Of Z Channel and a singular taste

I have, I think, 33 pay movie channels, and while it would be fashionable to say there’s never anything on, this isn’t entirely accurate. Better to say that there are tons of mediocre commercial movies that play ad nauseam, and that you learn to nosh on, like leftover lasagna.

I enjoy cold lasagna the next day, and I like the reliable mediocrity of my pay movie services, because it nicely fits the level of concentration I typically feel like devoting to a movie at 10:30 on a weeknight. Recently, for instance, I spent a few weeks getting through all of “Wild Things,” the 1998 sex and murder caper starring Matt Dillon, Denise Richards and Neve Campbell. It was in heavy rotation on one of my premium channels, which enabled me to consume it on my own time, in snippets, and then, when I had come to know it, to realize how long I had to wait for that scene where Richards climbs out of the pool.

This might not be the world that Jerry Harvey, the maverick programmer at the old Z Channel, envisioned when he brought his exuberant moviegoer purity to Z, one of the first pay movie channels in the country, and which at its peak was available to an estimated 100,000 subscribers in Los Angeles.

Tonight at 9, the Independent Film Channel (which, distressingly, does not play “Wild Things” enough, or even at all) airs “Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession,” Xan Cassavetes’ documentary on Harvey, who once booked movies into the old Canon Theater in Beverly Hills and went on to champion directors like Robert Altman and Michael Cimino by airing their work uncut on Z. A troubled man, Harvey in 1988 fatally shot his second wife, Deri Rudolph, before turning the gun on himself.

At just over two hours, much of it taken up by former friends, colleagues and Z Channel watchers (Quentin Tarantino, Alexander Payne) speaking in superlatives about an enigmatic figure and the films he programmed, “A Magnificent Obsession” is a somewhat discursive ode to Harvey. In paying tribute to a guy whose achievement, it seems, was to put films he liked on a pay movie service, “A Magnificent Obsession” at times comes uncomfortably close to falling into Christopher Guest mock-documentary territory.

Or maybe you had to be there, in the offices of Z circa the late 1970s, in the days not only before HBO and Showtime but HBO Family and Showtime Too, not to mention Encore and Encore Love. Like a lot of things in the culture, the ground that Harvey broke has become strewn with content, a feeling of overabundance and much-ness, and yet an attendant feeling that the much-ness is hardly representative of a range of moviemaking.

So what Harvey represents is a time when movies showed up on TV as a matter of someone’s singular taste and drive, and when TV exposure for a forgotten film meant something, as when James Woods recalls how the Z Channel’s airings of the overlooked “Salvador” helped him get an Academy Award nomination for best actor.

Harvey’s taste was admirably iconoclastic. F.X. Feeney, Harvey’s longtime friend and Z Channel colleague, tells the story of the 1957 Richard Brooks film “Something of Value,” about the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, that featured a prologue by Winston Churchill that had been cut out of the original release by MGM. The Churchill version aired on Z. But Harvey also showed Jacqueline Bisset movies, including a fanciful-looking 1973 French film called “Le Magnifique” and also “The Deep.”

It’s easy to grow melancholy about all this, particularly in light of today’s polyglot of commercial fare on premium channels, with vertically integrated companies purchasing rights to recent releases and throwing them against the figurative wall, adding services like On Demand to give the viewer a sense of having control over content.

Really, we don’t have control; we take what they give us. My 30-odd movie channels suggest an abundance of choice when in fact it’s something else. It’s the feeling of being comfortably numb. It’s the fact that the original “Beverly Hills Cop” is on, and I like watching the shootout scene at the villain’s mansion.