Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (2004) (2024)

Popular reviews

• Review by Jason Alley🏳️‍🌈🐻 ★★★★

  It may be hard to imagine now, but there was a time before HBO and Showtime. Before Blockbuster Video. And DEFINITELY before being able to stream just about any movie ever made, to any device, at any time. If you wanted to see movies, you just about had to see them in a movie theatre, or catch an edited, commercial-interrupted version on basic cable.

  Then came Z Channel. The world's first 24-hour pay movie channel, it featured amazingly eclectic programming (everything from silent classics to THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK), themed "film festivals," and everything was presented in its intended format and unedited.

  It sounds like pretty much the greatest thing ever, and the story of the channel's rise and fall…

• Review by Blair Russell ★★★★

  Watching this documentary fulfilled a promise made on Letterboxd… this past fall. A mutual left a comment on my review for Heaven’s Gate that he learned about HG from this documentary, and he recommended I check it out. As it’s me, last night was finally the occasion for me to learn about a famous cable channel from the past.

  Z Channel was in the Los Angeles area and ran from 1974 during the early days of cable to 1989. They became famous after Jerry Harvey was hired to program its schedule and due to his incredibly eclectic tastes ran everything from Rocky and Rear Window to foreign films, obscure or famous. Plenty of motion pictures later to be part of…

• Review by DrewMcWeeny

  I wish I'd lived out here when Z Channel was still on the air.

• Review by Quiller ★★★★½

  I first saw this documentary about the titular pay TV station and its brilliant but deeply troubled head of programming Jerry Harvey about a year after its release, and I felt wistful about missing the opportunity to grow up watching the Z Channel in the 1980s. (My father had a chance to relocate to the West Coast for work but took early retirement and then started his own business instead.) Seeing it again 18 years later, I’m actually kind of glad I didn’t have that opportunity after all. That’s because I recognize a tendency for the same obsessive behavior Harvey exhibited in myself. For a 2- to 3-year period around the time I saw this docu, I was watching up…

• Review by Gemma G

  Imagine seeing this film when it came out in 2004 and not having Letterboxd to pound that Watchlist button with every film mentioned. Fascinating, sad portrait of obsession. Night Owl films, hello hello.

• Review by Casey ★★★½ 2

  I think most of us have come to take for granted how relatively easy it is for us to watch whatever we want whenever we want these days. This is a cool documentary about a time when cinema was harder to access, focusing on an early American cable channel that screened foreign and art films along with forgotten classics. The narrative shifts between the channel's history and the troubled life of its sh*thead lead programmer, and I found my interest to be mostly in the former.

  A solid doc for movie heads, though it does feel bizarre to praise the work of a dude who murdered his wife.

• Review by ForenSeek ★★★★ 1

  One for us movie buffs! All kinds of great films are showcased and discussed, and many of the people who first saw these films on the Z Channel tell their love stories with the channel. A two-hour celebration of true cinema of high artistic quality - what could be better!

• Review by Christina ★★★★

  Two facts: 1) I would have watched Z Channel all the damn time if I’d been alive (and in the LA area) back then. 2) It doesn’t shock me at all that Xan Cassavetes proves to be as cinematically gifted as her parents. Though A Magnificent Obsession is pretty standard in its format, with talking heads galore, it tells a fascinating story: the little channel that could, giving HBO and Showtime a run for their money by showing cult and foreign films no one else was, programmed by an incredibly complex man who caused a great deal of pain to himself and others. Packed with clips of movies it gave new life to and interviews with filmmakers it inspired, Z Channel is memorialized in fine fashion with this documentary.

• Review by 😿Andrew Chrzanowski😿 ★★★½

  ☆"How do you know so much? And who are you?"☆

  A pioneer of bringing cinema to television, I had never heard of Z Channel before this film, the debut feature of Xan Cassavetes – yes, daughter of movie royalty – which documents the rise and fall of the eclectic and innovative Los Angeles station of the late 70s and early 80s, a precursor to nearly all the "premium" channels of our youth. Even more Blockbuster or video stores, this was virtually the only place to watch some of the greatest films. Its story comes forth in Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession.

  The first 24-hour cable station for movie lovers, mostly classic and thought-lost American standards, programming chief Jerry Harvey –…

• Review by Keith Adams Jr. ★★★★

  Quickie Review
  2 years after the launch of a then-new premium Pay-TV service that we know now as HBO, there was another premium movie channel that would follow the same model but do things differently from its increasing contemporary. It was called Z Channel and when it started, it played classic movies and contemporary movies that leaned into the mainstream but it wasn’t until the arrival of programmer Jerry Harvey that it would become a mecca for movie lovers in the Los Angeles area, playing both mainstream and independent films as well as foreign cinema and even played different cuts of the same movie together at the same time. This IFC documentary from Alexandra “Xan” Cassavetes (daughter of John) tells…

• Review by Dmitry_Karpyuk ★★★½ 2

  Любопытный док дочки Кассаветиса про "другого Харви", Джерри Харви, директора кабельного канала Z в Лос-Анджелесе, где показывали самые лучшие фильмы, в том числе полные версии "Двадцатого века", "Врат рая", "Однажды в Америке" без перерывов на рекламу. В основном поют дифирамбы те, кто без Харви бы не добился успеха, как, например, Джеймс Вудс — оказывается, именно после показа на Z Channel прогремел и номинировался "Сальвадор" Стоуна, в кинотеатрах прошедший совсем скромно. Без как всегда перевозбужденного Тарантино и ироничного Роберта Олтмена тоже не обошлось. У Харви были проблемы с психикой, в 39 лет он застрелил жену и покончил с собой, но вклад его переоценить невозможно, имя его не забыто, ну, в общем, понятно.
  Остается только позавидовать жителям Эл-Эй, которые каждый день могли натыкаться по ящику на всевозможные подарки.

• Review by Cliff ★★★

  This two-hour documentary really has two subjects rather than the more traditional one. First, it's the story of a man and his achievement: film buff Jerry Harvey, who set up the titular Californian premium cable channel, which became known for its uncut screenings - often important restorations - of international arthouse classics, alongside cult oddities and the occasional late-night European "elevated" smutfest. The channel was accompanied by what may well have been the world's most highbrow TV listings guide, which in hindsight looks arguably more fascinating than the channel itself, now that the actual films are widely available on disc.

  The second subject of the doc are the movies themselves: this is a potted history of a certain type of…