Z Channel: the Los Angeles TV station that played a major role in ushering in the age of the director’s cut
Los Angeles is a film epicentre, but it also initiated a new era of filmmaker freedom through the broadcast airways.
There is nothing that serves as a better indication of a filmmaker’s ambition and audacity than their ability to release a ‘director’s cut’, which includes both alternative and additional material not included in the theatrical release of their film. It’s become a pointless ego trip for some directors who have bought into their own hype, but there are rare cases in which the changes result in an entirely new appreciation for the original film.
Perhaps the most famous examples of contemporary director’s cuts revolve around the two most popular film trilogies of all time. Peter Jackson famously shot so much footage for The Lord of the Rings films that it could never be whittled down for the theatrical market, leading him to release the extended editions on home media. These alternative cuts don’t just add deleted scenes, but restore entire storylines, additional characters, and major moments that make the film more faithful to JRR Tolkien’s novels.
On the flipside, George Lucas took it upon himself to add new material to the original Star Wars trilogy by shooting new scenes and including advanced computer-generated imagery to map over some of the dodgier effects moments from the first three films.
While the release of the Star Wars ‘Special Editions’ made the films more popular than ever when they were re-released in theatres in 1997, many of the changes were criticised by fans. Most notable is a scene in the original Star Wars that is altered so that Harrison Ford’s Han Solo does not kill the bounty hunter Greedo in cold blood.
Jackson and Lucas were certainly not the first filmmakers to make director’s cuts, as many others had secretly tinkered away at their own versions after they were denied theatrical releases. Given that the home video market didn’t take off until later in the 20th century, there was often no venues in which to showcase these new versions. However, there was the American cable TV outfit Z Channel, run by Jerry Harvey, who once had a profound experience watching the extended edition of Sam Peckinpah’s neo-western masterpiece The Wild Bunch with a sold-out crowd.
Peckinpah’s director’s cut was more violent and ambitious than the version that had screened in theatres, and Harvey realised that he had the power to show more films like it to audiences in the way that they were intended to be seen, so starting in 1981, Z Channel began programming director’s cuts of several classics from the previous decade.
Among the notable films that were aired was Once Upon a Time in America, the mafia epic from the legendary spaghetti western innovator Sergio Leone, and while the film had been bastardised for an American release that ran at 139 minutes, Z Channel was able to programme the 229-minute cut that Leone had prepared before he died in 1989.
Perhaps the most significant programming decision made by Z Channel was to air the 325-minute cut of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, a film that had suffered a toxic reputation after it was blamed for collapsing United Artists. It had developed a sour standing in the cinematic community because of its financial underperformance, but most audiences only saw the 149-minute cut that had been slashed by studio editors before it was dumped in theatres. Thanks to Z Channel’s loyalty to what Cimino originally had in mind, Heaven’s Gate now has a more popular standing in the cinephile community.
