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