Jerry Harvey (screenwriter)

Born in Bakersfield, California, Harvey moved to Los Angeles in the late 1960s and enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).[2] 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.[3] 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.[4] 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,[5] 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.[4]

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.[4]

• Jerry Harvey biography at IMDB
• Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession at IMDB