Speaker 1: Ephemeral is production of my Heart three D audio for
Speaker 1: full exposure. Listen with that phones. If you were wind
Speaker 1: to the nineteen eighties and nineties, video stores were everywhere.
Speaker 1: They came in different shapes and sizes, states of cleanliness,
Speaker 1: and levels of cool. But they had one thing in common,
Speaker 1: racks and racks of videotapes. But now, with thousands of
Speaker 1: titles available to stream at the click of a button,
Speaker 1: what does a physical store they have to offer? A
Speaker 1: shopping destination, a bit of nostalgia, just a memory Today.
Speaker 1: Ephemeral producer Trevor Young traces the rise, fall, and potential
Speaker 1: future of the video store. When I was about eight
Speaker 1: or nine, my mom started taking me to a local
Speaker 1: video store in Austin, Texas called I Love Video. Up
Speaker 1: to that point, my idea of cinema was Star Wars,
Speaker 1: The Phantom Menace. I've been wondering, what are mini chlorines?
Speaker 1: The Iglorians are a microscopic life form that resides with
Speaker 1: an old living sounds. I don't understand, but I love video.
Speaker 1: I was exposed to a vast library of old timey classics.
Speaker 1: But what about us? We'll always had Paris horror flicks,
Speaker 1: ethereal dramas. Mr Malcolm, I think I can explain, Yeah, explain.
Speaker 1: We operate a little business here that simulates for our
Speaker 1: clientele the experience of being you actually and all sorts
Speaker 1: of movies, so that by the time I was in
Speaker 1: high school, I had developed a deep love for cinema.
Speaker 1: I always credit I Love Video for that. The place
Speaker 1: meant a lot to me, and without a doubt, I'm
Speaker 1: not alone in my experience. It's hard to overstate the
Speaker 1: importance of the space of the video store. Whether it
Speaker 1: was a shabby place, or whether it was a glitzy blockbuster,
Speaker 1: or whether it was a kind of quirky, artsy, fartzy
Speaker 1: place with memorabilia or whatever. The space of the store
Speaker 1: is hugely important because it's a social space and a
Speaker 1: physical space, creating this new sense of a physical relationship
Speaker 1: of shopping with movies. My name's Daniel Herbert, and I'm
Speaker 1: an associate professor at the Universe of Michigan in the
Speaker 1: Department of Film, Television and Media, and i am the
Speaker 1: author of Video Land, Movie Culture at the American Video Store.
Speaker 1: Dan's book, Video Land taps into something many of us
Speaker 1: have likely felt at some point that going into a
Speaker 1: video store is unlike any other movie going experience. At
Speaker 1: the movie theater. You would go and you know, you
Speaker 1: might shot up to the extent that you pick one
Speaker 1: of the four films that are playing in the theater,
Speaker 1: but then you buy a ticket and you sit down
Speaker 1: and you kind of have this consumption experience, whereas you
Speaker 1: don't watch a movie at the store. The store is
Speaker 1: all about shopping and contemplation and interacting with the physical
Speaker 1: objects of the shelves and the tapes, interacting with the
Speaker 1: physical bodies of the other shoppers and the clerks, and
Speaker 1: interacting socially with whoever you're there with, your family, your date,
Speaker 1: other shoppers seeing what they're watching. In terms of transforming
Speaker 1: movie culture, it made movies shoppable. Come to the warehouse,
Speaker 1: movies you want what do you want them? With? The
Speaker 1: warehouse movie Rebel Garotte. The retailing of movies creates a
Speaker 1: public forum for that kind of evaluation of movie taste,
Speaker 1: and sometimes that's announced right when you're talking. So much
Speaker 1: of that was also invisible that you'd like walk and
Speaker 1: you look at a tape and you say that's not
Speaker 1: for me, And that's like this momentary, ephemeral interaction with
Speaker 1: an object in a store like me. Dan also has
Speaker 1: fond memories of his childhood video stores, even if some
Speaker 1: of them were a little readier than others. I grew
Speaker 1: up in a small kind of working class town on
Speaker 1: the south side of Detroit, and we got a video
Speaker 1: store there actually quite early, like eight three, eight four,
Speaker 1: and this was a classic junkie mom and pop shop
Speaker 1: and a totally beat up strip mall. That particular place
Speaker 1: had carpet on the walls and it was just gross,
Speaker 1: and the shelves were like, you know, handcrafted wood with
Speaker 1: stapled carpet on him. And I remember like it was
Speaker 1: totally fascinating and amazing to go in there and to
Speaker 1: see all the boxes, especially because in those days horror
Speaker 1: films were big, cheap action films were big, and those
Speaker 1: things had crazy lurid covers. The following movie is rated.
Speaker 1: Are so just to being a kid with very protective
Speaker 1: parents seeing like slasher movie covers and like action movie covers,
Speaker 1: I was like, this is a world of amazement my family,
Speaker 1: Like every other family, movie rental just became habit. Every weekend,
Speaker 1: two or three movies, if not on week days. I'm
Speaker 1: gen X and I grew up in a suburb without
Speaker 1: an art house theater. So like my introduction to like
Speaker 1: quality cinema, specialty cinema, indie stuff, foreign films, like my
Speaker 1: kind of cinephilia was fed by videotape rather than by
Speaker 1: an art house theater. When I saw things like eraser Head,
Speaker 1: Oh you are ship? Or drug store cowboy guys got
Speaker 1: new blues? Well, no, you know how odd it is
Speaker 1: to get blues these days, David, how about some morphine?
Speaker 1: I got some good old morphine, and I first saw
Speaker 1: the glimmer that film could be more than just Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Speaker 1: All right, everyone, You know that's set a trajectory for
Speaker 1: my whole life, making me think, like eventually that I
Speaker 1: could study films as a kind of serious thing. You'll
Speaker 1: hear Dan mentioned David Lynch's a racer Head a few
Speaker 1: times throughout this episode, and there's a reason for that.
Speaker 1: A racer Head demonstrates one way in which home video
Speaker 1: was so valuable to film culture. I mean, it's a
Speaker 1: super weird movie, like even by weird movie standards. I
Speaker 1: had an operation on my arm here. Doctors said I
Speaker 1: wouldn't be able to use it. What the hell do they? Know,
Speaker 1: I said, And I rubbed it for a half hour
Speaker 1: every day, and pretty soon I had my arm back again.
Speaker 1: But I also think the history of that film in
Speaker 1: terms of its being so exclusive, right, like it played
Speaker 1: in midnight screenings in l A and New York, and
Speaker 1: then you know, it's this kind of underground thing, like
Speaker 1: how do you get access to it if you're not
Speaker 1: in a big city, if you don't have like a
Speaker 1: midnight movie screening, And with home video you could see
Speaker 1: a racer head if you lived in suburban Detroit. There's
Speaker 1: lots of cases to from the eighties, even where you
Speaker 1: have things that were failures in theaters, but home video
Speaker 1: provided this lifespan. Officer k D six Stash three dot seven.
Speaker 1: Let's begin, ready, we sell your base and blood and
Speaker 1: black nothingness began to spin like we would not have
Speaker 1: Blade Runner if it weren't for home video, because Blade
Speaker 1: Runner did not do well in theaters, but home video
Speaker 1: kept it alive. We create a cushion pillow for their
Speaker 1: emotions and consequently we can control them them memories. You're
Speaker 1: talking about memories, and then then you have a director's cut,
Speaker 1: so there'd be a new home video release and so
Speaker 1: you have a film that was absolutely a failure in theaters,
Speaker 1: but whose legacy has been enormous, and that's entirely because
Speaker 1: of home video and the way home video can increase
Speaker 1: reputations even for films that did badly in theaters. But
Speaker 1: nowadays you can probably find a racer Head and Blade
Speaker 1: Runner on some online streaming service. It's likely a surprise
Speaker 1: to no one. The video stores have been closing down
Speaker 1: left and right for over a decade. According to USA Today,
Speaker 1: between two thousand seven and two thousand seventeen, the number
Speaker 1: of US video stores dropped eight from over fifteen thousand
Speaker 1: to just two thousand. Dan saw this coming a while
Speaker 1: back and knew that someone had to document this. Two nine,
Speaker 1: it was clear that the industry was changing dramatically. Netflix
Speaker 1: had just begun streaming in two thousand eight. One book
Speaker 1: came out, a very good book by Joshua Greenberg called
Speaker 1: from Databacks to Blockbuster. But I knew that, like, I
Speaker 1: could do a very different kind of book, and I
Speaker 1: wanted to do a very different kind of book. So
Speaker 1: I don't know that I knew immediately that I was
Speaker 1: kind of documenting something that was on its way out.
Speaker 1: But I had the sense that it was like timely,
Speaker 1: and so then by like two thousand ten or eleven,
Speaker 1: when I really did know that this was going to
Speaker 1: be a book. By that point, you know, Hollywood Video
Speaker 1: Movie Gallery went on a business, and so I did
Speaker 1: know that in fact, what I was doing was documentary,
Speaker 1: something that was still vibrant but certainly didn't have a
Speaker 1: lot of life left. So there was an urgency to
Speaker 1: the research. Urgent because it was clear that like everything
Speaker 1: was changing very dramatically, and people were adopting streaming more
Speaker 1: and more, and video stores were just disappearing. Dan's research
Speaker 1: went all the way back to the beginning of home video.
Speaker 1: It all started with one of the first home video formats,
Speaker 1: Beta Max, which came around in the mid seventies. But
Speaker 1: home video at that point was something very different. In
Speaker 1: those early days of Beta Max and then a couple
Speaker 1: of years later with vh Yes, those things were marketed
Speaker 1: and conceived of as being for television, for recording television
Speaker 1: programs and playing them at your own convenience. People could
Speaker 1: watch soap operas in the evening rather than during the day,
Speaker 1: or one could watch Magnum p I, you know, on
Speaker 1: a Saturday morning rather than on Thursday night and you
Speaker 1: can fast forward to the commercials, which, of course is
Speaker 1: one of the reasons why Hollywood was so upset by it,
Speaker 1: because it disturbed a business model. The manufacturers didn't necessarily
Speaker 1: think of these things initially as vehicles for delivering prerecorded
Speaker 1: movie content, but quickly entrepreneurs in the United States thought
Speaker 1: of that. One of those entrepreneurs was Andre Blair. Blay
Speaker 1: is often credited as the father of home video, and
Speaker 1: as it turns out, Blay lived and worked in a
Speaker 1: place not far from Dan Incidentally, very strange that I
Speaker 1: up in the same town that Andre Blais was operating.
Speaker 1: Actually here in southeast Michigan, in a town called Farmington,
Speaker 1: where I lived. He had already been in the business
Speaker 1: of kind of magnetic tape like duplication for like the
Speaker 1: auto industry, doing like educational videos and things like that. Now,
Speaker 1: let's see what would happen when driving under the influence
Speaker 1: of alcohol. Let's imagine you're driving and haven't taken alcohol.
Speaker 1: Watch out for that deliverymand Your rapid perception of the
Speaker 1: situation and quick break reaction prevented what could have been
Speaker 1: a fatal accident. Part of his insight was that he
Speaker 1: was already in the business of selling prerecorded content to
Speaker 1: a certain market, but that prerecorded content was not Hollywood movies,
Speaker 1: and the market was not general consumers. In seventy so,
Speaker 1: the same year that the VHS format hits North America,
Speaker 1: he approached all the Hollywood studios saying, I'd like to
Speaker 1: put your movies on tape and sell them to individuals,
Speaker 1: like private consumers. The only studio that I heard from
Speaker 1: was twenty century Fox. We had a nice conversation then
Speaker 1: he hadn't been a list of a hundred motivase and
Speaker 1: said that we've cleared the home video rights to these.
Speaker 1: I made them. We had fifty titles, and we released
Speaker 1: all fifty titles at once. He paid like hundreds of
Speaker 1: thousands of dollars for the right to put a bunch
Speaker 1: of old Fox movies on tape, and he tried to
Speaker 1: mandate that people could not rent them because he really
Speaker 1: wanted to kind of keep control of the sale and
Speaker 1: make it a a kind of a direct sale thing. And
Speaker 1: these things were like eight hundred bucks. But still people
Speaker 1: kind of defied him, and video stores immediately appeared in
Speaker 1: southern California and New York City and in southeast Michigan,
Speaker 1: there was a place called Thomas Video, and they remember
Speaker 1: driving across town and getting tapes directly from Blade. It's
Speaker 1: fun to think about what the first video store was.
Speaker 1: Different people claim that, but they all pop up very quickly,
Speaker 1: one after the other instead seven, and then that sets
Speaker 1: the whole thing in motion. So it was certainly an
Speaker 1: exciting thing, and people were opening video stories left and right.
Speaker 1: But the industry really exploded in a D three after
Speaker 1: the VCR prices they dropped from like seven dollars to
Speaker 1: three dollars, which, of course in a D three was
Speaker 1: still very expensive, but affordable to a middle class, working
Speaker 1: class family. While video stores were starting to spring up,
Speaker 1: there was still debate about which video format to use.
Speaker 1: Most of us think VHS when we think about video tapes,
Speaker 1: but in those early days of home video, Beta max
Speaker 1: was still dominant, if only for a short period. Beta
Speaker 1: tapes were smaller than vhs, and the first Beta tapes
Speaker 1: were only an hour long, kind of conceived of to
Speaker 1: again record television programs, but they put movies on them
Speaker 1: and you would rent and it would come with two
Speaker 1: Beta tapes. VCRs were these top loading things. The thing
Speaker 1: would like lift up in this clunk and then you
Speaker 1: put it in and then it's like sync down into
Speaker 1: the machine and it was like, you know, almost like
Speaker 1: a real to real playing inside there, spinning the dials
Speaker 1: inside the tape. The format war between VHS and Beta
Speaker 1: was real. And so you go into a video store
Speaker 1: in those days and they might have a thousand videos total.
Speaker 1: Four hundred would be BEATA and six VHS. It was
Speaker 1: a real kind of debate for store owners and for renters,
Speaker 1: and certainly for people who were dropping hundreds of dollars
Speaker 1: on the machines trying to guess, like what format is
Speaker 1: the right format. Thanks to Sony's revolutionary Beta Max deck,
Speaker 1: which hooks up to any TV set, now you can
Speaker 1: automatically videotape your favorite show even when you're not home,
Speaker 1: and watch it any time you would. Good morning, gentlemen,
Speaker 1: I'm going home to watch the Light show. Beta Max
Speaker 1: was a higher fidelity visually and sonically right, so the
Speaker 1: picture quality was slightly better than VHS and the and
Speaker 1: the sound quality was better, and that was part of
Speaker 1: their claim to fame. But eventually VHS just kind of
Speaker 1: took over, and then the network effect kicks in and
Speaker 1: more stores have more VHS tapes than data VHS, the
Speaker 1: four hour system from Panasonic and other leading companies. If
Speaker 1: you're a consumer, you're thinking, well, I'm not going to
Speaker 1: buy a beta tape because I only have these options
Speaker 1: as opposed to VHS, which has these options. The video
Speaker 1: store market took off fast. According to the Associated Press,
Speaker 1: there were over fifteen thousand video stores in the US alone.
Speaker 1: Home video the VCR and having a movie on tape
Speaker 1: transforms the movie viewing experience in incredible ways. One it
Speaker 1: puts it in the home. Of course, people have been
Speaker 1: accustomed to watching movies at home on television, but movies
Speaker 1: didn't appear when you wanted them necessarily, and so home
Speaker 1: video exploded. The idea that consumers had this kind of
Speaker 1: amazing control over what they watched, when they watched, and
Speaker 1: the convenience of watching it at home in the video
Speaker 1: store plays into that because with the rental model, these
Speaker 1: were kind of temporary transactions but offering tons of choices.
Speaker 1: If it had been a cell through model only, then
Speaker 1: people would have been like kind of stuck with whatever
Speaker 1: hundred tapes they bought. But with the rental stores, you know,
Speaker 1: even the worst video stores had five hundred titles or more.
Speaker 1: This week, the warehouse guarantees you can rent a Big Crocodile,
Speaker 1: Dundee Too, and Cocktail starring Tom Cruise. If we don't
Speaker 1: have a copy available, we'll give you a coupon for
Speaker 1: a free rental for one of these three hit movies.
Speaker 1: That sense of catering to individual tastes and desires that
Speaker 1: really comes about with home video and the video store
Speaker 1: being the literal market for taste. Consumers could get what
Speaker 1: they wanted, when they wanted, where they wanted. That was
Speaker 1: a transformation, I mean your transformation. Not only did video
Speaker 1: stores offer a new sort of convenience, they were also
Speaker 1: unique spaces in themselves. The early video stores, they were
Speaker 1: just reflections of the quirky personalities of the people who
Speaker 1: owned them. High Video Sam's got exciting news for you.
Speaker 1: You can now rent a video over night and high
Speaker 1: are these great movies from only nine cents Video Sam's
Speaker 1: libraries and convenient to you. They were just small, little
Speaker 1: retail shops, often rapidly put together by people who might
Speaker 1: not have had any previous experience in business. Now there
Speaker 1: were lots of things that tried to professionalize the business,
Speaker 1: and like there's a whole industry around people who made
Speaker 1: shelves for video stores and sold it to individuals, and
Speaker 1: there were people who you know, specialized in security systems
Speaker 1: for the doorway and things like that. The point is
Speaker 1: is that prior to Blockbuster, there was a huge range
Speaker 1: of what the stories would look like. Some were super clean,
Speaker 1: kind of corporate looking. Others were just totally funky and weird.
Speaker 1: You've come around ALREADYO per parad or neary you are,
Speaker 1: and so it really depended on the individual owner. You
Speaker 1: have those independently owned stories that really did try to
Speaker 1: foster eclecticism as its own special value. You know, those
Speaker 1: art house video stores would hold everything from ed Wood
Speaker 1: a fiend I am a soldier of our planet, I
Speaker 1: a fiend to Felini. It's about those stories that had
Speaker 1: huge selections, way beyond Blockbuster, and not just huge, but
Speaker 1: intention the outside of the mainstream alternative I guess. And
Speaker 1: that alternative might be highbrow, and that alternative might be
Speaker 1: super low brow. But it would only be a matter
Speaker 1: of time before corporate movie chains entered the business. For
Speaker 1: a short period from the late seventies to mid eighties,
Speaker 1: independent video stores were thriving but then the most iconic
Speaker 1: video store emerged. Imagine the perfect video store. It would
Speaker 1: have a great run right over, ten thousand videos, three
Speaker 1: evening rows, so no rush, no hassles cha, twenty four hour,
Speaker 1: quick drop return, open late every night. Well, the perfect
Speaker 1: video store. Blockbuster really hits the scene starting eight seven
Speaker 1: and then taking off through blow And they've got this
Speaker 1: kind of cookie cutter model that every Blockbuster might be
Speaker 1: slightly different in terms of arrangement, but they all look
Speaker 1: the same. They've all got the same color scheme, they've
Speaker 1: all got the same sign and so this idea as
Speaker 1: we enter the ninety nineties that there's a kind of
Speaker 1: standardization of the aesthetics of the stores themselves. An individual
Speaker 1: Blockbuster store would have like six thousand, eight thousand tapes,
Speaker 1: so that's a lot of variation potentially, but still they
Speaker 1: kind of sold themselves as having that kind of middle
Speaker 1: of the road, nothing too far afield. If you want
Speaker 1: the thing that everybody wants, then we've got that thing
Speaker 1: that everybody wants. But Dan says the sort of soulless
Speaker 1: perception of Blockbuster and other major chains wasn't entirely accurate.
Speaker 1: It's a weird thing the way that history is remembering
Speaker 1: Blockbuster as just only being this corporate store that killed
Speaker 1: video stores and movie culture, because in fact, when they
Speaker 1: hit the scene, they had way more movie options than
Speaker 1: the typical mom and pop shop. It's because of financing.
Speaker 1: If you're like an individual entrepreneur and you're investing in
Speaker 1: tapes based on your revenue, that's limited. But if you're
Speaker 1: like a publicly traded company like Blockbuster and you can
Speaker 1: just flood a space with six thousand tapes, that's what
Speaker 1: they did. Nobody has the movie I want. Hey, if
Speaker 1: it's on video, Blockbuster probably hasn't. I mean, we have
Speaker 1: over ten thousand videos, and so they sold themselves on
Speaker 1: having more choices, and Hollywood Video they had like ten
Speaker 1: thousand tapes. Only Hollywood Video has Star Wars the Fanto
Speaker 1: Menace for five days, so you can watch it again
Speaker 1: and again. Welcome to Hollywood Hollywood Video. I remember even there,
Speaker 1: this big corporate store had like a cult movie section
Speaker 1: and a foreign film section that was pretty impressive considering.
Speaker 1: And no joke, there was a Hollywood Video in Albuquerque
Speaker 1: that had like a wall of anim a. It was
Speaker 1: like the place to go in the nineties if you
Speaker 1: wanted to watch Japanese animation. The historical record needs to
Speaker 1: remember that those places did actually offer lots of options.
Speaker 1: Contrary to what you'd expect. The rise of corporate stores
Speaker 1: wasn't all bad for indie stores. The more alternative stores. Actually,
Speaker 1: a number of them pop up because of Blockbuster. When
Speaker 1: the whole video industry starts to really kind of grow
Speaker 1: more corporate and homogenized in the later half of the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties, that's exactly when you see places like Videos
Speaker 1: open up, Scarecrow in Seattle opens up. They realized that,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, okay, Blockbusters kind of taking over the mainstream game,
Speaker 1: but they don't have eraser Head. We can actually do
Speaker 1: quite well right next to Blockbuster because we're doing something
Speaker 1: pretty different. When you walking down the street and you
Speaker 1: see little ghost what you're gonna do about ghost pastas?
Speaker 1: What what? What is that? That's the Ghostbusters theme song. No,
Speaker 1: And that's how we're going to sell ourselves as the
Speaker 1: alternative to mainstream movie culture. That wasn't by I don't
Speaker 1: think that they were threatened by Blockbuster necessarily, because they
Speaker 1: were effectively differentiating themselves based on product and clientele. Indie
Speaker 1: stores were also kept alive by the people Dan mentioned
Speaker 1: earlier who tend to frequent more quirky stores, the cinophiles,
Speaker 1: you know. La Tripe always said that, you know, the
Speaker 1: best scripts don't make the best films, you know, because
Speaker 1: they have that kind of literary, you know, narrative thing.
Speaker 1: You know that you're sort of a slave to. The
Speaker 1: best films, you know, are the ones that aren't like
Speaker 1: tied to that slavishly. Some people who thought of themselves
Speaker 1: as having kind of distinctive tastes would still go to
Speaker 1: a Blockbuster on occasion, but would probably pride themselves on
Speaker 1: going to the cool store in town. And the cool
Speaker 1: stores definitely did all that they could to maintain that
Speaker 1: sense of loyalty, almost like a cult community, because yeah,
Speaker 1: if you don't have that, then you get out of business.
Speaker 1: And so there's no single way to characterize who cinophiles were.
Speaker 1: What is true is that the kind of art house
Speaker 1: video stores were in places either in big cities or
Speaker 1: in places with highly educated populations, so college towns. Those
Speaker 1: environments helped build and sustain video stores that had more
Speaker 1: kind of artistic leanings or eclectic tastes. Now we land
Speaker 1: in the nineties where things started to change the industry
Speaker 1: really hits a big excellent plateau from like ninety three
Speaker 1: through the late nineties, and there's ups and downs right
Speaker 1: and various changes, like increasingly Hollywood did actually priced tapes
Speaker 1: for a cell through audience rather than rental, pricing things
Speaker 1: at twenty bucks rather than eighty, and so people did
Speaker 1: buy tapes campveryone's just dying before Jason, and now his
Speaker 1: latest stab at Terror has been slashed to just Roddy
Speaker 1: the thirteenth, Art seventh. The new blood, especially kids movies,
Speaker 1: right like Disney creating those straight to video sequels to
Speaker 1: their cartoons. They're the baddest, the wildest about funny. His
Speaker 1: characters in the Pride right now that we all know
Speaker 1: each other sad bare back and give the Lion King
Speaker 1: too simplest Pride on video today. But DVD hits in
Speaker 1: this is d v D, and this is what happens
Speaker 1: what you watch d v D. And the studios all
Speaker 1: kind of knew that things were done, and so if
Speaker 1: you wanted to kind of be able to sell new
Speaker 1: hardware and re energize the whole home video business, it
Speaker 1: was going to take a different format. Warner Brothers worked
Speaker 1: with I think it was Tashiba On the DVD launches
Speaker 1: in and two thousand it becomes the fastest adopted consumer
Speaker 1: electronics in the history of the planet up till that time,
Speaker 1: which tells you, or tells me, that the appetite for
Speaker 1: home videos was never diminished, It only grew stronger. And
Speaker 1: so DVD tapped into an excitement for home video that
Speaker 1: was already there and just said now it's even better.
Speaker 1: So DVD and it doesn't totally wipe away VHS immediately,
Speaker 1: But you know, I think the last Hollywood tape released
Speaker 1: on VHS was either two thousand five or two thousand
Speaker 1: and six. One format displaces another in six years. I
Speaker 1: actually have had conversations with the guy at Warner Brothers
Speaker 1: who ran Warner Home Video at that time, and their
Speaker 1: whole plan was to create what he called it direct
Speaker 1: to consumer product. They just wanted more direct access to
Speaker 1: that revenue, and that meant selling rather than renting. The
Speaker 1: DVD was designed as a sell through product that it
Speaker 1: was cheaper to manufacture plastic discs than the magnetic tapes
Speaker 1: on plastic cases, and DVD was promoted as being better
Speaker 1: visuals and better sound, which is true. The picture he
Speaker 1: is twice as sharp as VHS. The sound is infinitely clearer.
Speaker 1: It looks and sounds like you're at the movies, but
Speaker 1: you can experience it at home. We today in can
Speaker 1: too easily say that Netflix streaming killed video stores. The
Speaker 1: first attack on video stores was the DVD because it
Speaker 1: really shifts the whole business model away from rental to
Speaker 1: direct sales, and that means people instead of going to
Speaker 1: Blockbuster are now going to Walmart and Target, and it
Speaker 1: displaces video stores significantly. Alongside the DVD came the Internet,
Speaker 1: the Net too long time users. Internet is a whole
Speaker 1: group of networks. The Net is made up of some
Speaker 1: twelve thousand individual computer networks. And with the Internet came
Speaker 1: a little website called Netflix. In today's busy world, going
Speaker 1: to the video store is a hassle. With Netflix, you'll
Speaker 1: just make a list of the movies you want to
Speaker 1: see and you'll get your first DVDs in about one
Speaker 1: business day. Founded in, Netflix marketed itself as the first
Speaker 1: online DVD rental store. The Netflix model, you would get
Speaker 1: on a computer and rent things by clicking them, and
Speaker 1: they would get mailed to you and you could have
Speaker 1: like three discs at a time. Or something like that.
Speaker 1: There's a lot happening with Netflix that's really innovative. One
Speaker 1: this idea of no late fees. You could keep the
Speaker 1: disc for as long as you wanted, You just couldn't
Speaker 1: get a new one until you mailed it back, keep
Speaker 1: them as long as you owned without late fees. Return
Speaker 1: one and this prepaid envelow and the automatically send you
Speaker 1: another movie from your list. To this kind of elimination
Speaker 1: of physical store as a shopping site. You didn't have
Speaker 1: to go anywhere to shop for movies anymore. Well, this
Speaker 1: is the last time I grant here. Hey, you're not
Speaker 1: allowed to rent already now. The other innovation is a
Speaker 1: subscription pricing model. It's comparable to HBO. People paid a
Speaker 1: monthly fee for cable and having Hbo h no, let
Speaker 1: Hbo be your kick it to of those stars. But
Speaker 1: the idea that you would have a monthly subscription fee
Speaker 1: for a movie rental store was kind of ludicrous. In
Speaker 1: one stroke, Netflix changes a lot of different things, and
Speaker 1: I think the thing that subscription models did is it
Speaker 1: removes the sense of value from the specific commodity, the
Speaker 1: individual tape or disk. Like at the video store, you
Speaker 1: would pay four bucks to rent a tape or three
Speaker 1: fifty to rent a disk. But subscriptions suddenly say you
Speaker 1: pay us fifteen bucks a month and it has nothing
Speaker 1: to do with how much you watch. The individual movie
Speaker 1: loses its kind of value, and instead what they're selling
Speaker 1: is that sense of possibility and options, which I still
Speaker 1: think is why people subscribe to Netflix. How many people
Speaker 1: subscribe to Netflix and only watch one thing in a month.
Speaker 1: But it's this idea that it's like, oh, but I've
Speaker 1: got that on tap. Anytime I want it, it's there,
Speaker 1: and so that's worth whatever the prices now their team
Speaker 1: bucks or whatever. Subscriptions really change the psychology of the
Speaker 1: whole endeavor. So what happens when we now have an
Speaker 1: abundance of films at our disposal and the act of
Speaker 1: physical browsing and choosing is removed from the equation In
Speaker 1: the old days of the video stores, you might have
Speaker 1: a relationship with the store. You might like some stores
Speaker 1: better than others because of the space, but in the
Speaker 1: end you also have like a relationship with whatever you
Speaker 1: rented from that store. Like if I rented some check
Speaker 1: new wave film, I'm gonna sit down and set aside
Speaker 1: time to watch that thing. Whereas with Netflix, it's hard
Speaker 1: to speak for everybody because there's hundreds of millions of
Speaker 1: Netflix users. But I do think that, like the relationship
Speaker 1: is really about having Netflix rather than having a movie.
Speaker 1: It's so easy to kind of disregard the importance of
Speaker 1: any individual movie on the platform because they all seem
Speaker 1: available eternally. Of course isn't true, but it's like, if
Speaker 1: I'm already gonna pay for this subscription service, I can
Speaker 1: fass forward through this or I can turn it off
Speaker 1: at any point. The relationship is less about with you
Speaker 1: in an intentional way with a particular movie, and it's
Speaker 1: more about your relationship with the possibilities. There as a
Speaker 1: somewhat final nail in the coffin, the introduction of streaming
Speaker 1: did away with the need for any physical media whatsoever.
Speaker 1: Netflix Streaming first appears in two thousand seven as a
Speaker 1: kind of special service to people who were already subscribers
Speaker 1: to the rent by mail thing, and then quickly within
Speaker 1: one two years after that, suddenly Netflix the streaming library
Speaker 1: opens up to people just for streaming, and you don't
Speaker 1: even have to be associated with the rent by mail
Speaker 1: system and the video library, although still pretty rotten. Ultimately
Speaker 1: it grows so that like suddenly there's five thousand move
Speaker 1: bes on Netflix rather than just whatever four hundred that
Speaker 1: they had had previously, And it just grows and grows
Speaker 1: and grows. And so this idea that like you had
Speaker 1: the convenience of shopping at home, consuming at home, and
Speaker 1: doing it immediately. At the time, there had been cable
Speaker 1: on demand. Prior to that, you could have bought a
Speaker 1: movie through your cable provider, but Netflix streaming provides that
Speaker 1: with the subscription based pricing, it's already quote unquote free.
Speaker 1: I'm already paying for this, so it's a great service.
Speaker 1: Other media companies noticed the success of Netflix and quickly
Speaker 1: followed suit. Hulu launched in two thousand eight with content
Speaker 1: that was mostly free to watch but was filled with advertisements,
Speaker 1: though Hulu did eventually launched its own subscription service. Next
Speaker 1: came Amazon Prime Video, which also launched in two thousand eight.
Speaker 1: Amazon Prime Video is a very different kind of model.
Speaker 1: It's really there as a kind of hook to get
Speaker 1: people attached to the shipping, the Amazon Prime fast shipping stuff.
Speaker 1: If you want to get your diapers in two days,
Speaker 1: you also get to watch look who's talking is Mikey,
Speaker 1: Who are you? I'm his father father? Are you the
Speaker 1: sperm donor? I mean sperm donor I'm the kid's father.
Speaker 1: Netflix streaming really takes off two thousand eight nine ten,
Speaker 1: Amazon Prime Video becomes available to people. That's really just
Speaker 1: sealing the deal on video stores that had already been
Speaker 1: hugely disrupted because of those earlier issues related to DVD.
Speaker 1: So how did video stores survive throughout the Netflix boom
Speaker 1: of the two thousand's Some are surviving because they're in
Speaker 1: smaller towns or rural areas that don't have quick mail
Speaker 1: or fast internet service or anything like that. You've got mail,
Speaker 1: but lots of stores try to come up with this
Speaker 1: idea of no late fees is a direct reaction to
Speaker 1: uh Netflix. Someday you'll remember where you were when you
Speaker 1: first heard that there are no more late fees at Blockbuster.
Speaker 1: If you need an extra day or two with your
Speaker 1: movies or games, you go right ahead. So it's like,
Speaker 1: we'll shoot if Netflix has no late piece, then suddenly
Speaker 1: we look like the bad guys. Not only is it
Speaker 1: inconvenient for people to come to our store now compared
Speaker 1: to the easy rental of Netflix, but now we look
Speaker 1: like villains because we charge people for not returning tapes
Speaker 1: on time, and Netflix gets rid of the very notion
Speaker 1: of something being on time or late. The real thing
Speaker 1: that they push in the two thousand's was this idea
Speaker 1: of new releases. Because Netflix, you still had to wait,
Speaker 1: You were still in a line with other consumers or
Speaker 1: other customers to get the latest thing. Whereas you know,
Speaker 1: video stores, especially by the two thousand's, new movie Wednesday,
Speaker 1: New movie Tuesday, right like, so there was like a
Speaker 1: release date, a street date for those tapes or those discs,
Speaker 1: and so even though the movie had been in theaters,
Speaker 1: if you wanted it faster than you could get it
Speaker 1: on Netflix, and faster than you could get it on cable,
Speaker 1: then the video stores were the place to get things
Speaker 1: faster than other places. Movies are two for just ninety
Speaker 1: nine cents every Tuesday, a participating video update stores including
Speaker 1: new releases. Yes too for just nine cents, including new releases,
Speaker 1: but otherwise, yeah, a lot of stories got a business.
Speaker 1: Blockbuster flounders, Hollywood video flounders. It wasn't even about streaming
Speaker 1: at that point. It was about the whole disruption of
Speaker 1: Walmart target selling movies and about Netflix, you know, changing
Speaker 1: the whole game, three hundreds of titles for the whole
Speaker 1: family from only six ninety nine at least, no a
Speaker 1: big a place for really loves and targets, epy DVD
Speaker 1: c how are excilent now? In the late two thousands
Speaker 1: and early Dan went on a pilgrimage, mostly for research
Speaker 1: for his book. He decided to drive to and visit
Speaker 1: as many American video stores as he could. I just
Speaker 1: talked to UM and Video in fruit Port, Michigan. He's
Speaker 1: owned the store for about twenty five years, and that
Speaker 1: in his estimation, according to his memory, h it's the
Speaker 1: oldest independently owned video store in Moskegon County. I mean
Speaker 1: that was like probably like some of the best times
Speaker 1: in my life go on road trips and rather than
Speaker 1: like looking at the Grand Canyon with your dad, you
Speaker 1: could do look at video stores in weird places. I'm
Speaker 1: in Knox, Pennsylvania, where there's market and video rental. I
Speaker 1: walked into the store and they did, in fact serve
Speaker 1: as a kind of small grocery store with packaged foods
Speaker 1: and a video store with a substantial number of VHS,
Speaker 1: tapes and DVDs. I went to like over twenty states,
Speaker 1: over two fifty stores. Looking at small town stores across
Speaker 1: the Midwest and the far West and the South, there
Speaker 1: were some stories that were just kind of totally depressing.
Speaker 1: I'm thinking of one in particular in Kansas, where I
Speaker 1: showed up and I was just like, oh man, oh man,
Speaker 1: this is so grim. I gotta get out of here.
Speaker 1: But other places were still operating at full steam. Even
Speaker 1: if the owner knew that that was not sustainable, he
Speaker 1: offered to sell me the store. Uh. Several times, they
Speaker 1: were still buying stock and putting new stuff on shelves
Speaker 1: every week. The weirder thing about a lot of the
Speaker 1: small town stories is that by that point a lot
Speaker 1: of them were not only video stores. They engaged in
Speaker 1: a number of other businesses because the video rental was
Speaker 1: diminishing and so they had to do something else. I
Speaker 1: saw places that sold, you know, second hand kids clothes.
Speaker 1: I saw places that sold porcelain figurines. There was a
Speaker 1: place in Idaho that was half laundromat half video store.
Speaker 1: That was pretty cool. There was one place in Wyoming
Speaker 1: that you could rent movies, you could get whitewater rafting tours,
Speaker 1: and you could buy a gun I love the idea
Speaker 1: that you could like rent Rambo and buy a gun
Speaker 1: under the same roof. Could I could kill you here?
Speaker 1: It's me, don't push it. The small town stores were
Speaker 1: really quirky, not in a kind of artsy FARTZI way,
Speaker 1: but rather in a kind of the vagaries of capitalism
Speaker 1: kind of way. It's like anything to make a buck,
Speaker 1: and the stores would reflect the kind of scrappiness of
Speaker 1: the owner of like trysts trying to do anything like
Speaker 1: selling lotto tickets. The number of stores that had tanning
Speaker 1: salons or tanning beds attached to them or in a
Speaker 1: back room that was a huge thing. Oh so when
Speaker 1: the summer comes, a lot of people can because they
Speaker 1: don't have time. You get the sun, but they'll come
Speaker 1: in a tan Okay. At what point does the rental
Speaker 1: slow down till April? People? Okay? And was the tanning
Speaker 1: been here as long as the stories? Okay? When did
Speaker 1: he start that? Probably a year ago? Year ago? What
Speaker 1: made him things to do that? Just looking for something
Speaker 1: else to offset the video? You probably remember hearing Dan
Speaker 1: mentioned a few bigger nationally known indie stores video It's
Speaker 1: in l A or Scarecrow in Seattle, for example, for
Speaker 1: a variety of reasons. Most of these types of stores
Speaker 1: are still going strong today. And the book I kind
Speaker 1: of refer to these places as video capitals, just meaning
Speaker 1: it's to kind of centralization under the video store roof
Speaker 1: of like movie culture, right, it's kind of that's condensed
Speaker 1: site for movies and knowledge about movies. And the owners
Speaker 1: were generally kind of cinephiles and believed in providing a
Speaker 1: wider range of movie options, almost like a public service.
Speaker 1: I mean a lot of them talked in this kind
Speaker 1: of almost like they were on a mission kind of way.
Speaker 1: And the clerks were always cinephiles and film nerds who
Speaker 1: would largely talk, you know, film trivia all day. What
Speaker 1: are you doing this? Since stopped making picks, how am
Speaker 1: I going to know what movies to see? We have
Speaker 1: a wide variety of Gene picks Jane's trash, I'm gene.
Speaker 1: A number of them endured and still kind of endure
Speaker 1: even after the mainstream video business was falling apart, because
Speaker 1: even in the face of Netflix, even in the face
Speaker 1: of streaming, even in the face of DVD sell through.
Speaker 1: You know, a place like Scarecrow, they offer things that
Speaker 1: aren't easily available on streaming Netflix or aren't available for
Speaker 1: sale at Walmart, etcetera. What do you think would be
Speaker 1: the next obstacle there? If people will put in our way, well,
Speaker 1: as long as they can, think, we'll have our problems. Still,
Speaker 1: the problem is once the whole kind of ecosystem of
Speaker 1: video rental disappears and people in general lose going to
Speaker 1: the video store as a habit or as a practice,
Speaker 1: then it's really hard to even maintain that kind of
Speaker 1: core consumer group that even goes to the specialty store. Still,
Speaker 1: those stores are cultural staples in their respective cities. Video
Speaker 1: Drum in Atlanta where I live is a bustling hub
Speaker 1: for film people to congregate and share film knowledge. That
Speaker 1: holds true for many of the video capitals dan is
Speaker 1: talking about. They were community hubs for cinophiles. The stores
Speaker 1: like Scarecrow and Videots did a good job of cultivating
Speaker 1: that cinephile culture in that area centered around the store.
Speaker 1: And so one of the things that they've done is
Speaker 1: sell the very idea of community that in the face
Speaker 1: of a communitylessness of Netflix viewers, where we're all detached
Speaker 1: from each other, we don't even shop next to one another,
Speaker 1: shoulders shoulder. Then the stores like Videots and and Scarecrow
Speaker 1: can say, not only do we have a Felini film
Speaker 1: that Netflix never will, but we can provide you, as
Speaker 1: a consumer, the sense of belonging that Netflix never will,
Speaker 1: a sense of shared affinity for eclectic taste in movies.
Speaker 1: And so they're not just selling rentals, they're selling the
Speaker 1: very idea of a cinephile community. But to stay alive,
Speaker 1: many of these beloved community stores have had to adopt
Speaker 1: a business model that may not be sustainable. Those stores,
Speaker 1: a number of them, have become nonprofit institutions. Now Scarecrows
Speaker 1: Nonprofit Videos has become a nonprofit. The nonprofit business model
Speaker 1: that Videots and Scarecrow and others are relying on relies
Speaker 1: on the idea that you can get people to donate
Speaker 1: money to a retail operation because you've convinced them that
Speaker 1: the retail operation is a cultural resource worth preserving. I
Speaker 1: do think it's just a really hard thing because even
Speaker 1: with all the nostalgia and all the kind of felt love,
Speaker 1: it doesn't mean that suddenly a new video store can
Speaker 1: crop up in ann Arbor because people are like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I love video stores, but I'm still not going to one.
Speaker 1: How do you turn that kind of nostalgia or love
Speaker 1: for an institution into a business model. I do not know.
Speaker 1: The idiots in l A closed temporarily with the goal
Speaker 1: of reopening a new location serving not just as a
Speaker 1: video store but also in art theater and film archive.
Speaker 1: Here's Videots executive director Maggie McKay speaking with Casey R. W.
Speaker 1: Last year. I do think people really need to sit
Speaker 1: in the dark with their friends and strangers and watch
Speaker 1: a flickering screen, and they need the human interaction that
Speaker 1: comes with a video store. And I think more than ever,
Speaker 1: we're going to crave that. I think Videos has been
Speaker 1: very clever broadening it and saying when we say we're
Speaker 1: a cultural resource, we mean that because we're not just
Speaker 1: a video store. We're a center for movie culture in
Speaker 1: Los Angeles, beyond the transactional things that happened when you
Speaker 1: rent a movie from us, and I think Scarecrow, you know,
Speaker 1: has imagined ways of doing that as well. I mean
Speaker 1: Scarecrow's big claim too, is that they're the largest single
Speaker 1: collection of movies under one roof, you know, in North America,
Speaker 1: which is important, but it's not like it's like a
Speaker 1: film archive. Either it's like it's a video store. With
Speaker 1: the closure of so many video stores, there's also one
Speaker 1: big unintended consequence, what happens to all of those tapes
Speaker 1: and disks They try to do these sell offs of
Speaker 1: their stock, whether it's tapes in the old days or
Speaker 1: DVDs later, anything that's not being sold is landfill. For
Speaker 1: those of us who have viewed film as an art,
Speaker 1: as a kind of higher level experience that one can
Speaker 1: have on this planet, it is disheartening to realize that
Speaker 1: in the end, they are material commodities that when they
Speaker 1: lose their value, turn into lumps of garbage. Not that
Speaker 1: you know, streaming television's any less poisonous. When I was
Speaker 1: wrapping up Video Land, this was two thousand fourteen, so
Speaker 1: this was when like lots of stories were going out
Speaker 1: of business and just the stores were unrented and the
Speaker 1: tapes were going into garbage bins. That was a real
Speaker 1: lightbulb moment for me in general, about how the life
Speaker 1: cycle of commerce creates material that has value for a time,
Speaker 1: and then when that value is gone, it is still
Speaker 1: on the planet. We're stuck with it. There's yet another
Speaker 1: tragic truth when it comes to the downfall of video stores.
Speaker 1: In some ways, they created the conditions for their own demise,
Speaker 1: meaning that they created a sense that consumers could and
Speaker 1: should have control over their entertainment. In this sense of
Speaker 1: possibility and options and convenience that they accelerated and activated,
Speaker 1: and all of those things are exactly why we subscribe
Speaker 1: to Netflix and Disney Plus. Oh miss Simpson here prode
Speaker 1: addition to the Disney family and soon appearing a Disney
Speaker 1: Plus I for one salute or new corporate overlord. It's like, oh,
Speaker 1: Disney Plus has these options, and it's super easy and convenient,
Speaker 1: and I can watch these things whenever I want. All
Speaker 1: those kind of expectations of what a streaming platform should
Speaker 1: provide or does provide, those expectations were initially set up
Speaker 1: by the video store. That's their bigger legacy is kind
Speaker 1: of creating a sense of personalization, convenience, and control. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: they were outpaced by other devices and platforms. As I
Speaker 1: mentioned at the beginning of the episode, I got a
Speaker 1: ton of value out of my local video store growing up.
Speaker 1: I Love video in Austin has since closed down, and
Speaker 1: it strikes me as though I've lost a part of myself.
Speaker 1: I asked Dan what he misses most about video stores
Speaker 1: as a customer. I really do miss browsing physically. I
Speaker 1: have a hard time describing why it's so important or
Speaker 1: was so important to me as an individual. But I
Speaker 1: loved walking through the store. When I was in grad
Speaker 1: school at in l A, there was a store around
Speaker 1: the corner called Video Journeys. It's a pretty good store.
Speaker 1: I would spend an hour browsing that store and I
Speaker 1: would walk out with nothing, and I was not unhappy
Speaker 1: about that. It was just a kind of like, oh,
Speaker 1: I'll go down to the store. I got to buy
Speaker 1: some groceries, and then I'll walk next to Video Journeys
Speaker 1: and just look around. Who would in their right mind say,
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna look around at Netflix. Of course, there's
Speaker 1: tons of times that we do look around at Netflix
Speaker 1: and never watch a thing, but nobody sits down just
Speaker 1: to browse Netflix. Ever, those of us who had favorite
Speaker 1: video stores, I would put money on the fact that
Speaker 1: there was our favorite, in part because of the people
Speaker 1: who worked there. It was like, I get to see
Speaker 1: this one guy who's always got the right joke to crack,
Speaker 1: and he recommends horrible movies. But I love to argue
Speaker 1: with him. So much of what I am saying really
Speaker 1: comes down to missing the people and the spaces in
Speaker 1: which one could shop for movies. And by that, by shopping,
Speaker 1: what I mean is contemplate a future of watching it
Speaker 1: and having a good time. There is a loss in
Speaker 1: the loss of the physical space and the social interactions
Speaker 1: that those spaces generated. And it's hard to put into
Speaker 1: words because it's visceral and it's embodied, and it's in
Speaker 1: your heart, and it's your mind, and it's in your
Speaker 1: hopes for entertainment and and enjoyment. I say, there's no
Speaker 1: reason we need to lose those experiences. I urge you
Speaker 1: to frequent your local video store and keep that community alive.
Speaker 1: Maybe ask the store clerk about Eraserhead and see what happens.
Speaker 1: I'd like to rent breakfast statification. This is our someone
Speaker 1: has it out? Oh no, I've I've been the four
Speaker 1: other places. You're the only ones that have had it. Well.
Speaker 1: I can put her on reserve for you if you'd like.
Speaker 1: Maybe we could call them and ask them to return.
Speaker 1: Dan Herbert is the author of Video Land Movie Culture
Speaker 1: at the American Video Store. This episode of A Feller
Speaker 1: was written and assembled by Trevor Young and produced with
Speaker 1: Max and Alex Williams. Music this episode from the artist
Speaker 1: Mon Plaisier. Learn more at Loyalty Freak music dot com.
Speaker 1: Next episode, we'll take a trip to our local video store,
Speaker 1: Video Drum in Atlanta to talk to the owners, clerks,
Speaker 1: and customers, and we'll have a roundtable discussion with iHeart
Speaker 1: Podcast hosts Lauren Vogelbond and Annie Reese on their best
Speaker 1: video store memories. Let us know where you rent videos, past,
Speaker 1: present and future Ahem dot show. For more podcasts from
Speaker 1: my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio at Apple
Speaker 1: podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.