Jerry Harvey

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.

Background 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.

Harvey, in partnership with producer Richard Chase and theatre operator Kenneth Greenstone, created a small company, Mayfair Film Group, to release arthouse films in America. Their best-known releases were the rock'n'roll drama That'll Be the Day starring David Essex, and Ken Russell's biopic Mahler, starring Robert Powell.

Programming career 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.