Jerry Harvey (screenwriter)

American screenwriter

Gerald Francis "Jerry" Harvey (October 28, 1949 – April 9, 1988) was an American screenwriter and film programmer, best known for his work on Z Channel, a pioneering cable station in Los Angeles from 1974 to 1989.

Born in Bakersfield, California, Harvey moved to Los Angeles in the late 1960s and enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). While at UCLA, he was enrolled in an English course taught by Charles Lynn Batten, and made a positive impression on Batten early on. In 1971, he met Douglas Venturelli, with whom he co wrote China 9, Liberty 37. The film, a "spaghetti Western" shot in Italy and Spain, featured Sam Peckinpah in a rare acting role. Filmed in 1978, it would not see a European release until 1978 (and was not shown in America until years later, in some cities as late as 1984). It would be Harvey's only screenwriting credit. In 1974, Harvey programmed the director's cut of Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch in front of a sellout crowd at the Beverly Canon Theater, with Peckinpah himself in attendance. The very concept of a "director's cut" had little commercial viability until Harvey demonstrated it with this screening. Later, as longer versions of films such as Touch of Evil by Orson Welles began surfacing from studio vaults, director's cuts became a staple of the revival house theater circuit. (In the 1960s and 1970s, before the rise of home video, revival houses were the only way to see films as their makers intended.) Harvey's passion for film won him friendships with filmmakers such as Peckinpah, Robert Altman, James B. Harris, Monte Hellman as well as actors such as Peter O'Toole.

Unimpressed with the usual television fare, Harvey wrote an angry letter to the Los Angeles based pay TV service SelecTV; they were so impressed that they hired him as an assistant film programmer. In 1981, the eclectic Z Channel, another pay TV outlet in LA, hired Harvey as its director of programming. Harvey brought his relationships with the above listed filmmakers and championed their work, including Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, The Ruling Class with Peter O'Toole, Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America, Karel Reisz's The Loves of Isadora, John Ford's Up the River, Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900, and Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid.

Z Channel, launched in 1974 (one of the early pay TV services in the US), soon enjoyed tremendous popularity and influence. Producer Charles Joffe told filmmaker Xan Cassavetes that the primary reason Woody Allen's Annie Hall won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1977 was because it had played so frequently on Z Channel during the weeks the awards were being voted. Jerry Harvey's first significant coup came in 1982 when studio executive David Chasman alerted him that the director's cut of Heaven's Gate, written and directed by Michael Cimino, was lying fallow in a British vault. Few had seen this version since its one week run in Manhattan in November 1980. (The film had been so attacked that it was generally believed, even by studio insiders, that Cimino's original version had ceased to exist altogether.) Harvey retrieved this one remaining print and gave it a highly publicized "world premiere" on December 24, 1982. The success of this airing was consequential. Cimino's version was shortly released on home video, where it is now the only version available. Although Harvey saw to it that Z (as it was known by its subscribers and devotees) kept commercial pace with its rivals HBO, Showtime and The Movie Channel by showing the latest box office hits, Z's primary appeal to viewers lay in its devotion to films that were personal passions. Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession, a 2004 documentary directed by Xan Cassavetes, detailed Harvey's life and accomplishments. Altman and Harris attested to Harvey's sympathy and inspiration as a champion of film. Filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino, and Jim Jarmusch acknowledged the influence of the Z on their works.

The film also chronicles Harvey's often tragic history with women. One of Harvey's older sisters, Ann, committed suicide, in 1978. Although the oldest sister, Mary, was believed to have committed suicide in 1975 (as a body had washed up on the beach), she was alive at least as late as 2004 as she was found by one of two children she had borne and put up for adoption. Mary suffered from one or more mental illnesses, including schizophrenia, and lived in a halfway house in Silverlake as late as 2008, when the facility was razed in order to build luxury condos. However, Mary's survival was unknown to Harvey, and these deaths haunted him, helping destroy two longtime relationships: first with music executive Doreen Ringer Ross, who lived with Harvey from 1974 to 1978, and then with photographer/filmmaker Vera Anderson. Anderson and Harvey were married in 1978, shortly after Ann's suicide; they were divorced in 1984.

Harvey married again in February 1986 to Deri Rudulph (born December 21, 1949). They remained together until April 9, 1988, when Harvey killed Rudulph with a pistol before turning the gun on himself.