that I would have preferred a greater focus on Z Channel and a lesser focus on the personal story of Jerry Harvey. That's mostly my own fascination with process and milieu. I could easily imagine watching a "cable channel procedural." The glimpses the film offers into the world of cable television in the 1970s and 1980s utterly drew me in. The personal story is fascinating, though, and give the film much of its power. We apparently have Jerry Harvey primarily to thank for the concept of "the director's cut" in general and for several important director's cuts in specific. But he also murdered his wife. A tension exists between a film fan's natural desire to celebrate the accomplishments of Harvey's decade-long run as a successful and influential champion of cinema and the human instinct to shun a muderer. Cassavetes obviously had to reach a decision as to the balance point between those instincts, but she doesn't explicitly deal with the decision, forcing viewers to consider it for themselves.
Maybe my preference for more focus on the channel and less on the man is a dodge, revealing my own discomfort the question of where to place that balance point.
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