The Little Station That Could

Posted September 24th, 2009 / By Drew Wiltsey in Columnists, News, Opinion

Prologue

I wanted to watch some television, so I turn on the set and begin pressing the buttons on a brown box. The box has about 14 buttons on it, and a long brown wire that connects to the television set. As I make my way through the buttons, I see commercials and newscasts, boring shows for grown ups, etc. I reach the last one which is labeled Z. I press the button and the television screen turns black and white. I’m seeing a room with a formal dinner setting. People are in the room but they seem to want to leave. They can’t seem to leave for some reason. A goat appears and walks out of the room.  The people are confused.  They start trying to break a wall down in an effort to escape the room. People are yelling. I can’t understand what they are saying because they are speaking in a foreign language. There are subtitles, but I don’t know what that means yet. The words go by too fast to read. I’m not sure why I don’t change the channel, but I keep watching, keep looking. It’s 4:35 in the afternoon. Tuesday. The year is 1978. I am 7 years old and I am watching the Z channel—one of the world’s first cable stations.

Z Channel’s Impact on the Film Industry

Introduction

Jerry Harvey and the strangely named Z channel burst onto the emerging California cable scene in 1974. The few existing stations catered mostly to exclusive sports coverage or Hollywood hits. His idea—rather his goal, was to start a station dedicated to “the cinema” featuring the celebrated works from the likes of Fellini, Buñuel, Peckinpah, Bergman, Visconti, Kurosawa, Kubrick or any other noteworthy filmmaker from around the world. And that’s exactly what he did.

To understand the full impact of the Z channel, we must first remove from consideration our current landscape: Internet, DVDs, anything digital and go back to a time before Star Wars; before blockbuster mega hits in general. We must return to a time when print and word of mouth were the only realistic way one could ever hear of such films and directors. You might get a chance to see a current Kurosawa film as the reels tour the U.S., but you could only read about his back catalogue of films. A student of film in the ’70s might have the privileged experience of seeing some of the older imported gems in class but in general, foreign films were, well, foreign.

The late ’70s and early ’80s were truly the heyday of television. The business of cable was an entirely new concept and no one was quite sure what to make of it at first. Beyond the game shows, news, sports coverage and hit T.V. shows, stations aired re-runs like Gilligan’s Island and The Twilight Zone, classic movies, and old cartoons on every channel. We saw the birth of  new cartoons and the subsequent Saturday morning cartoon phenomenon, Godzilla and MGM horror movies on weekends, made for T.V. movies, and even television ‘cuts’ of movies that had R ratings in the theaters—Halloween by John Carpenter and The Godfather by Francis Ford Coppola being two examples. Cable really didn’t have much to offer beyond the three main things T.V. couldn’t offer—R rated movies, live sports broadcasts, and pornography.

A cable station featuring foreign and art house films certainly would have failed had it been launched in Des Moines, Iowa, but in Los Angeles it flourished. In 1974, Martin Scorsese was finishing his first film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Stephen Spielberg was working on his first, Sugarland Express. It was an incredibly prolific time and creativity was king. The success of Midnight Cowboy released in 1969 by maverick filmmaker John Schlesinger had changed a lot of things. It was a story about a Texas dishwasher who moves to New York to become a hustler, blindly thinking that rich women will pay to have sex with a young Texas stud. His dreams clash with reality and he soon finds himself homeless and running out of money. After a few failed attempts at male prostitution lead him to utter helplessness, he befriends another lost soul. The film won three Academy Awards including best picture. Hollywood was changing indeed and the Z channel was  immediately embraced by it’s community. Jerry Harvey and his cable channel quickly became the talk of the town making the scene, meeting people and setting up premires of new and classic foreign films in America with Theater owners.

Widescreen on Television

Back at the Z channel, Harvey introduced the virtually unheard of process of letterboxing on T.V. to an unsuspecting audience, sometimes going as far as contacting filmmakers or studios asking for original reels in order to make a transfer in the films original aspect ratio. Widescreen feels natural now, but at the time it was revolutionary. Films like Ben-Hur or How the West Was Won with their huge 70mm prints were cropped down for television and hadn’t been seen in their original aspect ratios in tens of years. It would take production companies another ten years to warm up to the idea of releasing widescreen videos, and now with DVDs, it is unheard of to be denied the full aspect ratio of the filmmakers’ vision. But Harvey wasn’t just ahead of his time, he was lightyears ahead of his time.

The Director’s Cut

By the mid ’80s, his devotion to the filmmakers’ vision would introduce us to another now household term: the Director’s Cut. Heaven’s Gate, a box office disaster whose merits are still debated to this day, had cost 42 million dollars and made only 3 million after terrible reviews. It basically sank United Artists and started a huge controversy in Hollywood. The studio had to cut down his five hour long film into something realistic for theaters, and nobody was happy with the 149 minute result. Crimino’s previous film The Deer Hunter released in 1978 was a huge hit, winning the Academy Awards for best picture and best director. At that time, Hollywood was experiencing great success with these young directors. Spielberg would get millions to do a movie, and the movie became a hit, so the studio would make billions. Studios had little reason to interfere with these maverick directors. But Heaven’s Gate ruined all that. Hollywood blockbusters would not be left up to chance anymore. But strangely, when the film aired on the Z channel a few years later in a three and a half hour ‘director’s cut’, it became a hit. The Z channel soon followed with more director’s cuts like the the five-hour cut of Bertolucci’s masterpiece 1900, which was also disastrously cut by the studio. After years of attempts at re-releasing it in everything from a shorter PG version to a longer R-rated and finally an NC-17 sort of longer version, it got a proper release in its uncut, unedited five-hour glory in 2006, something that the Z channel was happy to show way back in the mid 80s.

The End of Z Channel

With the introduction of the consumer VCR in the early ’80s, the landscape of entertainment certainly changed. Star Wars was changing things with its toy and merchandising franchise. Cable networks were popping up. Now a kind of funny thing happens. But again you must forget about how we use technology today to see it. Today we can get instant feedback via the computer. We can track how many people visited our site today. We can make instant graphs and charts. Hollywood then and today has had to take a big chances. Even with star power, you can’t guarantee a movie’s success. But the new craze of VHS and Beta rental tapes soon proved to be a more than useful aide to Hollywood itself.

First Blood is a good example. Rambo is a household name. An icon of the ’80s with a huge franchise. But the interesting thing is that First Blood was a dud in the theaters. Stallone was still coming off of Rocky fame—hence the “this time he’s fighting for his life” tagline for the title. But it basically did nothing money-wise or for Stallone’s career. His next film was even worse; a ridiculous piece of garbage called Rhinestone co-starring Dolly Parton. But then out of nowhere First Blood became a huge hit on VHS. Sales of tapes probably had people guessing for a while but they eventually made Rambo: First Blood Part II which was a huge hit on the screen and started a trend in crappy action movies. Other films like The Breakfast Club would become VHS classics and create a another trend—the modern teen movie that would last well past the ’80s. Low budget horror films become video hits and a sequel with a higher budget is made and a nice and safe system is born. Hollywood had found a formula that didn’t require the maverick filmmaker at all.

All of this meant certain doom for the Z channel. Cable station were popping up everywhere, offering the latest hot Hollywood films and in the end, Rambo beat The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. At its peak, the Z channel only had 100,000 subscribers. In the early days of cable, that was a fine number since there were so few to compare it to. Jerry Harvey’s world was coming to an end, and he would never live to see his ideas and impact on the film community. His ideas became memes embedded in every filmmaker, actor, director who was lucky enough to see the Z channel.

Epilogue

I was much too young to understand what I was seeing and I’m sad to say I didn’t watch more. Even in my early teens, I’m sorry to say I wasn’t instantly  influenced to become a filmmaker after viewing the works of the most important filmmakers in the world. The truth is, I was like every other kid in my initial quest for T.V. entertainment; I was looking for Godzilla, Kung Fu movies, cartoons or a show I liked. But if I couldn’t find anything I would always check the Z channel just to see what might be playing as a last resort.

Years later, I would fall in love with film and revisit many of the images I had observed as a curious child. I would discover Film Noir and start watching everything I could get my hands on. A scene would happen and I’d remember seeing it on the Z channel. Before DVDs, you had to rely on imported videos from Europe or Japan to see a lot of great films in widescreen or uncut versions. I was into Sergio Leone at the time and was happy to see a crappy bootleg with chinese subtitles just to see a widescreen version of one of his films. I remember when Once Upon a Time in the West finally came out on DVD around 2005 or 2006. Perfect image. Widescreen with the correct aspect ratio. Uncut. Restored sound. Just like the version that played on the Z channel more that 20 years earlier.

Drew Wiltsey is a graphic designer, producer under the moniker , and writer. When he’s not working, he’s either contemplating humanity, drinking too much or reading a book. He lives and works in Portland, Oregon. You can also find him on .