Video Free Brooklyn in New York City is just one of the video stores that have managed to stay alive through engaging film lovers in the community. Jennifer Loeber
It was late April when the sole surviving location of Kim’s Video & Music announced that it was closing its doors for good. The beloved New York City video store minichain already had dwindled from four branches to one, but the First Avenue location managed to hang on for nearly five years after Kim’s flagship shop closed in 2009. The news was met with a fair amount of media attention, some nostalgic (Tom Roston’s piece in The New York Times ), while others (Cody Clarke’s to-the-point Smug Film post titled “I Don’t Care That Kim’s Is Closing, And You Shouldn’t Either”) were unmoved by the fact one of the city’s last vestiges of video store culture was calling it quits.
That the number of video stores around the world is on the decline isn’t exactly breaking news. For the past decade, a range of options—DVD-by-mail, video on demand, standalone rental boxes, and online streaming among them—have posed major challenges to the viability of video stores, rendering the phrase itself an anachronism. But just because Blockbuster couldn’t keep its iconic blue awnings hanging doesn’t mean there aren’t some intrepid entrepreneurs (and diehard cinephiles) taking a cue from their digital counterparts and finding ways to not just survive in the age of Netflix, but thrive.
Hop the F train from Kim’s final location to Brooklyn and you’ll find Video Free Brooklyn, a tiny storefront touting the tagline that “Video stores didn’t die, they just had to evolve.” Originally opened in 2002, the space was taken over by the husband-and-wife team of Aaron Hillis and Jennifer Loeber in 2012.
While the decision to purchase a video store at the height of streaming’s assault on the traditional rental industry seemed counterintuitive, Hillis calls it “a labor of love that, surprisingly, also made economic sense.” Part of that is location: Video Free Brooklyn resides on Smith Street, a main thoroughfare of the borough’s Cobble Hill neighborhood, which means steady walk-in traffic. And once people find it, they tend to come back. “The neighborhood tends to be more educated and media-savvy,” Hillis says, “which translates to more discerning tastes.”
Video Free Brooklyn co-owner Aaron Hillis. Jennifer Loeber
Though the store measures just 375 square feet, basement storage allows Hillis—a noted film critic in his own right—to keep approximately 10,000 discs on hand. But rather than compete against the same wide-release films and television series that one can watch with the click of a button and an $8.99 streaming subscription, Hillis is curating a library of hard-to-find fare. “After the floodgates of the Internet opened, we’re now drowning in content and especially mediocrity,” Hillis says. “Video Free Brooklyn’s model is almost a no-brainer: My inventory is heavily curated, but so is my staff, all of whom work in the film industry and have extensive, nerdy knowledge about cinema. Coming into the shop is about nostalgia, the joy of discovery, and getting catered recommendations from passionate cinephiles. It’s a hangout, like the record store in High Fidelity.”
It’s Not Always About Profits
Patty Polinger and Cathy Tauber know all about creating a community around cinema. In 1985, the childhood friends co-founded Vidiots in Santa Monica after realizing there was a need for a place that would celebrate cinema’s unsung genres by offering a range of independent, foreign, cult, and documentary films. Over the next two decades, they amassed a large following of cinephiles—Oscar-winning moviemakers included. But then the digital world began to encroach on their brick-and-mortar business, leading Polinger and Tauber to ask customers what to do next. They kept hearing the same suggestion: Go nonprofit!
“A lot of people were suggesting it to us and we didn’t really think we could do it,” says Tauber. “We just didn’t even know that it was an option.” Appropriately enough, they did know that one of their customers was in the business of helping organizations turn nonprofit. He confirmed that their status in the community and the fact they’d been hosting educational events since opening made them a perfect candidates. So in 2012, The Vidiots Foundation became official. The video store operation moved under the foundation’s umbrella in February.
An annex at Santa Monica store Vidiots allows the store to host community events. David Blattel
From the outside, one would hardly know the difference. But internally, merging these operations “simplified our lives, because we had three websites [and] two sets of books and it was very confusing,” laughs Polinger. Though The Vidiots Foundation is in its infancy, Polinger and Tauber are quick to credit five-time Oscar nominee David O. Russell—whom Polinger calls their “guardian angel” (and whose son was a Vidiots intern—with helping them to realize the new organization’s evolving potential by connecting the duo with corporate sponsors like Annapurna Pictures, Fox, and The Weinstein Company.
As for the ways in which streaming services like Netflix might impact their future, Tauber and Polinger don’t seem worried. “I feel like we have so many movies that you just can’t get on Netflix or streaming,” she says. The bigger problem, they believe, is television. “Sunday night has become our worst night—that’s when the best TV is on,” Polinger says. “The DVR has done more to hurt us than Netflix.” Still, she maintains, any digital option lacks one key component: “The human connection thing is still really important. People come in here to talk about films.”
A Foundation for the Future
Taking a page out of Vidiots’ book, Seattle’s Scarecrow Video—the country’s largest independent video store with a library of more than 120,000 DVDs, Blu-rays, VHS tapes, laserdiscs, and VCDs—recently went the nonprofit route. Despite its impressive inventory, the Scarecrow team has learned it’s not always enough to just be a video store these days. In October, 2013, Scarecrow owners Carl Tostevin and Mickey McDonough penned an open letter to their customers in which they admitted “It is a difficult time to be a video store, and the past several years have not been kind. Our rental numbers have declined roughly 40 percent over the past six years. This isn’t a huge surprise—obviously technology has been moving this direction for some time—but the decline has been more dramatic than we had anticipated.” They reminded customers that they depend upon their patronage to stay afloat, then saw one of their best holiday seasons in years. But then January rolled around, and business slowed again.
Cue the all-staff meeting. “They said, ‘we are now open to accepting proposals from anyone for what to do with Scarecrow,'” says Kate Barr, a Scarecrow employee at the time. Barr and co-worker Joel Fisher proposed a nonprofit organization with the sole purpose of preserving and expanding the Scarecrow library and making it accessible to as many people as possible. The owners liked what they heard, and gave Barr and Fisher the go-ahead. Their first stop was Kickstarter, where they met their $100,000 fundraising goal within one week. “We were completely blown away by the amazing response,” admits Fisher. “We were not expecting it at all—especially not within hours.”
With more than 120,000 items, Seattle’s Scarecrow Video is the largest independent video store in the country. Scarecrow Video
Barr is now business manager and president of the board of The Scarecrow Project, as it’s known, and Fisher is Scarecrow’s operations manager and secretary of the board. With the first part of their funding in place, Barr and Fisher can begin attending to some of the items on their initial wish list: Scarecrow memberships, educational opportunities, and even more of parties, screenings, book signings, and guest visitors to The Screening Room. Though it wasn’t part of the initial plan, the number of calls they’ve received from fellow video store owners following the Kickstarter success makes Barr “wonder whether or not another piece of this puzzle is going to be acting as a lightning rod to bring all of the existing video stores that are able to survive together in some sort of coalition.”
Elvis Mitchell (right) interviews David Mamet at Vidiots. David Blattel
Fisher admits that the convenience and on-demand nature of digital entertainment always will pose a challenge to physical retail outlets, but believes the issue goes beyond the idea of instant gratification. “There is room for all these things,” he says, “but it’s dangerous if people reach the mindset of, ‘If it’s not on Netflix it’s not worth watching.’ Because the selection is so small. It’s the same with cable television and on-demand services—even if you subscribe to all of these different avenues, you’re missing out.”
It’s not that streaming platforms aren’t being curated—it’s who’s doing the curating. “What’s passively happening, whether people realize it or not, is that corporations are deciding what we should watch,” adds Barr. “The thing that made VHS catch on in the ’80s was this great sense of emancipation; prior to that, the only way you were seeing a movie was just by going to a theater. With streaming we are regressing a little bit, because once again the sacrifice we are making in order to have the ease of streaming is that we are putting that decision-making process in the hands of Netflix, Amazon, or whatever service.” And more often than not, those decisions are financially motivated—which is fine for the company’s coffers, but can also lead to that all-too-familiar fatigue that comes with scrolling past endless straight-to-video schlock and movies you’ve already seen but keep getting recommendations for.
For Hillis, the issue is not so much a question of survival as it is an evolutionary concept. “I’m unconvinced that video stores are in direct competition with streaming services or Netflix any more so than a free concert in the park, the World Cup, a local film festival, or anything that distracts someone away from my shop on a Saturday night,” he says. “Video stores need to provide some form of market exclusivity to maintain relevance. I don’t foresee them rising again in the age of one-click accessibility—but then again, it’s not like Facebook friends replaced real-life friends.”
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