Speaker 1: Ephemeral is a production of iHeart three D Audio For.
Speaker 2: Full exposure, listen with that phones. Last year, we ran
Speaker 2: a series of episodes on the history and cultural significance
Speaker 2: of video rental stores. In that series, we name drop
Speaker 2: a number of iconic locations, one of which is the
Speaker 2: Los Angeles based Vidiots. For decades, Vidiots has been an
Speaker 2: institution in Southern California's film community. It's also one of
Speaker 2: the only female owned and operated video stores into country,
Speaker 2: but due to the same struggles plaguing video stores nationwide,
Speaker 2: it shuttered its doors in twenty seventeen. However, the Vidiots
Speaker 2: team is hard at work planning a rebirth. They're nearly
Speaker 2: ready to open their new location in Los Angeles along
Speaker 2: with a restored neighborhood movie theater. So Today producer Trevor
Speaker 2: Young Ray turns to chronicle the journey of one of
Speaker 2: the country's most important video stores.
Speaker 3: As I mentioned in our series last year, video stores
Speaker 3: were instrumental in my upbringing. Without those spaces and the
Speaker 3: people in them, I wouldn't have a fraction of the
Speaker 3: love or knowledge of film that I have today. And
Speaker 3: I'm not alone in that experience.
Speaker 1: They're fucking fun They're inspiring. Who really truly wants to
Speaker 1: sit at home and never talk with another person about
Speaker 1: the thing that you love. I'm Maggie McKay. I'm the
Speaker 1: executive director of Vidiots Foundation.
Speaker 3: Maggie is the main person responsible for reviving Vidiots. She
Speaker 3: says physical media spaces like vidiots are more important now
Speaker 3: than ever before.
Speaker 1: All you have to do to make people realize they
Speaker 1: miss something is give them a taste of it. Record
Speaker 1: stores are a perfect example. New bookstores are cropping up
Speaker 1: now too. I've been trying to explain to my twelve
Speaker 1: and nine year old how much fun life was when
Speaker 1: we were growing up, and we sincerely took it for granted.
Speaker 1: I'm not a mall kid. I was never a mall kid,
Speaker 1: but we were not sitting at home on a device.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying that as an old lady. I'm not
Speaker 1: doing the like in my day. It was just more fun.
Speaker 1: All you have to do is give that back to
Speaker 1: people in some way, and they gobble it up.
Speaker 3: Like me. Maggie says her passion for video stores started
Speaker 3: when she was very young.
Speaker 1: I mean, I grew up in Lower Manhattan in Soho
Speaker 1: before it turned into a high end shopping mall for
Speaker 1: the one percent, and when I was growing up was scrappy.
Speaker 1: It was a little scary down there. We didn't have
Speaker 1: a ton of freedom. There definitely were limitations, especially after dark.
Speaker 1: But there was this video store. It opened across the
Speaker 1: street from my house. The long gone but much beloved
Speaker 1: Rare Bird video. Of anybody in the world remembers Rare
Speaker 1: Bird video. I would love somebody to contact me and
Speaker 1: reminisce with me. I was also really lucky. I had
Speaker 1: movie theaters that were not that far away. I could
Speaker 1: like take a long walk or go a couple subway
Speaker 1: stops and get to a movie theater. But the video
Speaker 1: store was really the thing. Because I had agency in
Speaker 1: a video store, I could go by myself. My clerks
Speaker 1: at Rare Bird were not like the most like kid friendly,
Speaker 1: but they tolerated my bulkkit and I just would hang
Speaker 1: out for hours on end, and between that and access
Speaker 1: to movie theaters, I was able to sort of find
Speaker 1: myself some freedom and a hobby and an interest that
Speaker 1: obviously led me down a lifelong path and gave me
Speaker 1: a job. So I came into the videos universe in
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen. I was long employed as a film festival
Speaker 1: programmer and have always been pretty deep into the nonprofit
Speaker 1: film exhibition space, film festivals and anything I could do
Speaker 1: to connect an audience to a film and its maker.
Speaker 1: And I had always known about Vidiots because Vidiots was
Speaker 1: like a shining star in the history of la and
Speaker 1: it was one of the first places I sort of
Speaker 1: pilgrimage too, because I'd always really kind of lived closer
Speaker 1: to the East Side. It was exactly the kind of
Speaker 1: place that made me fall in love with film when
Speaker 1: I was younger, and a few people knew that I
Speaker 1: was getting restless in the job I was in and
Speaker 1: then I wanted to change, and those people connected me
Speaker 1: to Vidiots. And the first time I walked into Vidiots,
Speaker 1: which I had not been in there in a long
Speaker 1: long time, I just was like electrified by how incredible
Speaker 1: a collection was and how big it was. And when
Speaker 1: I met our founders Patty and Kathy, I was like
Speaker 1: cook Line and Sinker. I didn't know that Vidiots was
Speaker 1: founded by women, not to mention like third generation Angelino's
Speaker 1: and two of the coolest people I've ever met in
Speaker 1: my life, and I just was like enamored. I'm still
Speaker 1: enamored of Patty and Kathy. I walked away knowing they
Speaker 1: needed an executive director really badly. They needed someone to
Speaker 1: fundraise and expand the donor base and figure out what
Speaker 1: this sort of year round programming approach would be. And
Speaker 1: I walked away from that first encounter thinking like, if
Speaker 1: I don't do this, some shadude in a trucker cap
Speaker 1: is going to have this job for five minutes, and
Speaker 1: videots is going to close. No offense to dudes and
Speaker 1: trucker caps. But I could just see it becoming something
Speaker 1: that somebody who thought it was cool would do for
Speaker 1: a minute, find out it was going to be really hard,
Speaker 1: and then jump ship. And I was like, I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna do that. And even under incredibly difficult circumstances up
Speaker 1: and down, that always gone back to that moment and
Speaker 1: been like, if I do this, I got to do
Speaker 1: it all the way.
Speaker 3: Maggie says that very quickly Vidiots became a special place.
Speaker 1: For her, aside from like how legendary it was and
Speaker 1: how cool it was that neon and the look of it.
Speaker 1: I walked in the first time to meet Patty and Kathy,
Speaker 1: and they had a little office in the back, and
Speaker 1: the first thing I noticed was I saw the documentary
Speaker 1: section and I was like, oh, wow, this is really small.
Speaker 1: I was shocked. I was like, it was seemed to
Speaker 1: be one wall, and I was like, well, maybe that's
Speaker 1: something I can work on because I really love docs
Speaker 1: and I kind of part of my secret passion. And
Speaker 1: then I turned around and noticed that I was wrong
Speaker 1: and that the doc section at Vidiots went all the
Speaker 1: way around the walls, and that I realized there was
Speaker 1: an unparalleled commitment to documentary. And when I realized that,
Speaker 1: I just was like, this is where I want to be.
Speaker 1: This is where I had always wanted to be. I
Speaker 1: never really felt a sense of belonging like I did
Speaker 1: until not first encounter with Patty and Kathy.
Speaker 3: Without a doubt, Maggie knows just about everything there is
Speaker 3: to know about Vidiots, so I asked her to tell
Speaker 3: us more about the store's history and about the founders,
Speaker 3: Patti Pollinger and Kathy Towbert.
Speaker 1: So Patty and Kathy have been best friends since they
Speaker 1: were I think three. They've lived in La their whole lives,
Speaker 1: and I love hearing about their high school stories. They
Speaker 1: both had jobs. Kathy was in the music industry. She
Speaker 1: worked for Frank Zappa and had been in the music
Speaker 1: industry for a while. Patty worked for MGMUA, and they
Speaker 1: both really kind of got sick of working for other
Speaker 1: people and wanted to do something on their own independently.
Speaker 1: They wanted not to work in male dominated industries anymore,
Speaker 1: which was everything and remains everything. They looked around and
Speaker 1: they were like, what can we do? And they noticed
Speaker 1: that video stores were cropping up, but the video stores
Speaker 1: that were around them had really limited offerings and certainly
Speaker 1: not the kind of stuff they were interested in. And
Speaker 1: they saw that gap and they knew that they could
Speaker 1: not only fill it, but like do something pretty extraordinary
Speaker 1: with it. So they opened with eight hundred tapes in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty five in our historical location at three to
Speaker 1: Zo two Peko in Santa Monica, a couple of blocks
Speaker 1: from the beach, and within a really short period of
Speaker 1: time it was booming. But I can tell you that
Speaker 1: it wasn't easy for them. When they went to get
Speaker 1: their first bank loan, one of the loan officers told them,
Speaker 1: why didn't you go ask your dads for the money.
Speaker 1: So they sort of opened videots in spite of real
Speaker 1: gender bias and disparity, and they made it work. And
Speaker 1: I think about that a lot as we're making progress
Speaker 1: against a lot of odds.
Speaker 3: Patty and Kathy always wanted the store to be a
Speaker 3: unique and exciting place.
Speaker 1: They didn't just want to do something transactional. They wanted
Speaker 1: to have a spot to party. They wanted to hang out,
Speaker 1: wanted to meet dudes. They wanted to create something that
Speaker 1: people would come to on a Friday night and hang
Speaker 1: out at. And that is precisely what they did. And
Speaker 1: one of the unique things that they did was they
Speaker 1: designed the space to really be hospitable to a party.
Speaker 1: One of the things that they did that we will
Speaker 1: absolutely replicate in the new space is that everything was
Speaker 1: on rolling racks, so you could move the collection around.
Speaker 1: And it was very much meant to be a place
Speaker 1: that you knew you could go down on a Friday
Speaker 1: night and there would be a party at Vidiots, a
Speaker 1: party with really interesting, open minded, inclusive people. They did it.
Speaker 1: They made a space that people wanted to be at.
Speaker 1: I'm perpetually amazed at how many people in La out
Speaker 1: of LA internationally know about Vidiots, remember it and revere
Speaker 1: it and love it. That's always a really good thing
Speaker 1: for me when I'm in the mire of fundraising and
Speaker 1: buried under her pandemic shipping supply issues and how are
Speaker 1: we going to make the next one hundred thousand dollars?
Speaker 1: When I hear that, I'm bullied by it.
Speaker 3: Vidiots also made a point of amassing one of the
Speaker 3: most comprehensive video collections in the country.
Speaker 1: When they started, they were going after the really hard
Speaker 1: to find stuff, a lot of experimental film, a lot
Speaker 1: of music video, which is some of my favorite stuff
Speaker 1: in the collection. They didn't go black market. They were
Speaker 1: sensible and they were thoughtful about their curation, but they
Speaker 1: were going after things that they knew nobody else was
Speaker 1: going to have, and stuff they wanted to see, honestly,
Speaker 1: and filmmakers they wanted to support. They knew that, especially
Speaker 1: with their positioning in Los Angeles, they could be really
Speaker 1: instrumental in helping emerging filmmakers get their work to audiences.
Speaker 1: And so they became really known as a place where
Speaker 1: if you'd made something, or you'd captured some kind of
Speaker 1: crazy footage, footage of the ninety two uprising, we've got
Speaker 1: that at Vidiots. Because people had this stuff and they
Speaker 1: didn't always know what to do with it, and some
Speaker 1: of those people have become really well known filmmakers. So
Speaker 1: the collection holds a lot of history in the VHS,
Speaker 1: and the VHS preservation is something that's really important to us.
Speaker 1: I really wish there was more of a preservation focused
Speaker 1: on VHS because there are so many people who simply
Speaker 1: were excluded from making work on film, and so when
Speaker 1: VHS came along, when tape came along, they turned to
Speaker 1: that and they were able to make work on that format.
Speaker 1: If we don't preserve it, that work is going to
Speaker 1: go away. So it's important to the history of LA
Speaker 1: for sure.
Speaker 3: Throughout the nineteen nineties, chain stores like Blockbuster and Hollywood
Speaker 3: Video started to dominate the market, but Maggie says that
Speaker 3: wasn't much of a problem for Vidiots.
Speaker 1: I mean, Patty and Kathy are brilliant businesswan. They understood
Speaker 1: their community so innately, and actually the late nineties and
Speaker 1: early two thousands were fantastic for Vidiots. They were cranking,
Speaker 1: enormously successful. I think two thousand and three was their
Speaker 1: peak year. And let me tell you, they made a
Speaker 1: lot of money, a lot of employees. It was booming.
Speaker 1: I think a police like Vidiots was naturally set up
Speaker 1: to actually, in some weird way benefit from chain stores,
Speaker 1: because as soon as those chains started to really take over,
Speaker 1: people knew what they were missing, and they knew that
Speaker 1: Vidiots was the place to go for that. So at
Speaker 1: that time, I mean, we had people driving down from
Speaker 1: Santa Barbara on a regular basis because they knew that
Speaker 1: they couldn't find what they wanted because chain stores had
Speaker 1: put so many independent stores out of business. But it
Speaker 1: was their curation, it was what Patty and Kathy were
Speaker 1: putting on the shelves. They had like resisted a lot
Speaker 1: of populist stuff that they sort of like didn't think
Speaker 1: was up to their artistic standards. And the Olsen Twins
Speaker 1: were the moment. I don't see why we just can't
Speaker 1: tell them the truth. You mean that were the witness
Speaker 1: protection program. Oh, that's a big trend for guys. Hey
Speaker 1: want to go see a movie.
Speaker 3: Oh and by the way, we'll want to get here alive.
Speaker 1: And at a certain point, like they started having kids,
Speaker 1: their customers started having kids, and they were like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: of course we have to have the Olsen Twin videos,
Speaker 1: and they stocked them and they rented. You'd be surprised
Speaker 1: who was renting some of that stuff. So you take
Speaker 1: home something really mainstream like that. But then you also
Speaker 1: get to introduce your kid to something. You know, Miyazaki.
Speaker 1: I really love it here, but people don't seem to like.
Speaker 1: Which is in this.
Speaker 2: Town depends on the people.
Speaker 1: Now take me for instance.
Speaker 2: I just met you, and I know I like you.
Speaker 1: I do think that younger audiences are sort of an
Speaker 1: afterthought right now, certainly for streaming, because streaming is really
Speaker 1: hard for little kids, and it's so easy to get
Speaker 1: them hooked. So big streaming services are like, give them
Speaker 1: one show and then have the next episode just automatically roll.
Speaker 1: It's so algorithmic. It's such a marketing thing that is
Speaker 1: really challenging to get younger people to discover anything new.
Speaker 1: That's where physical media comes in. I use Moonstruck as
Speaker 1: an example. I mean, you waited for the right man
Speaker 1: the first time.
Speaker 2: Why didn't you wait for the right man again?
Speaker 1: Because he didn't come. I'm here you'll like Moonstruck was
Speaker 1: not marketed to me when it came out in the eighties.
Speaker 1: I was a kid. I liked the box art of
Speaker 1: the VHS and so I took it home and watched it,
Speaker 1: and it became instantly one of my favorite movies and
Speaker 1: led me down this really interesting path something wild. I
Speaker 1: saw really really young, the Jonathan Dummy movie because I
Speaker 1: liked the box art, and it made me a much
Speaker 1: more interesting viewer because I was watching that was not
Speaker 1: made for me.
Speaker 3: Maggie says that when DVD rolled around in the early
Speaker 3: two thousands, Vidiots was very smart about transitioning from tape
Speaker 3: to disc.
Speaker 1: If they knew that they wanted to bring DVD in
Speaker 1: and they knew that it was going to have a
Speaker 1: solid shelf life, they could move the VHS off. What
Speaker 1: they did that was really smart was that they hung
Speaker 1: on to vhs that didn't get a digital release, and
Speaker 1: they also hung on to a lot of what I
Speaker 1: think initially they thought was like crappy stuff that they
Speaker 1: just didn't want to buy a DVD of it. They
Speaker 1: didn't think it was a very good movie or a
Speaker 1: good show, and they weren't gonna rent it much. Now,
Speaker 1: some of that stuff is really interesting and really valuable
Speaker 1: for us to have in the VHS archive because it's
Speaker 1: out of print. That actually stands for some really popular
Speaker 1: stuff too. I mean, recent news about Bruce willis everybody
Speaker 1: went nuts about Moonlighting, while we've got every episode of
Speaker 1: Moonlighting on physical media and go ahead and google how
Speaker 1: expensive Season four of Moonlighting is if you can even
Speaker 1: get it anymore. And that's a good show.
Speaker 2: My goodness, mister Presto.
Speaker 3: We're looking a little pale today, aren't we?
Speaker 2: And who have we here?
Speaker 3: I don't know now now no reason to be Shylott's.
Speaker 2: See a little confidence, a little charisma, a little dale kange,
Speaker 2: remember less than one. Imagine your entire audience is completely naked.
Speaker 3: Boggles the mind, doesn't it.
Speaker 1: Another thing Patty and Kathy were really well known for
Speaker 1: was I mean, they had it in print on all
Speaker 1: their materials. If you can't find something, tell us we
Speaker 1: have a friend who is friends with this incredible queer scholar.
Speaker 1: And they were saying that Vidiots was instrumental to their
Speaker 1: graduate work because Vidiots was the only place they could
Speaker 1: go and say, I can't find this thing? Can you
Speaker 1: find it for me? And it was like a point
Speaker 1: of pride for our clerks to be able to hunt
Speaker 1: something down, find it and give it to the person
Speaker 1: who needed it, whether it was for someone really well
Speaker 1: known whether it was for someone academic or whether it
Speaker 1: was just a fan, they were going to find it.
Speaker 1: And we're still like that. I will spend an inordinate
Speaker 1: amount of time trying to find an obscure movie for
Speaker 1: anybody who asks.
Speaker 3: But when streaming started to take off in the twenty tenths,
Speaker 3: vidiots prepared for disaster.
Speaker 1: We knew was going to go south pretty quick. Community
Speaker 1: that loved us. Many of those people were still there,
Speaker 1: but a lot of them were not. So many of
Speaker 1: those people had migrated off of the West Side because
Speaker 1: it became unaffordable. And that's not to say that we
Speaker 1: didn't still have a very devoted Santa Monica fan base,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't enough to sustain. Yeah, it was really hard.
Speaker 1: It was really really difficult. At one point, Alejandro and
Speaker 1: Yuriito came in, I believe, with his.
Speaker 3: Son real quick. For anyone who doesn't know, Alejandro Inyori
Speaker 3: too is an Oscar winning director famous for films like
Speaker 3: The Revenant and Birdman. Those happened to be two of
Speaker 3: my favorite films. So I really love this story.
Speaker 1: They were browsing. I like, went in the office. I said, Patty,
Speaker 1: go talk to him. You got to go talk to him,
Speaker 1: go talk to him. She went out and started talking
Speaker 1: to him. He was asking how it was going, and
Speaker 1: she was like, yeah, it's really hard. Like I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna pretend that it's easy. And he gave us this
Speaker 1: amazing pep talk about how you have to suffer for
Speaker 1: anything that's worthwhile, and like, all I can think of
Speaker 1: is like Leonardo DiCaprio in the woods fighting a bear,
Speaker 1: and us like Haulling eleven thousand VHS tapes and fifty
Speaker 1: thousand titles up Mountain. I returned to that image a lot. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was really hard, and it's still really hard, but
Speaker 1: it's worth it.
Speaker 3: In twenty seventeen, Vidiots closed its iconic location in Santa Monica. However,
Speaker 3: they always knew that this wasn't the end of Vidiots.
Speaker 1: So we shuttered the brick and mortar in seventeen. We
Speaker 1: put everything into storage. I don't know if anybody else
Speaker 1: thought it was visible, but I was hellbent on not
Speaker 1: closing unless we did it with the intention of reopening.
Speaker 1: So everything went into safe storage. We gave up the
Speaker 1: brick and mortar. We continued programming. We're doing stuff at
Speaker 1: the Ace Hotel. During the pandemic, we were doing virtual stuff.
Speaker 1: I actually think that the future of film are spaces
Speaker 1: like Vidiots and partnerships like the one that we have
Speaker 1: with Movie, with streamers and distributors that understand how amazing
Speaker 1: and on lucrative it will be to forge relationships with
Speaker 1: brick and mortar spaces. I can tell you our partners
Speaker 1: at Movie are down with it. They get it, and
Speaker 1: I think that companies that don't get it are gonna
Speaker 1: be sincerely disappointed when they don't have a future generation
Speaker 1: of film lovers, because I really think these younger generations
Speaker 1: are the ones you need to look at. If you're
Speaker 1: worried about the state of film economically, creatively, but especially economically,
Speaker 1: better start paying attention to how these kids are being
Speaker 1: invited into this art form, because they are not being
Speaker 1: invited in right now.
Speaker 3: Maggie largely laments the rise of streaming. She says, well,
Speaker 3: it's not all bad. We've lost something very important in
Speaker 3: physical media.
Speaker 1: The word everything is the problem. Right. We have incredible
Speaker 1: relationships with some of the best streaming services out there,
Speaker 1: Movie Criterion, we love Nightflight. We don't inherently have an
Speaker 1: issue with streaming services. It's a great way to expand access.
Speaker 1: The problem is big corporate entities have blocked access not
Speaker 1: just for physical media, but for theatrical as well. When
Speaker 1: one point of access eradicates another, that's just bad for audiences,
Speaker 1: it's bad for filmmakers. And the word everything is a myth.
Speaker 1: I mean everything is not digitized, everything is not available
Speaker 1: on a streaming service, and just inherently the way streaming
Speaker 1: services are set up, everything can't stay on a streaming service.
Speaker 1: And more importantly, everyone can't afford all of those streaming services.
Speaker 1: And so what streaming, maybe not intentionally has done, especially
Speaker 1: with the quote streaming wars, it becomes about bottom line,
Speaker 1: and when it becomes about what one company has over another,
Speaker 1: the people who lose out are audiences. And the people
Speaker 1: who really lose out are audiences that don't have the resources,
Speaker 1: or the time or the inclination to know. Oh, if
Speaker 1: I want full access to a multitude of films, I've
Speaker 1: got to have sixteen seventeen now streaming services. It's insane
Speaker 1: and it's unaffordable. The other thing is like the human interaction. Yes,
Speaker 1: when you take a home video home with you, you're
Speaker 1: watching it and you know it's a different experience than
Speaker 1: the theatrical experience when you're with a group of people,
Speaker 1: but you still have a point of connection to another
Speaker 1: human being while you're doing that. And some of the
Speaker 1: most fascinating conversations I've had, some of the most inspiring,
Speaker 1: have been in a video store with another clerk or
Speaker 1: another customer, or I've overheard conversations between customers. So even
Speaker 1: with physical media that you take home and watch, you
Speaker 1: still have a point of connection to another person. Strangers
Speaker 1: talking to each other about something they have commonality around
Speaker 1: is how we prevent the world from syncing into oblivion.
Speaker 1: I mean, maybe I'm a crazy person, but I think
Speaker 1: this socio economic cultural divide we're looking at right now
Speaker 1: is not unrelated to the fact that access to the
Speaker 1: most popular art form for the last one hundred plus
Speaker 1: years has become really diminished. And I think that about
Speaker 1: record stores, and I think that about radio stations and
Speaker 1: non cable TV. I mean, it's all connected. When two
Speaker 1: people who seem to have nothing in common like the
Speaker 1: same thing, a lot of progress can be made. And
Speaker 1: when you take those points of access away, it's a
Speaker 1: shut storm. You have so much more in common with
Speaker 1: someone you don't know. If you know they like something
Speaker 1: that you like, or they introduce you to something they
Speaker 1: like you didn't know about. That's how it works. Bookstores,
Speaker 1: record stores, that's what they're designed to do. Help you
Speaker 1: find something you're going to love or hate, but one
Speaker 1: way or the other, you're going to talk to another
Speaker 1: person about it.
Speaker 3: Luckily, Vidiots has been hard at work at making a
Speaker 3: triumphant return, and they're planning for a major comeback. After
Speaker 3: Vidiots closed in twenty seventeen, Maggie says they immediately started
Speaker 3: looking for another location, and in twenty nineteen, Vidiots revealed
Speaker 3: that they had finally found a new home.
Speaker 1: Well, I came together because a lot, a lot a
Speaker 1: lot of people said yes when I asked them for help.
Speaker 1: The first thing we did was shutter. The next thing
Speaker 1: we did was we knew we had to come up
Speaker 1: with a new business plan, like on paper or with research.
Speaker 1: We did a year and a half of market research
Speaker 1: to figure out what the best path forward would be.
Speaker 1: We innately knew it needed to move towards the east Side.
Speaker 1: We did some walk arounds of neighborhoods on the east
Speaker 1: Side and Patty and Kathy were like, yeah, this feels
Speaker 1: like Santa Monica in the eighties. This is right, this
Speaker 1: is where it needs to be. And once we sort
Speaker 1: of solidified that, we knew that there were not enough
Speaker 1: screening spaces on the East side of Los Angeles. I
Speaker 1: mean now post COVID, it's like the entire city is
Speaker 1: a movie theater desert right now. On the other hand,
Speaker 1: there's been a great revival of Rep Cinema, which I
Speaker 1: think is amazing, but it doesn't counterbalance what we've lost.
Speaker 1: And there was a lot of work put into bringing
Speaker 1: together an advisory council and building up the board of directors,
Speaker 1: going to everybody I knew who had some level of
Speaker 1: expertise who could offer a point of view. We rewrote
Speaker 1: a business plan with our friend Jenny Jacobe, who was
Speaker 1: going through her master's program at UT Austin and had
Speaker 1: a ton a ton of experience with draft House, where
Speaker 1: she'd been for a long time. We were friends with
Speaker 1: Tim League. We went to Tim. He was our first funder.
Speaker 1: When we started to put money together for the relaunch.
Speaker 1: We thought we would do like black box theaters, We'd
Speaker 1: go into something like a warehouse. I was very fixated
Speaker 1: on auto body shops because they have high ceilings and
Speaker 1: then the Eagle over an Eagle Rock, which is a
Speaker 1: movie theater that opened in nineteen twenty nine and ran
Speaker 1: until the year two thousand that I had driven past
Speaker 1: every day for the last ten years of my life,
Speaker 1: had a fur least sign on it. And I went
Speaker 1: straight to jeff Or Walter, who is really our partner
Speaker 1: on everything Vidiots and is renovating the building with us,
Speaker 1: and said, I think it's this. I think it's this,
Speaker 1: or it's nothing. And then we went in the building.
Speaker 1: I was like, Yep, it's this or nothing. Jeff is
Speaker 1: a former Vidiots customer, are architects, former Vidiots customers, landlords,
Speaker 1: former Vidiots customers, So that all really beautifully fowl into
Speaker 1: place was sprinklings of magic. We are definitely a phoenix.
Speaker 3: Maggie says. They are hard at work at creating an
Speaker 3: all new experience in the Eco Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Speaker 3: The space will be a hybrid including a large theater
Speaker 3: and a video store.
Speaker 1: We have these two things that seem obsolete right now,
Speaker 1: and they shouldn't seem obsolete, but circumstances are such that
Speaker 1: they seem antiquated. You've got this old single screen movie
Speaker 1: theater that's been dark for twenty years, and you've got
Speaker 1: a revered but long shuttered video store, and you put
Speaker 1: them together and you get this incredible new, soon to
Speaker 1: be thriving hub for the film capital of the world.
Speaker 1: Two hundred and fifty seat state of the art movie
Speaker 1: Theater thirty five I DCP A big lobby. That was
Speaker 1: the thing that we knew the Eagle had to offer.
Speaker 1: The Eagle had operated as an eight hundred to nine
Speaker 1: hundred seat movie theater for most of its life, so
Speaker 1: it's really really big space. It doesn't have the decorative
Speaker 1: elements of the Vista. It's not something like a movie palace.
Speaker 1: It has that feeling of scale that something like the
Speaker 1: Vista has. It's really big, and it's very hard to
Speaker 1: tell from the outside of the building how big it is.
Speaker 1: And we knew that the scale would allow us to
Speaker 1: make some subtle but really meaningful changes, which mostly involved
Speaker 1: expanding the lobby. When we took over the building, the
Speaker 1: lobby was basically a hallway. I can't even imagine how
Speaker 1: it operated. I've heard amazing stories about people trying to
Speaker 1: find their friends and trying to go to the bathroom
Speaker 1: because there was only one bathroom downstairs. It was not
Speaker 1: remotely what you would call accessible. It was not functional
Speaker 1: at all by today's standards. I'm not sure it was
Speaker 1: functional by yesterday's standards. But we knew that if we
Speaker 1: moved back wall of the theater and we would still
Speaker 1: retain the feeling of scale in the theater, but it
Speaker 1: would also give us a hangout space, and that's something
Speaker 1: that LA severely lacks in its even wonderful and existing
Speaker 1: theatrical spaces. You watch a movie and instantly you're out
Speaker 1: on the sidewalk trying to figure out how to keep
Speaker 1: talking about the movie with your friends. And you know,
Speaker 1: if you have to move people from one location to
Speaker 1: another in LA, that's pretty much the end of the conversation.
Speaker 1: So we knew that we needed a gathering space. We
Speaker 1: didn't want to like squeeze fifty thousand titles into like
Speaker 1: a hallway and then suddenly lose the entire thrust of
Speaker 1: our mission, which was to create access and maintain access
Speaker 1: and grow our library. I mean, I'm telling you, it
Speaker 1: was magical. The Eagle has a massive storefront attached to
Speaker 1: it on one of the most busy commercial corridors in
Speaker 1: Northeast Los Angeles that deeply needs revitalizing. Eagle Rock Boulevard
Speaker 1: was once a really thrive having sort of economic hub
Speaker 1: for North Esela, and it is not anymore. And we
Speaker 1: feel very strongly that Vidiots will be an anchor for
Speaker 1: the neighborhood, help revitalize the existing businesses, help bring in
Speaker 1: new businesses into spaces that have been shuttered for a
Speaker 1: really long time, and we have the community around us
Speaker 1: to do it. So beer and wine too. We knew
Speaker 1: that beer, wine and food is pivotal, and then also
Speaker 1: having a space for the community to come together, having
Speaker 1: a place where kids know we've got a high school,
Speaker 1: we've got a middle school, we've got several elementary schools.
Speaker 1: We knew we wanted our space to be a place
Speaker 1: where those people could come and feel they belonged and
Speaker 1: feel they had a creative outlet and candy and popcorn
Speaker 1: and a hanging space, and the storefront allows us to
Speaker 1: do that. We're building a flexible community space in microcinema
Speaker 1: in the other part of the storefront, and we've made
Speaker 1: everything ada accessible and all connected and related, and the
Speaker 1: sound is all integrated so you can have a full
Speaker 1: scale event in there. You can have three separate events
Speaker 1: happening at the same time for three different groups of people.
Speaker 1: It is sort of the dream scenario when you're trying
Speaker 1: to revitalize film. It's not feasible for all of us
Speaker 1: to haul across town for that, and we deserve it.
Speaker 1: We were completely entitled to having a thriving film culture
Speaker 1: in our neighborhoods, and again one that speaks to a
Speaker 1: much broader community of people. I want my children and
Speaker 1: their peers, especially their peers who are have fewer advantages
Speaker 1: than my kids do, to have a place to go
Speaker 1: that I had that feeling, that buzz of walking into
Speaker 1: a place you know that you're wanted, a place that's fun.
Speaker 1: It doesn't feel like homework. You're not being dragged there.
Speaker 1: You want to go there. You jump on your skateboard,
Speaker 1: you roll down own and you might bump into your crush.
Speaker 1: You might have fifteen cents in your pocket that you
Speaker 1: can hang out in the video store as long as
Speaker 1: you want and get that interaction and get that feeling
Speaker 1: of inclusion and it's you know, it's a party.
Speaker 3: Maggie admits that the construction process has been pretty tough.
Speaker 3: Funding such a major project is no easy feat, especially
Speaker 3: for a small independent film outlet. And despite knowing this,
Speaker 3: I asked Maggie when she expects the new videots to open.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we know better than to try to predict anything
Speaker 1: in this world anymore. So certainly the plan is opening
Speaker 1: in twenty two. We need to open in twenty two for,
Speaker 1: if anything, for my own personal sanity. But the building
Speaker 1: is coming together beautifully. We have definitely been impacted financially
Speaker 1: by the pandemic. We've been impacted by shipping in supply
Speaker 1: chain issues and all the things that every he hears
Speaker 1: about by inflation. So we are still very much in
Speaker 1: our capital campaign, which is almost entirely run during the pandemic,
Speaker 1: and we do have a lot of money to raise.
Speaker 1: We're doing great. Our community has really rallied around us,
Speaker 1: but we need to expand that community, and we do
Speaker 1: need everybody who says that they care about theatrical, who
Speaker 1: says that they care about physical media. You know, some
Speaker 1: of the loudest voices in the fight for theatrical and
Speaker 1: in the fight for independent cinema still don't seem to
Speaker 1: know what we're doing at Videots, and I think that
Speaker 1: has everything to do with the limitations of launching something
Speaker 1: like this in a pandemic, and so we need to
Speaker 1: radically shift that. We need to see support from our
Speaker 1: more resourced brothers and sisters in the industry distributors. We
Speaker 1: have so many amazing companies that have come in to
Speaker 1: support us, and we need to see more follow suit.
Speaker 1: Seventy one percent of our funding from individuals, and we're
Speaker 1: talking little gifts up to our founding member level, which
Speaker 1: is five thousand and above, people joining as founding members
Speaker 1: in groups and crowdsourcing their founding membership. Some founding members
Speaker 1: doubling down and making gifts annually since we started this
Speaker 1: campaign in twenty nineteen, and that's how we're doing it.
Speaker 1: Very very very sadly, public funding for specifically film exhibition
Speaker 1: spaces is almost non existent. I mean, we've really struggled
Speaker 1: on that front. And it's not because we're not good
Speaker 1: at what we do, and it's not because we don't
Speaker 1: have a compelling project. It's just not there. So much
Speaker 1: of the funding has shifted to filmmaker centric programming, which
Speaker 1: is great and it will certainly help shift tides to
Speaker 1: make a more inclusive and a more representative creative slate.
Speaker 1: The the question is where will those movies reach audiences,
Speaker 1: so us reaching new individuals is something that's really important
Speaker 1: to us. I do hope Los Angeles and public funding
Speaker 1: sources wake up to the fact that without theatrical spaces,
Speaker 1: all of the new filmmakers they're supporting are going to
Speaker 1: have a really hard time.
Speaker 3: However, Maggie is hopeful that Vidiots will come to Fruition
Speaker 3: sooner than later, and when it does finally open, she
Speaker 3: knows it will be incredibly successful.
Speaker 1: There's no question in my mind that people want to
Speaker 1: go to movie theaters. They want to go to brick
Speaker 1: and mortar spaces to access everything from art to skateboards
Speaker 1: to whatever. They want to go to brick and mortar.
Speaker 1: It got taken away from them, and sometimes it got
Speaker 1: prematurely taken away. Small businesses are hard to maintain and operate,
Speaker 1: but they're worth it. And I think in a weird way,
Speaker 1: you're going back into the past to create something new,
Speaker 1: and that's something new creates a path forward, and that's
Speaker 1: exactly what we're doing with Vidiots. We're taking these two
Speaker 1: things that once existed and making something totally new with them.
Speaker 1: And you know, you put in beer and wine and
Speaker 1: good food, and that helps too.
Speaker 3: Since the store could always use the help. I'll let
Speaker 3: Maggie finish by telling you how you can support vidiots.
Speaker 1: So you can learn more about vidiots, you can support,
Speaker 1: you can get involved. We're on socials at vidiots and
Speaker 1: we're at Vidiotsfoundation dot org. We've got a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of stuff coming up. I can't tease anything, but yes,
Speaker 1: as we get closer and closer to opening, it won't
Speaker 1: just be a movie that opens us up. It will
Speaker 1: be several months worth of welcome back to the video
Speaker 1: store and welcome back to the movie theater, fun for
Speaker 1: all ages. So exciting, Yay.
Speaker 2: This episode of Ephemeral was written and produced by Trevor
Speaker 2: Young with producers Max and Alex Williams. Maggie McKay is
Speaker 2: the executive director of Vidiots Foundation. Big thanks to Maggie
Speaker 2: for a tour of the new Vidiots space. We wish
Speaker 2: them the very best with their renovations. Music this episode
Speaker 2: from the artist Monteplazier. Learn more at loyaltyfreakmusic dot com.
Speaker 2: And we want to hear from you. What do you
Speaker 2: love about video stories? Do you want more spaces like Vidiots?
Speaker 2: Let us know on social media. We're at Ephemeral Show
Speaker 2: and for more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 2: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.