Z Channel:

No film lover can afford to go on living and not see Z Channel: A Magnificant Obsession, an amazing IFC documentary about a Los Angeles TV station in the early days of cable that played a wildy diverse slate of films in groupings only the manic programmer Jerry Harvey could understand. Z Channel was to early-cable TV what Pauline Kael was to film criticism: opinionated, difficult, in love with movies, and intrumental creating a space for film lvoers to diver in and swim freely. It’s important to remember that, in Kael’s day and when Z Channel was founded in 1974, there were no video stores, no Netflix and no TiVo. If you wanted to see a movie some professor/parent/older friend crowed “classic!” about every five minutes, you had to catch it on TV if you were lucky or live in a town that had a university film series or a repatory house. If you didn’t have either of those, sucks to be you. Great aged movies belonged to the obsessive, the urbane, or the geographically fortuitous.

Z Channel only operated in LA but held fast to the belief that good movies, however they performed at the box office needed champions for them to be seen. And they needed venues with as few barriers to entry as possible. The channel has been credited by the creators of movies like Salvador, Once Upon a Time in America and Heaven’s Gate from the ax of oblivion.

We take a lot of this for granted now. Turner Classic Movies makes old film available through a fairly elementary cable package. Netflix puts thousands of movies not available at Blockbuster available through the mail. The Independent Film Channel and Sundance exist to provide quality cinema to the average cinemaphile. “Independent” is now just as much a brand name as “Blockbuster.”

It wasn’t always so. Just 25 years ago, great films with even a few years behind them were the property of the few and the fortunate. Efforts like Z Channel (as illustrated in this magificant documentary and avilable exclusively on IFC and through Netflix) were the pioneering efforts to make great cinema the province of everyone who wanted it.

• Category: Cinematically Speaking...