can't throw to their intentions. But what's on
Speaker 6: the screen is they leave a lot out.
Speaker 12: There's a lot of bonus stuff on that bonus disc.
Speaker 12: I need to go back and rewatch it. But I
Speaker 12: know there's a lot of deleted stuff there on the
Speaker 12: actual DVD, and so I know I know there's some
Speaker 12: because it's a two disc set, so I remember there
Speaker 12: being some stuff that it's not in the final film.
Speaker 12: So I need to go back on I'm meant to
Speaker 12: do that in preparation, and I just didn't. I just
Speaker 12: didn't get around to it. But I'm going to very soon.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it sounds like there's a lot of hesitation from
Speaker 1: a lot of people to talk about this. It's from
Speaker 1: what Alexandra or Zan Cassavetti's was talking about. Like even
Speaker 1: FX Feeni, he did not want to talk about this
Speaker 1: or really took a lot to finally get him on camera. Though.
Speaker 1: I have to say, now, this is not a slam
Speaker 1: of Alexandra cassavettis, but she is so obnoxious in that
Speaker 1: audio commentary, so obnoxious and just seven people on the
Speaker 1: audio commentary. It's a little excessive and she just will
Speaker 1: like cut people off and just I don't know, she
Speaker 1: sounds like she's twelve years old. Just as far as
Speaker 1: like the this is the coolest guy ever. She's kind
Speaker 1: of got that like Tarantino energy.
Speaker 6: Almost Maybe maybe I'm about to commit slander, but I
Speaker 6: Tarantino seems like he was coked up as hell on
Speaker 6: this doc. He's so excited. You look at his eyes,
Speaker 6: how animated he is. There's no way he's not coked up.
Speaker 6: It's like, did you guys see Eli Roth Joe Bob
Speaker 6: Briggs show a couple of years ago? His eyes are
Speaker 6: dart and ever he's talking to like, am I elimented
Speaker 6: on this? What I'm talking about? The movie? Like it's like,
Speaker 6: oh dude, you just did a major bump. Before they
Speaker 6: went on the.
Speaker 1: Air, Tarantina was definitely doing a lot of coke, him
Speaker 1: and pt Anderson. There's that famous story of them not
Speaker 1: necessarily physically torturing Fiona Apple, but just mentally torturing her
Speaker 1: with them being assholes basically all night. Though I know
Speaker 1: she was not an innocent you know, little flower, because
Speaker 1: talking with who's the one that did the John Holmes
Speaker 1: documentary was at cass Pally and he was just like
Speaker 1: talking about how incredibly drugged pt Anderson and she were
Speaker 1: and she was and just how what an awful experience
Speaker 1: that was for him trying to put up with Paul
Speaker 1: Thomas Anderson. Yeah, no, Tarantino, especially when he's talking about,
Speaker 1: you know, and you were talking about this whole idea
Speaker 1: of taping off of the channel that Lance at a
Speaker 1: video archives had the balls to rent out tapes that
Speaker 1: he taped off of Z Channel. So you're watching stuff
Speaker 1: at home and it's got the Z Channel logos and
Speaker 1: stuff on there. It's like, Okay, that's some pretty big balls.
Speaker 1: But then when Tarantino's just like, and you see all
Speaker 1: the other movies that like they also show, but Lance
Speaker 1: only tape Dead Pigeon all right, Like.
Speaker 10: God damn, but what seat fixed bayonets Park Row, God
Speaker 10: damn it, tape part fucking Row.
Speaker 1: Please settle down. I mean, just keeps going and keeps going,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, cut, cut this right now, please just
Speaker 1: cut this.
Speaker 6: This is so cringe the taping off Z channel. That's
Speaker 6: actually how I first saw Z Channel. I didn't live
Speaker 6: in LA in the eighties. Mike, You and I actually
Speaker 6: met for the first time because we were video bootleggers.
Speaker 6: I think I think enough times passed. The statute of
Speaker 6: limitations is up. We can say that, and I remember
Speaker 6: I'd read about Z Channel in like Fangoria or star log,
Speaker 6: you know, they were showing some movie or something. I
Speaker 6: had a vague recollection, and then I got some tape.
Speaker 6: I do not remember what the movie is for the
Speaker 6: life of me. I got some bootleg movie that was
Speaker 6: not available on video, and it had the Z channel
Speaker 6: bumpers on it, and I think that was the first
Speaker 6: time I ever saw anything from Z Channel. And then,
Speaker 6: of course, nowadays people have uploaded a whole movie, like
Speaker 6: I think Easy Riders on the Internet archive from the
Speaker 6: Z channel, with the bumpers and the logos and everything,
Speaker 6: and it's just kind of an experience to watch it,
Speaker 6: weirdly enough, in full frame because Z channel is such
Speaker 6: a well because Z Channel was such a proponent of
Speaker 6: wide screen, so it was just weird that maybe they
Speaker 6: hadn't got to that point yet, or maybe a widescreen
Speaker 6: print just wasn't available at the time. Because that's the
Speaker 6: other thing we should talk about with z that they
Speaker 6: talk about in the documentary. With them being taste makers,
Speaker 6: they were the one who fought for not only wide
Speaker 6: screen to finally show a movie in its correct presentation,
Speaker 6: but also to restore it like dos Boot, Americans had
Speaker 6: never seen the full version of that till Z Channel,
Speaker 6: Heaven's Gate Once upon a Time in America nineteen hundred.
Speaker 6: There's a few others where they were the proponent of
Speaker 6: this movie was fucked in the ass when it was
Speaker 6: released in America. Here's what this movie was. And I
Speaker 6: think that they should be lauded for. And I also
Speaker 6: understand why people are not going to sit through a
Speaker 6: nine hour cut of I don't remember what the movie was,
Speaker 6: but it was a subtitle movie and they were bitching
Speaker 6: about coffee tasting like dishwater, and that movie was like
Speaker 6: nine hours long, and I'm like, yeah, I don't know,
Speaker 6: you know if my film nerd ass could have sat
Speaker 6: through that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I love the story from Alexander Payne where it's like,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, I remember writing and complaining that the letterbox
Speaker 1: wasn't wide enough for or tall enough for a Kurrasawa,
Speaker 1: that they were cutting off the sides. I was like,
Speaker 1: that's a good man, that's a very good man. That
Speaker 1: they still had the same Z Channel shirt that he
Speaker 1: got in the mail from that. That was great.
Speaker 12: Before we moved too far away from a Tarantino, I
Speaker 12: will have to tell you guys about the run in
Speaker 12: I have with him at the New Beverly, which was
Speaker 12: kind of interesting. U. November of twenty fifteen, a year
Speaker 12: prior to the seeing this film, I just happened to
Speaker 12: be out there again and he was running Rosemary's Baby
Speaker 12: on one of his midnight screenings, and he was in
Speaker 12: high promotion mode for The Hateful Eight, and so my
Speaker 12: buddy from Bakersfield had come down and he said, I
Speaker 12: wonder if Tarantino ever he gets out here to the theater.
Speaker 12: I said, ay, he's a busy guy. I doubt we'll
Speaker 12: see him out here. He had no more than said that.
Speaker 12: Then he said, three seats down there, he is right
Speaker 12: in front of you. And so he was literally three
Speaker 12: seats in the row in front of me, three seats
Speaker 12: to my right, and he threw his head back and
Speaker 12: you could see that famous forehead and the laugh, and
Speaker 12: I said, yep, that's him, all right. So I for
Speaker 12: the entire run time of Rosemary's Baby, I had to
Speaker 12: listen to everything he said.
Speaker 6: It was like a.
Speaker 12: Running commentary because I was with an earshot and it
Speaker 12: was just like it was. It was really kind of surreal.
Speaker 12: I'm gonna be honest with you. I was just sitting
Speaker 12: there and I thought, is this really happening? And of
Speaker 12: course he was. You know, he's always takes pride in
Speaker 12: the trailers that he runs before his films, and so
Speaker 12: I think he's a brisky point was one of the
Speaker 12: trailers that he had programmed, and.
Speaker 6: He was, Oh, isn't that great? You know that kind
Speaker 6: of stuff. And so then about two.
Speaker 12: Thirty in the morning, we're walking out and I bent
Speaker 12: over to pick up a copy of the La Weekly
Speaker 12: and my friend and my buddy said, if you stand
Speaker 12: up right now, you're gonna do an about face with Tarantino,
Speaker 12: and I said, and I did, and he was literally
Speaker 12: side by side with me. We walked out the door together,
Speaker 12: and I thought, well, what should I do here? I
Speaker 12: don't know, this is kind of an.
Speaker 6: And I just thought, well, I'm just gonna thank him
Speaker 6: for keeping this theater open.
Speaker 12: I don't know what else to say at this point,
Speaker 12: so I said, you know, I said, it's great that
Speaker 12: you keep in this theater running, and you know, I
Speaker 12: know it probably would have fallen by the wayside if
Speaker 12: you hadn't taken the reins. And I said, you know,
Speaker 12: it's a nice thing you're doing here. I don't know
Speaker 12: what else to say, and.
Speaker 6: He just lit up.
Speaker 12: He's like, wasn't it great seeing Rosemay's baby in thirty
Speaker 12: five milimeter? He was like bouncing on and he was
Speaker 12: actually pretty nice. I have to admit, Like Gilbert Godfrey
Speaker 12: always used to say about Jerry Lewis, he said, you know,
Speaker 12: well he was always nice to me.
Speaker 6: So that was kind of the way. The thing I had.
Speaker 12: My buddy was taking all of this in from the
Speaker 12: other side of the sidewalk, and when we finished, he said, well,
Speaker 12: you just had to be that guy, didn't you said, yeah,
Speaker 12: I did.
Speaker 1: Did he talk during the movie?
Speaker 6: Yes, he was.
Speaker 12: It was like a was an audio commentary. Yeah it was.
Speaker 6: It was like a running commentary.
Speaker 12: And he would laugh very loudly at things in the movie,
Speaker 12: you know, So it was it was like I said,
Speaker 12: it was surreal. It's that's the only way I know
Speaker 12: to put it. So and I hated to hijack the
Speaker 12: conversation and tell that story. But just for whatever it's worth,
Speaker 12: for shits and giggles, isn't saying so I had to
Speaker 12: say it.
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Speaker 16: Hello everyone, this is Malcolm McDowell.
Speaker 8: I just want to say that this is a request
Speaker 8: to listeners of the Projection Booth podcast to become patrons
Speaker 8: of the show via Patreon dot com p A T
Speaker 8: e o n dot com slash Projection Booth.
Speaker 16: That's pretty simple.
Speaker 1: I think you can do that.
Speaker 16: It's a great show and Mike he provides hours of
Speaker 16: great entertainment. So now it's time to give back my
Speaker 16: little drovies. Settle down and take a listen and have
Speaker 16: a sip of the old Molocco and then you'll be
Speaker 16: ready for a little of the.
Speaker 7: Old in out in out real horror show.
Speaker 1: Bye Bye.
Speaker 6: I'm Chris Cooling from Forgotten and you're listening to the
Speaker 6: Projection Booth The Ultimate Movie Podcast, we should talk about
Speaker 6: Jerry Harvey and his impact on the Channel and what
Speaker 6: happened after, because they do point it out in the
Speaker 6: documentary when Jerry Harvey eventually got so toxic that he
Speaker 6: murdered his wife and then killed himself. That obviously put
Speaker 6: a giant stain on Z Channel. And I don't think
Speaker 6: this was intentional, but the coincidental. The Z Channel hit
Speaker 6: a major financial roadblock right after Jerry Harvey killed himself
Speaker 6: when we had the what was it the late eighties
Speaker 6: seven early eighty eight stock market crash. I don't remember
Speaker 6: exactly when it happened, but they're investors who were about
Speaker 6: to take Z National to really compete with HBO. The
Speaker 6: floor fell out from these guys with the stock market crash.
Speaker 6: While a lot of people, when you look at retrospectives,
Speaker 6: they say Z died with Jerry, and while in spirit
Speaker 6: it might have, it still struggled on for another year
Speaker 6: to a year and a half before I mean Z
Speaker 6: ended it not with a bang, but with a whimper.
Speaker 6: And there's the added irony that both Adam and I
Speaker 6: saw this on IFC and that IFC paid for this
Speaker 6: documentary and the same thing happened to them. They started
Speaker 6: adding commercials, they started adding mainstream movies, they started going
Speaker 6: downhill and downhill, and now IFC is barely even a
Speaker 6: brand anymore. But we should also talk about the commercials
Speaker 6: because after that disaster of the money, they started taking
Speaker 6: on sports programming local LA sports programming, and that brought
Speaker 6: them into a lawsuit from the FCC because according to
Speaker 6: pay cable restrictions, you cannot have advertising. And they said, well,
Speaker 6: we don't have advertising except during the baseball and basketball games,
Speaker 6: which have commercials. And they said, well, you can't be
Speaker 6: a pay cable channel and carry commercials. And I think
Speaker 6: Z died before that ever went to actual court and
Speaker 6: got resolved. But that was also another giant shot that
Speaker 6: took some meat out of Z channel was we need
Speaker 6: the sports to stay alive, but we also can't survive
Speaker 6: as a pay cable channel with the sports. And the
Speaker 6: sports were also another bane. The people who were tuning
Speaker 6: in for the Dodgers did not care about the Kirosawa
Speaker 6: film that came before it. The people who were watching
Speaker 6: the weird French movies that are subtitled are not going
Speaker 6: to watch the La Heat basketball games that came after it,
Speaker 6: So you were trying to please two masters and not
Speaker 6: pleasing either one. And I just think it was a
Speaker 6: band aid over a bullet wound, and I think it
Speaker 6: actually made them bleed even harder.
Speaker 1: It's a really sad part of the documentary when they
Speaker 1: introduced that, and yeah, it's like trying to make the
Speaker 1: Jackson nerds sit at the same table. And it's just
Speaker 1: not going to happen.
Speaker 12: Yeah, that's a great analogy, and it just it does
Speaker 12: it kind of It just broke my heart when they
Speaker 12: were talking about The Silence, the Bergmann film, The Silence,
Speaker 12: and then there's a promo for a coming up next whatever,
Speaker 12: the baseball game or whatever. It was, this really dark,
Speaker 12: serious Bergman film, and then there's a promo for a
Speaker 12: baseball gament.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, it's like playing an up tempo record out
Speaker 1: of a fucking death dedication. Pondras Man, fucking pondrous.
Speaker 6: Z channel had become Okay. It was such a taste maker.
Speaker 6: I mean, it died in eighty nine, so it's still
Speaker 6: technically the eighties, but we're at the tail end of
Speaker 6: the eighties. It was such a taste maker and in
Speaker 6: the beginning and middle of the eighties. By the time
Speaker 6: it died, it was given three paragraphs in the LA
Speaker 6: Times just saying, you know, local Los Angeles cable channel,
Speaker 6: saying goodbye or signing off or whatever it was. I
Speaker 6: hate to say this, but they lived past their relevance.
Speaker 6: And now some of that was outside forces. Okay, some
Speaker 6: of that was things they could not have helped, even
Speaker 6: the Jerry Harvey murder suicide, you know, with something they
Speaker 6: couldn't have seen coming. But maybe it's twenty twenty hindsight, guys.
Speaker 6: There's had to have been better options than with the
Speaker 6: lot ones they went with. They had to have been
Speaker 6: more options than adding sports and throwing on commercials. Maybe
Speaker 6: we just don't have the full picture. But I don't
Speaker 6: think it was as bad as as they seem to
Speaker 6: think it was, because they massively overcorrected in the wrong direction.
Speaker 1: I think about channels like AMC back in the day
Speaker 1: when AMC was the TCM of cable channels. They would
Speaker 1: have whole mornings of We're going to show a buster
Speaker 1: Keaton festival, and it would go on all morning, and
Speaker 1: you had who was it wasn't Robert Osborne, wasn't Robert
Speaker 1: Osbourne on that one.
Speaker 6: I know he's on Turner Classic, but he might have
Speaker 6: started on AMC. I don't remember.
Speaker 1: For the name I was trying to think of was
Speaker 1: Bob Dorian.
Speaker 7: This is the tape I found downstairs.
Speaker 2: Let me clear something up. A lot of people think
Speaker 2: that Boris Karlov played Frankenstein, and that's not right. Karlov's
Speaker 2: character didn't have a name in that film.
Speaker 17: He was only referred to as the Monster. It has
Speaker 17: been a number of years since I began excavating the
Speaker 17: ruins of Condah with a group of my colleagues. Now
Speaker 17: my wife and I have retreated to a small cabin
Speaker 17: in the solitude of these mountains.
Speaker 1: Having him on there is like your Ben Menkowitz as
Speaker 1: it were, you know, just like introducing everything, and yeah,
Speaker 1: that was great, and then yeah, they started to add commercials.
Speaker 1: Then they started to they weren't showing uncensored films because
Speaker 1: I remember watching straight Time on there, and there's a
Speaker 1: scene where Dustin Hoffman makes mment wallsh to take off
Speaker 1: his pants while they're on a freeway, and I remember
Speaker 1: the film got closer, like you kind of zoomed in
Speaker 1: so that you didn't see what was underneath this, you know,
Speaker 1: but below the waste kind of thing. And I was
Speaker 1: just like, that's really screwy, what's going on. And I
Speaker 1: don't know if they were necessarily letterboxing things, because there
Speaker 1: was a huge backlash against letterboxing. I mean, I worked
Speaker 1: at a video store when Last the Move he Cans
Speaker 1: came out, which was one of the first big letterbox
Speaker 1: movies to come out on video. I'm sure that there
Speaker 1: were precedents, but that was such a popular film and
Speaker 1: people wanted to see it, and they did not want
Speaker 1: to see it with those black bars. So many people
Speaker 1: had come into the video store and just be like,
Speaker 1: what's going on. Something's wrong with my television, something's wrong
Speaker 1: with this video cassette. It's like, well, let me try
Speaker 1: to explain this to you. No one wanted to hear.
Speaker 1: I had visual aids of here's this size screen and
Speaker 1: here's your television, and trying to line them up. It
Speaker 1: was too much math for the general audience. So they
Speaker 1: were just like, no, no, give me my money back.
Speaker 1: I don't want to see this. You're robbing me of
Speaker 1: half the picture.
Speaker 6: I'm in school right now and in my digital media class,
Speaker 6: the short I'm making for my final is called shot
Speaker 6: on Shittio and it's, you know, meant to look like
Speaker 6: a four to three black and white, you know, piece
Speaker 6: of crap VHS thing. And I kept trying to explain
Speaker 6: to my teacher and she's not a stupid woman in
Speaker 6: any way, and I'm going to make it full frame.
Speaker 6: And then she's looking at the wide screen, going, but
Speaker 6: this is full frame. She goes, you're talking about making
Speaker 6: it four to three. So just the terminology, because Mike,
Speaker 6: you and I, if we say, if I say full
Speaker 6: frame to you, you think four to three. Now when
Speaker 6: you say full frame, it fills the whole wide screen,
Speaker 6: and four to three is a different nomine. Clayture, I
Speaker 6: think that's kind of hilarious how much that creeped in
Speaker 6: the other direction. Definitely remember Spartacus being run on AMC
Speaker 6: in letterbox format in nineteen ninety two because there was
Speaker 6: an article in USA Today and they were announcing that,
Speaker 6: you know, letterboxing is going to be a thing with
Speaker 6: AMC or something of that nature. I remember reading the
Speaker 6: article back then, and I remember Spartacus was the one
Speaker 6: that stands out in my mind. I'm sure there were others,
Speaker 6: but it definitely they ran a widescreen version of that,
Speaker 6: and it looked to be properly letterbox. It wasn't you know.
Speaker 6: It was the proper two point thirty five to one
Speaker 6: as far as I could tell from what I remember.
Speaker 1: So yeah, Spartacus was one of those success stories too,
Speaker 1: where it was like there is a different version of
Speaker 1: that out there, and that seemed to come out and
Speaker 1: I don't know that was post Z channel, So I'm
Speaker 1: kind of like tangenting a little bit. But I just
Speaker 1: remember like going down to the Fox Theater and them
Speaker 1: showing that quote unquote restored version where they have the
Speaker 1: whole snails and clams conversation. Tony Curtis can come back
Speaker 1: and do his voice, but we're gonna get who is
Speaker 1: a fucking rich little or somebody. No, Anthony Hopkins came
Speaker 1: in and did the voice for Laurence Olivier. I just
Speaker 1: watched that longer version of The Good, the Bad, and
Speaker 1: the Ugly the other day where they could get a
Speaker 1: very old Eli Wallach to come back and do his
Speaker 1: lines and maybe clint E Swood, but I don't think
Speaker 1: it's clint E Swood. But frankly it's interesting to see,
Speaker 1: but do not release that as the main version of
Speaker 1: that movie. You can keep that longer version with those
Speaker 1: dubbed in voices. I mean, here I am complaining about
Speaker 1: a spaghetti western with dubbed in voices, but those extra
Speaker 1: dubbed in voices, fuck all that. Just give me the
Speaker 1: original thing that played in theaters plays.
Speaker 6: I remember if this was out on DVD at the time.
Speaker 6: This is either late nineties or really really early two thousands.
Speaker 6: I was so happy to see twenty ten, the year
Speaker 6: we make contact on on the Fox Movie Channel. You know,
Speaker 6: this is a this is one of the channels in
Speaker 6: the upper echelon. They're showing it. It's a gorgeous for
Speaker 6: you know, the time wide screen print. And they bleeped
Speaker 6: out two words that weren't even swear words, and I went,
Speaker 6: what good? So they left in him saying bastard. They
Speaker 6: left in shit. They beeped out him saying I got
Speaker 6: to take a piss and goddamn. So goddamn and piss
Speaker 6: were bleeped out, but shit and bastard were left in.
Speaker 6: And I was like, fuck you, Fox Movie Channel. I thought,
Speaker 6: I thought, I thought you were uncut.
Speaker 1: No, no, yeah, And I don't remember when AMC really
Speaker 1: hit the skids and they started doing I mean, because
Speaker 1: they were doing original programming as well. But now it's
Speaker 1: just such a shadow of what it once was, and
Speaker 1: I'm glad TCM is still around and still doing its
Speaker 1: thing again. It's like, Okay, you want to see Casablanca,
Speaker 1: all right, Well, wait around a couple of days, it'll
Speaker 1: be on. Don't worry about it. But they still seem
Speaker 1: to carry some weight, and I finally just invested in
Speaker 1: the Criterion streaming Channel. Jury still out for me on
Speaker 1: that one, but I am glad that they're kind of
Speaker 1: doing what Z Channel seemed to do, which is blocks
Speaker 1: of programming where they're like, oh, we're going to show
Speaker 1: you all these things about blah, or like we're going
Speaker 1: to have a festival for this filmmaker or this actor
Speaker 1: or this actress, and just like grouping those programs together,
Speaker 1: which again not being a Z Channel of Vishinado looking
Speaker 1: at those program guides and they're like, oh, we are
Speaker 1: running all of these Altman films. Yes please, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: would love a festival like that in my own living room.
Speaker 6: That was the thing that Z Channel excelled at that
Speaker 6: whole festival because they programmed a lot like that, where
Speaker 6: they would you know, here's every single Igmar Bergmann film
Speaker 6: ever made. I think they did like nineteen Jacqueline Beset
Speaker 6: films or something, and HBO would never do something like that.
Speaker 6: I think Z Channel only made a blip in the
Speaker 6: overall radar of cinophile culture. I think they had to
Speaker 6: walk so all these other channels in the streaming era
Speaker 6: and in the early two thousands could run. I think
Speaker 6: without Z Channel things would have been a much more
Speaker 6: bland place. And that's why I appreciate this documentary because
Speaker 6: I mean, this thing's twenty one years old now. Since
Speaker 6: this documentary was made, it's dated as hell. My god,
Speaker 6: James Wood still looks like a human being in it.
Speaker 6: He doesn't look like a giant pile of leftover laundry
Speaker 6: like he does now. It's sort of sad to think
Speaker 6: half of the talking heads in this are dead now.
Speaker 6: So that's the one thing I'll bash it for is
Speaker 6: it's shockingly out of date now. But I think more
Speaker 6: people need to see it because they need to understand
Speaker 6: what Z Channel was and why it was so important.
Speaker 6: And it also makes me wonder legally who owned the
Speaker 6: Z Channel, Like the IP, the trademark. I would love
Speaker 6: to have some asshole like me buy that and make
Speaker 6: like a streaming Z channel and bring it back, but
Speaker 6: I have no I would who owns the ip for that.
Speaker 6: I'm sure that's an abandoned IP at this point because
Speaker 6: I'm sure somebody didn't keep it up.
Speaker 1: It feels like we're going backwards when it comes to
Speaker 1: all of this stuff, like when I'm talking about looking
Speaker 1: at every Altman film, or like you said, all these
Speaker 1: jack Linbissett films, or Antonio and any of these festivals
Speaker 1: that they're running. It's like the channels that are out
Speaker 1: there right now, they seem like they're handcuffed because they
Speaker 1: are all beholden to different film companies, and so like, oh,
Speaker 1: is it out on Warner Brothers? We will at the
Speaker 1: time this recording, maybe you can watch it on HBO.
Speaker 1: But if it's owned by MGM, then you're gonna have
Speaker 1: to see it over on Amazon. And if it's on
Speaker 1: this label, then you're gonna have to see it over here.
Speaker 1: If it's on Paramount, you'll see it on Paramount. Plus,
Speaker 1: you can't sit down and watch a director's entire body
Speaker 1: of work or an actor actress's entire body of work
Speaker 1: because they worked for different different chains, different different studios,
Speaker 1: and it's like, okay, well, now you know, there is
Speaker 1: no such thing as like a Z channel where you
Speaker 1: can sit down and just see all of these things,
Speaker 1: unless like I'm sure ANTONIONI probably worked for the same
Speaker 1: you know, well, actually no, because he came over to
Speaker 1: the United States, so you could probably see his Italian work,
Speaker 1: but not as US work or as US work, but
Speaker 1: not as Italian work. And it's just like it drives
Speaker 1: me crazy. And then you come to the Netflix of
Speaker 1: it all, where it's like, oh, what's the oldest movie
Speaker 1: that's on Netflix right now? Nineteen seventy five. It's like, oh, yeah, good,
Speaker 1: I'm glad that there were no movies that were ever
Speaker 1: made before nineteen seventy five. Like you were so limited
Speaker 1: because they're like, well, we're not going to pay for
Speaker 1: the rights for these things because nobody's gonna watch them,
Speaker 1: so why would we have them on our channel. This
Speaker 1: stuff drives me crazy.
Speaker 6: Sometimes a filmmaker nisses me off when they claim certain
Speaker 6: movies are not part of their filmography. I think it
Speaker 6: was the BFI. I might be wrong on the place,
Speaker 6: but somebody did, like an Oliver Stone retrospective. It said
Speaker 6: a career in pictures and it starts with Salvador because
Speaker 6: he doesn't consider The Hand or Seizure to be real
Speaker 6: movies of his. James Cameron says, no, the Terminator was
Speaker 6: my first movie. No, it wasn't. So that kisses me
Speaker 6: off right there when like Z Channel would program the
Speaker 6: Hand and Seizure in an Oliver Stone retrospective, whether Oliver
Speaker 6: liked it or not. But the other thing. A couple
Speaker 6: of years ago, my girlfriend wanted to watch all the
Speaker 6: hell Razor movies again. I think at that point there
Speaker 6: were only nine, and we looked it up. We had
Speaker 6: to get like five different streaming services to get them all.
Speaker 6: Just to your point, Mike, it was like I just said,
Speaker 6: screw this, I'll just go to I'll just go to
Speaker 6: you know, Cinema Gaddiner or something like that. I'll just
Speaker 6: pirate these. This is streaming was supposed to make things easier,
Speaker 6: not harder. So I just pirated all the hell Raizer
Speaker 6: movies because fuck you dimension.
Speaker 12: Yeah, I mean that's kind of where we're at. And
Speaker 12: you know, Disney when they bought it. Twenty twentieth Century
Speaker 12: Fox it's they basically, you know, it's it's evident that
Speaker 12: they bought it just to get all the ip that
Speaker 12: they could that they could use to continue Predator or
Speaker 12: continue the Star Wars or whatever. And of course they
Speaker 12: had bought Lucasfilm before they bought twentieth Century Fox. But still,
Speaker 12: but they're all these great Fox films that are just languishing.
Speaker 12: One of them is, for instance, is the nineteen seventy
Speaker 12: two film. The other which is a horror film that
Speaker 12: I'm quite fond of, and it's nowhere. You can't you
Speaker 12: can't stream it, you can't buy it. It's out of
Speaker 12: print on Blu ray and DVD. I mean, it's just
Speaker 12: it's almost like it completely vanished. And there are many
Speaker 12: many other instances of films in the Fox library because
Speaker 12: they don't have the potential to turn them into some
Speaker 12: sort of streaming property. And so they could care less
Speaker 12: all the Marilyn Monroe movies that she did for Fox.
Speaker 6: That's another.
Speaker 12: And like I said, the list goes on and on
Speaker 12: and on and they and worse, they won't even license
Speaker 12: these titles out to the boutique labels that want to
Speaker 12: put them out on disc like a Keno, Lorber and Arrow.
Speaker 6: They would love.
Speaker 12: To sign a licensing agreement with Disney and take care
Speaker 12: of restoring these films. They don't care because it requires
Speaker 12: legal muscle and they would have to get involved in,
Speaker 12: you know, legal negotiations, and it's like who cares, not
Speaker 12: worth it? And so, you know, film fans like us,
Speaker 12: we're the ones who suffer.
Speaker 6: There are certain Fox movies Disney's just I don't know
Speaker 6: if ashamed is the right word, but that they don't
Speaker 6: want anything to do with anymore, Like fight Club. They
Speaker 6: even pulled fight Club not only off of Blu ray
Speaker 6: and streaming, they pulled it out of repertory theaters. There
Speaker 6: were repertory theaters who had screening scheduled when Disney bought Fox,
Speaker 6: and they're like, this title is no longer available. There
Speaker 6: are titles like fight Club where they're just like, look,
Speaker 6: we know we technically own it, but we don't want
Speaker 6: it and we don't want you to want it, so
Speaker 6: fuck off. And you're gonna see that more and more
Speaker 6: with like you know, if Paramount gets Warner Brothers, as
Speaker 6: if Discovery didn't do a bad enough job, you know,
Speaker 6: vaulting Looney Tunes cartoons, and shit, you know you know
Speaker 6: what these streamers do, Mike. They might make pirates necessary.
Speaker 1: Oh god, yes, they so do.
Speaker 6: They make piracy necessary because if for nothing else, film
Speaker 6: goddamn preservation, even if there's no money to be made
Speaker 6: in the IP this thing. Hell, you know what, fuck it?
Speaker 6: I just said that. I hate that term IP intellectual property. No,
Speaker 6: it's a film, it's a short, it's a cartoon. I'm
Speaker 6: mad at myself for even fucking saying IP. There, So
Speaker 6: I need to be.
Speaker 1: Flogged, please, mommy, please flog me a little lower.
Speaker 6: Into the right.
Speaker 12: I can tell you with certainty that Paramount's home video
Speaker 12: division has been completely gutted because I would get review
Speaker 12: product from Paramount. There's a lady that I've dealt with
Speaker 12: for many, many years, and she sent me an email
Speaker 12: about two months ago and she said, I and all
Speaker 12: of my colleagues were leaving. We've been we've been dismissed.
Speaker 12: So essentially, when the Ellison crew came in and took
Speaker 12: over Paramount, they gutted the entire home video division so
Speaker 12: that we don't even know if they're going to be
Speaker 12: sub licensing their titles to Kino or Arrow or any
Speaker 12: of these other places because they don't have anybody to
Speaker 12: do the I think they have some restoration people there,
Speaker 12: but they don't have anybody to actually put the discs
Speaker 12: or the packaging, any of the artwork, any of that.
Speaker 12: All that's gone. I know that one for a fact
Speaker 12: because I received the email.
Speaker 1: So I mean, and then you come to the question,
Speaker 1: and again we're getting far afield of Z channel, but
Speaker 1: come to the question to something like I was reaching
Speaker 1: out to Warner Archives, remember Warner Archives and reaching out
Speaker 1: to them saying, hey, you're ever going to put out
Speaker 1: bill Guns Stop anytime soon? And they're like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: you know, the rights are tied up because of the music.
Speaker 1: It's like, okay, so get off your fucking ass and
Speaker 1: do something about it. But there's no interest because that again,
Speaker 1: it's not going to make money. It's not like they're
Speaker 1: going to sell more than a couple, I don't know,
Speaker 1: one hundred copies of this movie or something. And they're
Speaker 1: just like, it's not worth the time, it's not worth
Speaker 1: the expense. We're not gonna do it. It's like, meanwhile,
Speaker 1: it's just going to languish in your vaults. You know,
Speaker 1: one of the most important African American filmmakers of the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies into the eighties. We're just gonna let that
Speaker 1: sit there. Okay, great way to go. The studios themselves,
Speaker 1: the film studios themselves are the worst when it comes
Speaker 1: to preserving their own films.
Speaker 6: Oh, without a doubt. Again, I'm gonna say piracy is necessary.
Speaker 6: I know it's television not movies, but look at Hunter, Miamivice,
Speaker 6: twenty one Jump Street, China Beach, WKRP, Tour of Duty,
Speaker 6: et cetera. All those shows can only be found truly
Speaker 6: uncut from people like me who recorded them off their
Speaker 6: original broadcasts because the DVDs are missing the music. They
Speaker 6: can't or won't relicnse the music, and they make I
Speaker 6: mean sometimes it's a replacement song. Miami, Vice in WKA
Speaker 6: and China Beach actually did a pretty good job. If
Speaker 6: they couldn't get the song, they got a damn close
Speaker 6: sound alike. So I will give them props. But like,
Speaker 6: just try watching a Hunter or a twenty one Jump
Speaker 6: Street on streaming or DVD. There. I was watching a
Speaker 6: twenty one Jump Street episode where Booker was just laying
Speaker 6: on the hood of his car and somebody came over
Speaker 6: and talked to him and you just hear birds and whatnot,
Speaker 6: and then he reaches in and turns the radio off,
Speaker 6: but there was no song playing, and I'm like, son
Speaker 6: of a bitch, So I went and dug out my
Speaker 6: old recording and it was a song by X the
Speaker 6: Punk Band. And it's like, such, you're destroying history because
Speaker 6: you don't want to pay some licensing. So piracy is necessary.
Speaker 6: And like I said, we talked about with Z Channel
Speaker 6: piracy kind of hurt Z Channel, but modern piracy is
Speaker 6: necessary because if the studios won't do it, I'll do
Speaker 6: it myself. It's like bad sex, Fine, I'll just finish myself.
Speaker 1: Where you get those great things like that new Madmen
Speaker 1: where you can see the guy operating the vomit machine,
Speaker 1: It's like, how did you let this out? And people
Speaker 1: are just like, well, thank god I still have this
Speaker 1: on the old DVDs because this new blue ray set
Speaker 1: looks like shit and you can see the fucking crew members.
Speaker 1: It's like, where's the quality control? People.
Speaker 6: I'm not a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan, but I'm
Speaker 6: friends with people who are. They showed me the blu
Speaker 6: rays of those their quote wide screen because you know,
Speaker 6: obviously the film shoots wide screen, but it's meant to
Speaker 6: be seen full frame. You constantly see crewmembers lighting set up,
Speaker 6: see stands, bounce cards, the mic, you know the boom
Speaker 6: mic guy. You see so much crew on the Blu rays.
Speaker 6: I don't know how somebody said fuck it, just put
Speaker 6: it out the times in which we live. My final
Speaker 6: thoughts are Z Channel is a channel that needed to exist.
Speaker 6: I'm glad it did exist. I kind of wish it
Speaker 6: had gone national because I think they could have been
Speaker 6: I don't think Z Channel would have been successful if
Speaker 6: it had gone national, even with sports programming, because you're
Speaker 6: not going to get people turning in for Bergmann films
Speaker 6: the same way you're going to get people turning in
Speaker 6: for Schwarzenegger films on Showtime and HBO. But I still
Speaker 6: think it could have been a taste maker and a
Speaker 6: bigger player. But it had three things happen in rapid succession.
Speaker 6: Jerry Harvey's murder suicide, the stock market crash and the
Speaker 6: floor falling out, and then the lawsuit over adding sports
Speaker 6: and commercials. It was just inevitable to die. I don't
Speaker 6: think it needed to die, but we're looking back at
Speaker 6: history and not what they were maybe thinking at the time,
Speaker 6: was we just to stop the bleeding for another month.
Speaker 6: Maybe that was their whole mindset and they weren't looking
Speaker 6: at what the future might be. So Z Channel needed
Speaker 6: to exist. This documentary needed to exist, and if the
Speaker 6: filmmakers ever hear this, you need to put out that
Speaker 6: five hour cut because you have at least three people
Speaker 6: who will buy it on Blu Ray. Z Channel is
Speaker 6: a part of centophile history that better not be forgotten.
Speaker 12: I forget who it is in the documentary who says
Speaker 12: something about you don't know when you're living through a
Speaker 12: golden age, and I just can't remember who said that,
Speaker 12: but I remember that quote being very, very meaningful to
Speaker 12: me because I think that pretty well sums it up,
Speaker 12: because you don't. And I think about all the great
Speaker 12: films that I was alive for. You know, I was
Speaker 12: born in nineteen seventy, so I've been there for a
Speaker 12: lot of the great cultural cornerstones that we know. I
Speaker 12: was there when these films came out, and I didn't
Speaker 12: appreciate those moments. And it's the same with the Z Channel.
Speaker 12: I mean, I don't think people it was new and
Speaker 12: it was something that people were had not experienced before.
Speaker 12: And I guess, you know, once they got into a
Speaker 12: certain rhythm, people thought that it was just going to
Speaker 12: go on, and then it came to a point where
Speaker 12: it didn't. But I think that its place in film
Speaker 12: preservation is very important because it did lead the way.
Speaker 12: It paved the way for a lot of these the
Speaker 12: preservation of these directors preferred cuts of films. For that,
Speaker 12: I'm grateful, you know, and that's something that obviously is
Speaker 12: pretty commonplace now. Sometimes where we actually don't want or
Speaker 12: don't need to see some of these extendeds, as you
Speaker 12: both know, I'm sure, but there are cases where we
Speaker 12: do certainly need to see these alternate versions. And you know,
Speaker 12: it may have happened without the Z channel, maybe not,
Speaker 12: But I think that that is one of the important
Speaker 12: contributions that it made. You know, even though Jerry Harvey,
Speaker 12: he was such a controversial figure, and he you know,
Speaker 12: obviously was not a good person. We've ascertained that for sure,
Speaker 12: but I think you kind of have to. I know,
Speaker 12: it's an old cliche. You have to separate the person
Speaker 12: from what they left behind, and I think he left
Speaker 12: behind quite a legacy that still resonates, and that's my
Speaker 12: take on it.
Speaker 1: Did either of you guys get a chance to see
Speaker 1: the V sixty six documentary Life on the V.
Speaker 6: I saw it a couple of years ago when it
Speaker 6: came out, and that was I mean, hell, we could
Speaker 6: have a whole another hour long conversation about music video
Speaker 6: channels and their history, and the Life on the V
Speaker 6: was equally interesting. But again, that's a weird footnote that
Speaker 6: modern audiences I don't think care about music video is,
Speaker 6: let alone a music video channel anymore. But that was
Speaker 6: a good one too, Mike.
Speaker 12: That was educational for me too, because I did not
Speaker 12: realize that there were independent channels around the country that
Speaker 12: were running music videos twenty four seven independent of MTV,
Speaker 12: it's not. And there was one two hours from where
Speaker 12: I grew up over in Greensboro, North Carolina, which is
Speaker 12: you know that was That was a shock to me.
Speaker 12: It's like, wow, we had one of those in our
Speaker 12: state and I didn't even know it, but so it was.
Speaker 12: That was definitely a very interesting documentary, but a blip
Speaker 12: in time. I couldn't believe how quickly it rose and fell.
Speaker 12: Do you know what documentary we need? And I know
Speaker 12: Mike will agree with me. I don't know about Adam,
Speaker 12: but Mike will we need a documentary on night flight.
Speaker 12: We need a documentary on the history of night flight.
Speaker 12: You don't know how much I nerd it out when
Speaker 12: I got to work a night flight, Mike. I almost
Speaker 12: didn't even cash my first check from night Flight. I
Speaker 12: did take photos of it, but I needed the money,
Speaker 12: so I cashed it. But it was so cool. It
Speaker 12: had the night Flight logo on it and Stuart Shapiro's signature. Man,
Speaker 12: we need a night flight documentary, man, we really do.
Speaker 1: And there's still like a viable force. So it's like,
Speaker 1: come on, guys, get on your shit and do this.
Speaker 12: I'd love to see one. Yeah, absolutely, that's a great idea.
Speaker 1: Well, I'd love to see a really good Joe Bob
Speaker 1: Briggs documentary as well. You know you mentioned his show
Speaker 1: and how he's kind of moved around from different channels
Speaker 1: and everything, but he it's still on top and one
Speaker 1: of the best film critics that I can think of.
Speaker 1: His book is so well books. But they're so good,
Speaker 1: so well written, and I love what he says about things.
Speaker 1: But yeah, going back to the Life on the v
Speaker 1: if folks are interested, I would highly recommend checking that
Speaker 1: documentary out because it's almost a good companion piece to
Speaker 1: Z Channel because it's limited market. Here you're talking about Boston. Here,
Speaker 1: you're talking about a very particular channel. How HBO was
Speaker 1: trying to eat Z channels lunch, You've got MTV kind
Speaker 1: of the up and comer when it comes to the
Speaker 1: V channel as well, like happening around the same time,
Speaker 1: the story of the VJs, the story of what was
Speaker 1: going out with the channel luckily doesn't end in tragedy
Speaker 1: though there is the downfall, but the founder or main
Speaker 1: voice of the whole thing is still very much with
Speaker 1: us and pretty entertaining still though those clips of him
Speaker 1: are fricking priceless back in the day. So yeah, I
Speaker 1: really would recommend checking out Life on the v as well.
Speaker 6: Completely unrelated, the History of Rock and Roll Comics documentary.
Speaker 6: That's another one that's got a very tragic ending to it,
Speaker 6: but it is a really interesting thing. It has a
Speaker 6: lot of cocking heads you might not have expected for
Speaker 6: a documentary on rock and roll comics.
Speaker 1: When you say rock and roll comics, are you talking
Speaker 1: about a comic book? Because I have no idea what
Speaker 1: you're talking about.
Speaker 6: There was a comic book in the late eighties that
Speaker 6: ran through the early nineties called Rock and Roll Comics
Speaker 6: that was unauthorized biographies of heavy metal and rock and
Speaker 6: roll bands, and it was intensely controversial, and they also
Speaker 6: sold a metric fuck ton of copies, and they got
Speaker 6: sued constantly by the Guns and Roses and the new
Speaker 6: kids on the block. And Alice Cooper actually thought their
Speaker 6: their issue on him was such trash. He said, I
Speaker 6: fucking love it. If you ever do another one, let
Speaker 6: me help write it. Iced Tea loved Iced Tea loved his.
Speaker 6: He said, I'll let you do it as long as
Speaker 6: I get to pick the artist and stuff. So, but
Speaker 6: that also ends in tragedy because I'll spoil it. The
Speaker 6: owner of Rock and Roll Comics was a closeted homosexual
Speaker 6: and he picked up the wrong guy in a bar
Speaker 6: who beat him to death in his apartment. And they
Speaker 6: actually they don't prove it, but they think he might
Speaker 6: have been one of the first victims of Andrew Kunanen,
Speaker 6: because Andrew Cunanin was in the area at the time
Speaker 6: and picking up closeted gay men, So they think he
Speaker 6: might be a victim of Andrew Kannanan before he went
Speaker 6: on to kill was it for? I think Gounanan dead.
Speaker 6: So yeah, the rock and Roll Comics documentary is very
Speaker 6: enlightening as well, but that one also somebody of these
Speaker 6: end in tragedy.
Speaker 1: By the way, apropos of nothing. While I was watching
Speaker 1: this Z Channel documentary, every time Alexander Payne would come
Speaker 1: on screen, I was thinking, Wow, that's young Neil Gaiman.
Speaker 6: I do want that Z Channel T shirt. I do
Speaker 6: want to say to anyone who listens to this, if
Speaker 6: you've got a vintage Z Channel T shirt, I want that.
Speaker 6: I want a Z Channel T shirt.
Speaker 1: I'm sure you can find one out on tea public
Speaker 1: or something.
Speaker 6: I want a vintage one. I want a real Z
Speaker 6: Channel T shirt from the eighties.
Speaker 1: With a certificate of authentication signed by Jerry Harvey.
Speaker 6: No, I'll be happy. I'll be happy with some suspect
Speaker 6: sweatstains in the underarms.
Speaker 1: Well, I'll give my buddy Alexander a collin. We'll see
Speaker 1: what happens. All right, guys, We're going to take a
Speaker 1: break and play preview for an next week's show right
Speaker 1: after these brief messages.
Speaker 4: If you make yourself more than just a man, if
Speaker 4: you devote yourself to an.
Speaker 1: Ideal, then you become something else entirely.
Speaker 4: A legend, misty, a legend. We will let this together,
Speaker 4: then you're gone.
Speaker 3: Civil rising.
Speaker 4: To bud Man lost a combat. But if it doesn't
Speaker 4: exist anymore, mus.
Speaker 1: That's right. We'll be back next week with a look
Speaker 1: at a very obscure sequel to a movie that didn't
Speaker 1: really do a whole lot when it came out. It's
Speaker 1: called The Dark Night Rises. Until then, I want to
Speaker 1: thank my co host Josh and Adam. So, Adam, what's
Speaker 1: the latest with you? Sir?
Speaker 12: Well, you can catch me every week in all those
Speaker 12: places where you get your podcast, Adam's Corner. It's a
Speaker 12: weekly it's basically interviews with people who have created things
Speaker 12: that I'm interested in. And I was joking about it earlier.
Speaker 12: It's in an exercise in narcissism. But you know, if
Speaker 12: you dig some of the things that I did, then
Speaker 12: you might enjoy it. And I have a YouTube channel.
Speaker 12: I do a rundown once a month where I talk
Speaker 12: about all the four K and Blu Ray releases physical
Speaker 12: media stuff on my podcast, and so there's a YouTube
Speaker 12: channel also. It's also Adam's corner where you can actually
Speaker 12: see the discs I'm talking about. Those are little short videos.
Speaker 12: It's kind of a just like an addition to the podcast.
Speaker 12: And the paper that I write for is Focus Newspaper.
Speaker 12: You can find them at Focusnewspaper dot com in my area.
Speaker 12: They are actually still published, and I do a weekly
Speaker 12: column where I run down the latest theatrical.
Speaker 6: Releases, streaming releases, and disc releases.
Speaker 12: So that's what keeps me busy when I'm not programming
Speaker 12: commercials for the Spectrum News channels by day.
Speaker 1: And Josh, how about yourself, you're still running twelve different podcasts.
Speaker 6: I went back to college a few years ago, so
Speaker 6: I now have an associate's degree in digital media, a
Speaker 6: bachelor's degree in communications, and I'm going for a bachelor's
Speaker 6: in film, and then I'm going to go for a
Speaker 6: master's in film studies after that, because I've decided, at
Speaker 6: my age, I need to be the guy that annoys
Speaker 6: the teacher who knows more than they do in college courses.
Speaker 6: Other than that, I'm completely destitute. And I recently wrote
Speaker 6: an article on all of Richard Stanley's unmade movies for
Speaker 6: Space Monsters issue too. He's got a lot of movies
Speaker 6: he never got to make. But other than that, like
Speaker 6: I said, I'm destitute and just trying to survive week
Speaker 6: to week and being the oldest college students amongst the
Speaker 6: whole bunch of twenty somethings who constantly look down and
Speaker 6: wear headphones through class.
Speaker 1: Hey, maybe you can straighten out my lungfellow.
Speaker 6: You know what, I almost want to make a paper
Speaker 6: Chase reference, but then nobody would get what the paper
Speaker 6: Chase is.
Speaker 12: Incidentally, another twenty century Fox title that's not available anywhere.
Speaker 12: Of course it's not the film I'm talking about, of course.
Speaker 1: Well, thank you so much guys for being on the show.
Speaker 1: Thanks to everybody for listening. Do you want to support
Speaker 1: physical media and get great movies in the mail, head
Speaker 1: over to scarecrow dot com and try Scarecrow Videos incredible
Speaker 1: rent by mail service, the largest publicly accessible collection in
Speaker 1: the world. You'll find films there entirely unavailable elsewhere. Get
Speaker 1: what you want, when you want it without the scrolling.
Speaker 1: And yes, they have Z Channel a magnificent obsession. If
Speaker 1: you want to hear more of me shooting off my mouth,
Speaker 1: check out some of the other shows that I work on.
Speaker 1: They are all available at weirdingwaymedia dot com. Thanks especially
Speaker 1: to our Patreon community. If you want to join the community,
Speaker 1: visit patreon dot com. Slash projection booth. Every donation we
Speaker 1: get help some projection booth. Dick over the world.
Speaker 9: I know last something.
Speaker 3: That comes got, I got away, you know.
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Speaker 18: The static, getting up to the static statist channels.
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Speaker 9: At Mardan Bratti follow no space young.
Speaker 3: My comic places by world, my gos, my own.
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Speaker 15: Calsa all static day forever done open not your window
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Speaker 3: A shot.
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Speaker 9: Will turn it up. That