WEBVTT - Video Stores I 0:00:02.759 --> 0:00:07.440 Ephemeral is production of my Heart three D audio for 0:00:07.560 --> 0:00:13.480 full exposure. Listen with that phones. If you were wind 0:00:13.480 --> 0:00:17.400 to the nineteen eighties and nineties, video stores were everywhere. 0:00:18.040 --> 0:00:21.400 They came in different shapes and sizes, states of cleanliness, 0:00:21.520 --> 0:00:24.640 and levels of cool. But they had one thing in common, 0:00:25.320 --> 0:00:30.200 racks and racks of videotapes. But now, with thousands of 0:00:30.240 --> 0:00:32.600 titles available to stream at the click of a button, 0:00:33.120 --> 0:00:36.199 what does a physical store they have to offer? A 0:00:36.280 --> 0:00:41.960 shopping destination, a bit of nostalgia, just a memory Today. 0:00:42.440 --> 0:00:47.680 Ephemeral producer Trevor Young traces the rise, fall, and potential 0:00:47.760 --> 0:00:54.480 future of the video store. When I was about eight 0:00:54.560 --> 0:00:57.080 or nine, my mom started taking me to a local 0:00:57.160 --> 0:01:00.960 video store in Austin, Texas called I Love Video. Up 0:01:01.000 --> 0:01:03.920 to that point, my idea of cinema was Star Wars, 0:01:04.080 --> 0:01:08.319 The Phantom Menace. I've been wondering, what are mini chlorines? 0:01:10.200 --> 0:01:13.480 The Iglorians are a microscopic life form that resides with 0:01:13.560 --> 0:01:19.600 an old living sounds. I don't understand, but I love video. 0:01:20.000 --> 0:01:23.480 I was exposed to a vast library of old timey classics. 0:01:23.800 --> 0:01:28.280 But what about us? We'll always had Paris horror flicks, 0:01:31.800 --> 0:01:36.360 ethereal dramas. Mr Malcolm, I think I can explain, Yeah, explain. 0:01:36.600 --> 0:01:39.960 We operate a little business here that simulates for our 0:01:40.040 --> 0:01:44.560 clientele the experience of being you actually and all sorts 0:01:44.560 --> 0:01:47.000 of movies, so that by the time I was in 0:01:47.080 --> 0:01:49.800 high school, I had developed a deep love for cinema. 0:01:50.520 --> 0:01:53.120 I always credit I Love Video for that. The place 0:01:53.240 --> 0:01:56.240 meant a lot to me, and without a doubt, I'm 0:01:56.240 --> 0:02:03.000 not alone in my experience. It's hard to overstate the 0:02:03.080 --> 0:02:06.360 importance of the space of the video store. Whether it 0:02:06.400 --> 0:02:10.239 was a shabby place, or whether it was a glitzy blockbuster, 0:02:10.919 --> 0:02:13.840 or whether it was a kind of quirky, artsy, fartzy 0:02:14.040 --> 0:02:18.120 place with memorabilia or whatever. The space of the store 0:02:18.320 --> 0:02:22.200 is hugely important because it's a social space and a 0:02:22.240 --> 0:02:27.480 physical space, creating this new sense of a physical relationship 0:02:27.840 --> 0:02:32.760 of shopping with movies. My name's Daniel Herbert, and I'm 0:02:32.800 --> 0:02:36.400 an associate professor at the Universe of Michigan in the 0:02:36.440 --> 0:02:39.480 Department of Film, Television and Media, and i am the 0:02:39.480 --> 0:02:43.880 author of Video Land, Movie Culture at the American Video Store. 0:02:45.280 --> 0:02:48.280 Dan's book, Video Land taps into something many of us 0:02:48.360 --> 0:02:51.320 have likely felt at some point that going into a 0:02:51.440 --> 0:02:56.919 video store is unlike any other movie going experience. At 0:02:56.960 --> 0:02:59.480 the movie theater. You would go and you know, you 0:02:59.560 --> 0:03:01.320 might shot up to the extent that you pick one 0:03:01.360 --> 0:03:03.160 of the four films that are playing in the theater, 0:03:03.200 --> 0:03:04.400 but then you buy a ticket and you sit down 0:03:04.400 --> 0:03:08.040 and you kind of have this consumption experience, whereas you 0:03:08.080 --> 0:03:10.400 don't watch a movie at the store. The store is 0:03:10.440 --> 0:03:15.079 all about shopping and contemplation and interacting with the physical 0:03:15.080 --> 0:03:18.120 objects of the shelves and the tapes, interacting with the 0:03:18.120 --> 0:03:22.000 physical bodies of the other shoppers and the clerks, and 0:03:22.320 --> 0:03:26.440 interacting socially with whoever you're there with, your family, your date, 0:03:27.120 --> 0:03:31.160 other shoppers seeing what they're watching. In terms of transforming 0:03:31.440 --> 0:03:36.800 movie culture, it made movies shoppable. Come to the warehouse, 0:03:37.680 --> 0:03:39.600 movies you want what do you want them? With? The 0:03:39.680 --> 0:03:45.480 warehouse movie Rebel Garotte. The retailing of movies creates a 0:03:45.560 --> 0:03:50.240 public forum for that kind of evaluation of movie taste, 0:03:50.880 --> 0:03:54.200 and sometimes that's announced right when you're talking. So much 0:03:54.200 --> 0:03:56.280 of that was also invisible that you'd like walk and 0:03:56.320 --> 0:03:58.280 you look at a tape and you say that's not 0:03:58.360 --> 0:04:02.560 for me, And that's like this momentary, ephemeral interaction with 0:04:02.680 --> 0:04:07.400 an object in a store like me. Dan also has 0:04:07.440 --> 0:04:11.120 fond memories of his childhood video stores, even if some 0:04:11.160 --> 0:04:14.720 of them were a little readier than others. I grew 0:04:14.800 --> 0:04:17.000 up in a small kind of working class town on 0:04:17.040 --> 0:04:19.880 the south side of Detroit, and we got a video 0:04:19.920 --> 0:04:23.520 store there actually quite early, like eight three, eight four, 0:04:25.320 --> 0:04:28.760 and this was a classic junkie mom and pop shop 0:04:29.240 --> 0:04:32.960 and a totally beat up strip mall. That particular place 0:04:33.560 --> 0:04:37.040 had carpet on the walls and it was just gross, 0:04:37.680 --> 0:04:40.920 and the shelves were like, you know, handcrafted wood with 0:04:41.200 --> 0:04:43.960 stapled carpet on him. And I remember like it was 0:04:44.160 --> 0:04:46.599 totally fascinating and amazing to go in there and to 0:04:46.640 --> 0:04:49.599 see all the boxes, especially because in those days horror 0:04:49.680 --> 0:04:52.360 films were big, cheap action films were big, and those 0:04:52.400 --> 0:04:56.640 things had crazy lurid covers. The following movie is rated. 0:04:56.800 --> 0:04:59.680 Are so just to being a kid with very protective 0:04:59.680 --> 0:05:03.479 parents seeing like slasher movie covers and like action movie covers, 0:05:03.480 --> 0:05:06.520 I was like, this is a world of amazement my family, 0:05:06.600 --> 0:05:10.560 Like every other family, movie rental just became habit. Every weekend, 0:05:11.000 --> 0:05:13.760 two or three movies, if not on week days. I'm 0:05:13.839 --> 0:05:16.440 gen X and I grew up in a suburb without 0:05:16.480 --> 0:05:18.920 an art house theater. So like my introduction to like 0:05:19.040 --> 0:05:24.400 quality cinema, specialty cinema, indie stuff, foreign films, like my 0:05:24.560 --> 0:05:28.400 kind of cinephilia was fed by videotape rather than by 0:05:28.440 --> 0:05:32.080 an art house theater. When I saw things like eraser Head, 0:05:35.360 --> 0:05:39.479 Oh you are ship? Or drug store cowboy guys got 0:05:39.560 --> 0:05:43.120 new blues? Well, no, you know how odd it is 0:05:43.160 --> 0:05:46.600 to get blues these days, David, how about some morphine? 0:05:46.640 --> 0:05:49.520 I got some good old morphine, and I first saw 0:05:49.560 --> 0:05:52.599 the glimmer that film could be more than just Arnold Schwarzenegger. 0:05:53.160 --> 0:05:59.400 All right, everyone, You know that's set a trajectory for 0:05:59.480 --> 0:06:01.800 my whole life, making me think, like eventually that I 0:06:01.800 --> 0:06:05.400 could study films as a kind of serious thing. You'll 0:06:05.440 --> 0:06:08.320 hear Dan mentioned David Lynch's a racer Head a few 0:06:08.360 --> 0:06:11.400 times throughout this episode, and there's a reason for that. 0:06:12.240 --> 0:06:15.200 A racer Head demonstrates one way in which home video 0:06:15.320 --> 0:06:18.440 was so valuable to film culture. I mean, it's a 0:06:18.560 --> 0:06:22.200 super weird movie, like even by weird movie standards. I 0:06:22.240 --> 0:06:25.919 had an operation on my arm here. Doctors said I 0:06:26.000 --> 0:06:28.680 wouldn't be able to use it. What the hell do they? Know, 0:06:28.880 --> 0:06:31.640 I said, And I rubbed it for a half hour 0:06:31.839 --> 0:06:35.839 every day, and pretty soon I had my arm back again. 0:06:36.520 --> 0:06:39.480 But I also think the history of that film in 0:06:39.600 --> 0:06:43.239 terms of its being so exclusive, right, like it played 0:06:43.279 --> 0:06:46.520 in midnight screenings in l A and New York, and 0:06:46.560 --> 0:06:49.640 then you know, it's this kind of underground thing, like 0:06:49.720 --> 0:06:51.360 how do you get access to it if you're not 0:06:51.440 --> 0:06:54.240 in a big city, if you don't have like a 0:06:54.279 --> 0:06:58.279 midnight movie screening, And with home video you could see 0:06:58.279 --> 0:07:03.280 a racer head if you lived in suburban Detroit. There's 0:07:03.360 --> 0:07:07.200 lots of cases to from the eighties, even where you 0:07:07.320 --> 0:07:11.400 have things that were failures in theaters, but home video 0:07:11.440 --> 0:07:16.320 provided this lifespan. Officer k D six Stash three dot seven. 0:07:16.880 --> 0:07:23.080 Let's begin, ready, we sell your base and blood and 0:07:23.080 --> 0:07:26.320 black nothingness began to spin like we would not have 0:07:26.440 --> 0:07:31.400 Blade Runner if it weren't for home video, because Blade 0:07:31.480 --> 0:07:35.920 Runner did not do well in theaters, but home video 0:07:36.520 --> 0:07:40.040 kept it alive. We create a cushion pillow for their 0:07:40.120 --> 0:07:45.240 emotions and consequently we can control them them memories. You're 0:07:45.280 --> 0:07:48.240 talking about memories, and then then you have a director's cut, 0:07:48.320 --> 0:07:50.200 so there'd be a new home video release and so 0:07:50.400 --> 0:07:54.000 you have a film that was absolutely a failure in theaters, 0:07:54.000 --> 0:07:58.400 but whose legacy has been enormous, and that's entirely because 0:07:58.440 --> 0:08:01.520 of home video and the way home video can increase 0:08:01.600 --> 0:08:05.800 reputations even for films that did badly in theaters. But 0:08:05.880 --> 0:08:09.000 nowadays you can probably find a racer Head and Blade 0:08:09.040 --> 0:08:12.880 Runner on some online streaming service. It's likely a surprise 0:08:12.920 --> 0:08:15.440 to no one. The video stores have been closing down 0:08:15.520 --> 0:08:19.640 left and right for over a decade. According to USA Today, 0:08:19.680 --> 0:08:23.080 between two thousand seven and two thousand seventeen, the number 0:08:23.080 --> 0:08:27.600 of US video stores dropped eight from over fifteen thousand 0:08:27.640 --> 0:08:31.040 to just two thousand. Dan saw this coming a while 0:08:31.080 --> 0:08:36.160 back and knew that someone had to document this. Two nine, 0:08:36.760 --> 0:08:42.080 it was clear that the industry was changing dramatically. Netflix 0:08:42.120 --> 0:08:45.600 had just begun streaming in two thousand eight. One book 0:08:45.640 --> 0:08:48.680 came out, a very good book by Joshua Greenberg called 0:08:48.760 --> 0:08:53.480 from Databacks to Blockbuster. But I knew that, like, I 0:08:53.520 --> 0:08:55.400 could do a very different kind of book, and I 0:08:55.440 --> 0:08:57.760 wanted to do a very different kind of book. So 0:08:57.840 --> 0:09:00.400 I don't know that I knew immediately that I was 0:09:00.480 --> 0:09:03.640 kind of documenting something that was on its way out. 0:09:04.160 --> 0:09:06.400 But I had the sense that it was like timely, 0:09:07.200 --> 0:09:10.400 and so then by like two thousand ten or eleven, 0:09:10.400 --> 0:09:12.160 when I really did know that this was going to 0:09:12.240 --> 0:09:15.160 be a book. By that point, you know, Hollywood Video 0:09:15.600 --> 0:09:17.719 Movie Gallery went on a business, and so I did 0:09:17.920 --> 0:09:21.400 know that in fact, what I was doing was documentary, 0:09:21.440 --> 0:09:25.240 something that was still vibrant but certainly didn't have a 0:09:25.280 --> 0:09:28.840 lot of life left. So there was an urgency to 0:09:28.920 --> 0:09:31.959 the research. Urgent because it was clear that like everything 0:09:32.040 --> 0:09:34.839 was changing very dramatically, and people were adopting streaming more 0:09:34.840 --> 0:09:40.160 and more, and video stores were just disappearing. Dan's research 0:09:40.240 --> 0:09:42.960 went all the way back to the beginning of home video. 0:09:43.760 --> 0:09:46.760 It all started with one of the first home video formats, 0:09:47.240 --> 0:09:50.680 Beta Max, which came around in the mid seventies. But 0:09:50.800 --> 0:09:56.640 home video at that point was something very different. In 0:09:56.640 --> 0:09:58.840 those early days of Beta Max and then a couple 0:09:58.880 --> 0:10:02.400 of years later with vh Yes, those things were marketed 0:10:03.080 --> 0:10:07.800 and conceived of as being for television, for recording television 0:10:07.800 --> 0:10:11.680 programs and playing them at your own convenience. People could 0:10:11.679 --> 0:10:14.000 watch soap operas in the evening rather than during the day, 0:10:14.120 --> 0:10:16.360 or one could watch Magnum p I, you know, on 0:10:16.400 --> 0:10:19.280 a Saturday morning rather than on Thursday night and you 0:10:19.280 --> 0:10:27.240 can fast forward to the commercials, which, of course is 0:10:27.280 --> 0:10:29.720 one of the reasons why Hollywood was so upset by it, 0:10:29.720 --> 0:10:34.760 because it disturbed a business model. The manufacturers didn't necessarily 0:10:34.800 --> 0:10:40.520 think of these things initially as vehicles for delivering prerecorded 0:10:40.559 --> 0:10:45.120 movie content, but quickly entrepreneurs in the United States thought 0:10:45.120 --> 0:10:50.080 of that. One of those entrepreneurs was Andre Blair. Blay 0:10:50.160 --> 0:10:53.120 is often credited as the father of home video, and 0:10:53.160 --> 0:10:55.760 as it turns out, Blay lived and worked in a 0:10:55.800 --> 0:10:59.839 place not far from Dan Incidentally, very strange that I 0:11:00.080 --> 0:11:02.319 up in the same town that Andre Blais was operating. 0:11:02.720 --> 0:11:05.480 Actually here in southeast Michigan, in a town called Farmington, 0:11:05.559 --> 0:11:08.040 where I lived. He had already been in the business 0:11:08.040 --> 0:11:11.360 of kind of magnetic tape like duplication for like the 0:11:11.400 --> 0:11:15.040 auto industry, doing like educational videos and things like that. Now, 0:11:15.160 --> 0:11:18.199 let's see what would happen when driving under the influence 0:11:18.200 --> 0:11:23.199 of alcohol. Let's imagine you're driving and haven't taken alcohol. 0:11:23.880 --> 0:11:27.360 Watch out for that deliverymand Your rapid perception of the 0:11:27.400 --> 0:11:30.800 situation and quick break reaction prevented what could have been 0:11:30.840 --> 0:11:34.720 a fatal accident. Part of his insight was that he 0:11:34.760 --> 0:11:37.080 was already in the business of selling prerecorded content to 0:11:37.120 --> 0:11:40.600 a certain market, but that prerecorded content was not Hollywood movies, 0:11:40.640 --> 0:11:46.880 and the market was not general consumers. In seventy so, 0:11:46.960 --> 0:11:50.079 the same year that the VHS format hits North America, 0:11:50.520 --> 0:11:53.840 he approached all the Hollywood studios saying, I'd like to 0:11:53.920 --> 0:11:57.640 put your movies on tape and sell them to individuals, 0:11:57.920 --> 0:12:01.240 like private consumers. The only studio that I heard from 0:12:01.320 --> 0:12:04.880 was twenty century Fox. We had a nice conversation then 0:12:05.400 --> 0:12:08.080 he hadn't been a list of a hundred motivase and 0:12:08.160 --> 0:12:11.200 said that we've cleared the home video rights to these. 0:12:11.559 --> 0:12:15.240 I made them. We had fifty titles, and we released 0:12:15.240 --> 0:12:18.480 all fifty titles at once. He paid like hundreds of 0:12:18.480 --> 0:12:21.240 thousands of dollars for the right to put a bunch 0:12:21.280 --> 0:12:26.679 of old Fox movies on tape, and he tried to 0:12:26.880 --> 0:12:29.240 mandate that people could not rent them because he really 0:12:29.240 --> 0:12:31.400 wanted to kind of keep control of the sale and 0:12:31.440 --> 0:12:33.000 make it a a kind of a direct sale thing. And 0:12:33.040 --> 0:12:36.120 these things were like eight hundred bucks. But still people 0:12:36.200 --> 0:12:40.400 kind of defied him, and video stores immediately appeared in 0:12:40.720 --> 0:12:43.560 southern California and New York City and in southeast Michigan, 0:12:43.640 --> 0:12:46.840 there was a place called Thomas Video, and they remember 0:12:47.040 --> 0:12:51.840 driving across town and getting tapes directly from Blade. It's 0:12:51.920 --> 0:12:54.160 fun to think about what the first video store was. 0:12:54.920 --> 0:12:58.720 Different people claim that, but they all pop up very quickly, 0:12:59.000 --> 0:13:01.880 one after the other instead seven, and then that sets 0:13:01.920 --> 0:13:05.160 the whole thing in motion. So it was certainly an 0:13:05.160 --> 0:13:08.080 exciting thing, and people were opening video stories left and right. 0:13:08.600 --> 0:13:13.000 But the industry really exploded in a D three after 0:13:13.120 --> 0:13:16.200 the VCR prices they dropped from like seven dollars to 0:13:16.320 --> 0:13:18.280 three dollars, which, of course in a D three was 0:13:18.280 --> 0:13:21.960 still very expensive, but affordable to a middle class, working 0:13:21.960 --> 0:13:26.199 class family. While video stores were starting to spring up, 0:13:26.640 --> 0:13:29.560 there was still debate about which video format to use. 0:13:30.400 --> 0:13:33.360 Most of us think VHS when we think about video tapes, 0:13:33.960 --> 0:13:37.000 but in those early days of home video, Beta max 0:13:37.160 --> 0:13:41.679 was still dominant, if only for a short period. Beta 0:13:42.040 --> 0:13:45.720 tapes were smaller than vhs, and the first Beta tapes 0:13:46.160 --> 0:13:49.120 were only an hour long, kind of conceived of to 0:13:49.280 --> 0:13:53.640 again record television programs, but they put movies on them 0:13:53.640 --> 0:13:55.920 and you would rent and it would come with two 0:13:56.000 --> 0:13:59.600 Beta tapes. VCRs were these top loading things. The thing 0:13:59.600 --> 0:14:02.480 would like lift up in this clunk and then you 0:14:02.520 --> 0:14:04.480 put it in and then it's like sync down into 0:14:04.480 --> 0:14:06.199 the machine and it was like, you know, almost like 0:14:06.200 --> 0:14:09.319 a real to real playing inside there, spinning the dials 0:14:09.360 --> 0:14:13.840 inside the tape. The format war between VHS and Beta 0:14:13.920 --> 0:14:15.480 was real. And so you go into a video store 0:14:15.480 --> 0:14:20.600 in those days and they might have a thousand videos total. 0:14:21.240 --> 0:14:25.040 Four hundred would be BEATA and six VHS. It was 0:14:25.080 --> 0:14:28.400 a real kind of debate for store owners and for renters, 0:14:28.400 --> 0:14:31.600 and certainly for people who were dropping hundreds of dollars 0:14:31.640 --> 0:14:34.200 on the machines trying to guess, like what format is 0:14:34.240 --> 0:14:37.640 the right format. Thanks to Sony's revolutionary Beta Max deck, 0:14:37.680 --> 0:14:39.960 which hooks up to any TV set, now you can 0:14:39.960 --> 0:14:43.320 automatically videotape your favorite show even when you're not home, 0:14:43.440 --> 0:14:46.280 and watch it any time you would. Good morning, gentlemen, 0:14:46.840 --> 0:14:50.280 I'm going home to watch the Light show. Beta Max 0:14:50.560 --> 0:14:54.680 was a higher fidelity visually and sonically right, so the 0:14:54.800 --> 0:14:58.200 picture quality was slightly better than VHS and the and 0:14:58.280 --> 0:15:00.200 the sound quality was better, and that was part of 0:15:00.200 --> 0:15:03.720 their claim to fame. But eventually VHS just kind of 0:15:03.800 --> 0:15:06.640 took over, and then the network effect kicks in and 0:15:07.200 --> 0:15:10.960 more stores have more VHS tapes than data VHS, the 0:15:11.000 --> 0:15:14.960 four hour system from Panasonic and other leading companies. If 0:15:14.960 --> 0:15:16.920 you're a consumer, you're thinking, well, I'm not going to 0:15:16.960 --> 0:15:19.720 buy a beta tape because I only have these options 0:15:19.760 --> 0:15:23.480 as opposed to VHS, which has these options. The video 0:15:23.520 --> 0:15:27.080 store market took off fast. According to the Associated Press, 0:15:29.120 --> 0:15:32.440 there were over fifteen thousand video stores in the US alone. 0:15:33.520 --> 0:15:36.920 Home video the VCR and having a movie on tape 0:15:37.280 --> 0:15:42.040 transforms the movie viewing experience in incredible ways. One it 0:15:42.120 --> 0:15:44.400 puts it in the home. Of course, people have been 0:15:44.440 --> 0:15:48.240 accustomed to watching movies at home on television, but movies 0:15:48.240 --> 0:15:51.920 didn't appear when you wanted them necessarily, and so home 0:15:52.000 --> 0:15:56.480 video exploded. The idea that consumers had this kind of 0:15:56.680 --> 0:16:01.080 amazing control over what they watched, when they watched, and 0:16:01.120 --> 0:16:04.000 the convenience of watching it at home in the video 0:16:04.080 --> 0:16:09.360 store plays into that because with the rental model, these 0:16:09.400 --> 0:16:14.160 were kind of temporary transactions but offering tons of choices. 0:16:14.840 --> 0:16:17.320 If it had been a cell through model only, then 0:16:17.360 --> 0:16:19.920 people would have been like kind of stuck with whatever 0:16:20.240 --> 0:16:24.680 hundred tapes they bought. But with the rental stores, you know, 0:16:24.800 --> 0:16:28.200 even the worst video stores had five hundred titles or more. 0:16:29.040 --> 0:16:31.880 This week, the warehouse guarantees you can rent a Big Crocodile, 0:16:31.920 --> 0:16:34.520 Dundee Too, and Cocktail starring Tom Cruise. If we don't 0:16:34.560 --> 0:16:36.560 have a copy available, we'll give you a coupon for 0:16:36.640 --> 0:16:38.760 a free rental for one of these three hit movies. 0:16:39.640 --> 0:16:44.360 That sense of catering to individual tastes and desires that 0:16:44.480 --> 0:16:48.000 really comes about with home video and the video store 0:16:48.720 --> 0:16:54.880 being the literal market for taste. Consumers could get what 0:16:54.920 --> 0:16:58.440 they wanted, when they wanted, where they wanted. That was 0:16:58.480 --> 0:17:03.320 a transformation, I mean your transformation. Not only did video 0:17:03.360 --> 0:17:06.520 stores offer a new sort of convenience, they were also 0:17:06.640 --> 0:17:11.240 unique spaces in themselves. The early video stores, they were 0:17:11.320 --> 0:17:15.560 just reflections of the quirky personalities of the people who 0:17:15.560 --> 0:17:19.040 owned them. High Video Sam's got exciting news for you. 0:17:19.320 --> 0:17:21.600 You can now rent a video over night and high 0:17:21.600 --> 0:17:25.760 are these great movies from only nine cents Video Sam's 0:17:25.800 --> 0:17:30.320 libraries and convenient to you. They were just small, little 0:17:30.320 --> 0:17:34.200 retail shops, often rapidly put together by people who might 0:17:34.200 --> 0:17:37.720 not have had any previous experience in business. Now there 0:17:37.720 --> 0:17:40.359 were lots of things that tried to professionalize the business, 0:17:40.359 --> 0:17:42.880 and like there's a whole industry around people who made 0:17:42.880 --> 0:17:45.359 shelves for video stores and sold it to individuals, and 0:17:45.359 --> 0:17:48.880 there were people who you know, specialized in security systems 0:17:48.920 --> 0:17:51.600 for the doorway and things like that. The point is 0:17:51.600 --> 0:17:55.119 is that prior to Blockbuster, there was a huge range 0:17:55.240 --> 0:17:57.480 of what the stories would look like. Some were super clean, 0:17:58.040 --> 0:18:05.159 kind of corporate looking. Others were just totally funky and weird. 0:18:09.920 --> 0:18:14.320 You've come around ALREADYO per parad or neary you are, 0:18:14.800 --> 0:18:18.040 and so it really depended on the individual owner. You 0:18:18.119 --> 0:18:22.280 have those independently owned stories that really did try to 0:18:23.119 --> 0:18:28.880 foster eclecticism as its own special value. You know, those 0:18:29.000 --> 0:18:33.720 art house video stores would hold everything from ed Wood 0:18:35.119 --> 0:18:39.280 a fiend I am a soldier of our planet, I 0:18:40.640 --> 0:18:54.000 a fiend to Felini. It's about those stories that had 0:18:54.480 --> 0:18:59.080 huge selections, way beyond Blockbuster, and not just huge, but 0:18:59.359 --> 0:19:03.960 intention the outside of the mainstream alternative I guess. And 0:19:04.000 --> 0:19:07.720 that alternative might be highbrow, and that alternative might be 0:19:07.760 --> 0:19:11.040 super low brow. But it would only be a matter 0:19:11.040 --> 0:19:24.720 of time before corporate movie chains entered the business. For 0:19:24.800 --> 0:19:27.400 a short period from the late seventies to mid eighties, 0:19:27.960 --> 0:19:32.879 independent video stores were thriving but then the most iconic 0:19:32.960 --> 0:19:37.920 video store emerged. Imagine the perfect video store. It would 0:19:38.000 --> 0:19:42.560 have a great run right over, ten thousand videos, three 0:19:42.600 --> 0:19:46.560 evening rows, so no rush, no hassles cha, twenty four hour, 0:19:46.680 --> 0:19:50.840 quick drop return, open late every night. Well, the perfect 0:19:50.920 --> 0:19:56.600 video store. Blockbuster really hits the scene starting eight seven 0:19:56.640 --> 0:20:05.240 and then taking off through blow And they've got this 0:20:05.480 --> 0:20:09.760 kind of cookie cutter model that every Blockbuster might be 0:20:09.840 --> 0:20:12.560 slightly different in terms of arrangement, but they all look 0:20:12.640 --> 0:20:15.160 the same. They've all got the same color scheme, they've 0:20:15.160 --> 0:20:18.200 all got the same sign and so this idea as 0:20:18.240 --> 0:20:20.800 we enter the ninety nineties that there's a kind of 0:20:20.840 --> 0:20:26.600 standardization of the aesthetics of the stores themselves. An individual 0:20:26.640 --> 0:20:29.080 Blockbuster store would have like six thousand, eight thousand tapes, 0:20:29.200 --> 0:20:34.280 so that's a lot of variation potentially, but still they 0:20:34.359 --> 0:20:36.960 kind of sold themselves as having that kind of middle 0:20:37.000 --> 0:20:41.119 of the road, nothing too far afield. If you want 0:20:41.400 --> 0:20:44.760 the thing that everybody wants, then we've got that thing 0:20:44.800 --> 0:20:48.440 that everybody wants. But Dan says the sort of soulless 0:20:48.480 --> 0:20:52.800 perception of Blockbuster and other major chains wasn't entirely accurate. 0:20:53.760 --> 0:20:56.280 It's a weird thing the way that history is remembering 0:20:56.280 --> 0:20:59.720 Blockbuster as just only being this corporate store that killed 0:21:00.280 --> 0:21:03.719 video stores and movie culture, because in fact, when they 0:21:03.800 --> 0:21:06.840 hit the scene, they had way more movie options than 0:21:07.000 --> 0:21:10.440 the typical mom and pop shop. It's because of financing. 0:21:10.800 --> 0:21:14.000 If you're like an individual entrepreneur and you're investing in 0:21:14.080 --> 0:21:17.200 tapes based on your revenue, that's limited. But if you're 0:21:17.240 --> 0:21:20.160 like a publicly traded company like Blockbuster and you can 0:21:20.200 --> 0:21:23.240 just flood a space with six thousand tapes, that's what 0:21:23.280 --> 0:21:26.520 they did. Nobody has the movie I want. Hey, if 0:21:26.520 --> 0:21:29.000 it's on video, Blockbuster probably hasn't. I mean, we have 0:21:29.080 --> 0:21:33.040 over ten thousand videos, and so they sold themselves on 0:21:33.160 --> 0:21:37.280 having more choices, and Hollywood Video they had like ten 0:21:37.359 --> 0:21:40.840 thousand tapes. Only Hollywood Video has Star Wars the Fanto 0:21:40.920 --> 0:21:42.880 Menace for five days, so you can watch it again 0:21:42.880 --> 0:21:47.639 and again. Welcome to Hollywood Hollywood Video. I remember even there, 0:21:47.920 --> 0:21:51.120 this big corporate store had like a cult movie section 0:21:51.520 --> 0:21:55.000 and a foreign film section that was pretty impressive considering. 0:21:55.280 --> 0:21:57.639 And no joke, there was a Hollywood Video in Albuquerque 0:21:57.720 --> 0:22:00.919 that had like a wall of anim a. It was 0:22:00.960 --> 0:22:03.359 like the place to go in the nineties if you 0:22:03.400 --> 0:22:07.520 wanted to watch Japanese animation. The historical record needs to 0:22:07.920 --> 0:22:11.320 remember that those places did actually offer lots of options. 0:22:17.600 --> 0:22:20.800 Contrary to what you'd expect. The rise of corporate stores 0:22:21.040 --> 0:22:26.080 wasn't all bad for indie stores. The more alternative stores. Actually, 0:22:26.119 --> 0:22:29.399 a number of them pop up because of Blockbuster. When 0:22:29.480 --> 0:22:32.240 the whole video industry starts to really kind of grow 0:22:32.320 --> 0:22:35.600 more corporate and homogenized in the later half of the 0:22:35.680 --> 0:22:38.479 nineteen eighties, that's exactly when you see places like Videos 0:22:38.520 --> 0:22:43.080 open up, Scarecrow in Seattle opens up. They realized that, 0:22:43.359 --> 0:22:47.480 oh yeah, okay, Blockbusters kind of taking over the mainstream game, 0:22:47.880 --> 0:22:51.399 but they don't have eraser Head. We can actually do 0:22:51.520 --> 0:22:55.479 quite well right next to Blockbuster because we're doing something 0:22:56.000 --> 0:22:59.440 pretty different. When you walking down the street and you 0:22:59.520 --> 0:23:04.879 see little ghost what you're gonna do about ghost pastas? 0:23:05.119 --> 0:23:08.159 What what? What is that? That's the Ghostbusters theme song. No, 0:23:08.880 --> 0:23:10.680 And that's how we're going to sell ourselves as the 0:23:10.720 --> 0:23:16.640 alternative to mainstream movie culture. That wasn't by I don't 0:23:16.640 --> 0:23:19.800 think that they were threatened by Blockbuster necessarily, because they 0:23:19.800 --> 0:23:26.720 were effectively differentiating themselves based on product and clientele. Indie 0:23:26.760 --> 0:23:29.600 stores were also kept alive by the people Dan mentioned 0:23:29.640 --> 0:23:33.560 earlier who tend to frequent more quirky stores, the cinophiles, 0:23:34.119 --> 0:23:36.000 you know. La Tripe always said that, you know, the 0:23:36.040 --> 0:23:38.119 best scripts don't make the best films, you know, because 0:23:38.160 --> 0:23:40.640 they have that kind of literary, you know, narrative thing. 0:23:40.720 --> 0:23:42.359 You know that you're sort of a slave to. The 0:23:42.400 --> 0:23:44.560 best films, you know, are the ones that aren't like 0:23:44.680 --> 0:23:50.280 tied to that slavishly. Some people who thought of themselves 0:23:50.280 --> 0:23:54.119 as having kind of distinctive tastes would still go to 0:23:54.160 --> 0:23:58.960 a Blockbuster on occasion, but would probably pride themselves on 0:23:59.000 --> 0:24:01.679 going to the cool store in town. And the cool 0:24:01.720 --> 0:24:06.560 stores definitely did all that they could to maintain that 0:24:06.680 --> 0:24:11.760 sense of loyalty, almost like a cult community, because yeah, 0:24:11.800 --> 0:24:14.160 if you don't have that, then you get out of business. 0:24:14.280 --> 0:24:19.840 And so there's no single way to characterize who cinophiles were. 0:24:20.600 --> 0:24:22.840 What is true is that the kind of art house 0:24:23.119 --> 0:24:28.760 video stores were in places either in big cities or 0:24:28.800 --> 0:24:34.320 in places with highly educated populations, so college towns. Those 0:24:34.440 --> 0:24:38.440 environments helped build and sustain video stores that had more 0:24:38.520 --> 0:24:44.600 kind of artistic leanings or eclectic tastes. Now we land 0:24:44.600 --> 0:24:49.280 in the nineties where things started to change the industry 0:24:49.840 --> 0:24:54.680 really hits a big excellent plateau from like ninety three 0:24:55.560 --> 0:24:59.840 through the late nineties, and there's ups and downs right 0:25:00.400 --> 0:25:05.560 and various changes, like increasingly Hollywood did actually priced tapes 0:25:05.640 --> 0:25:09.160 for a cell through audience rather than rental, pricing things 0:25:09.160 --> 0:25:11.560 at twenty bucks rather than eighty, and so people did 0:25:11.600 --> 0:25:16.280 buy tapes campveryone's just dying before Jason, and now his 0:25:16.480 --> 0:25:20.879 latest stab at Terror has been slashed to just Roddy 0:25:20.960 --> 0:25:26.360 the thirteenth, Art seventh. The new blood, especially kids movies, 0:25:26.480 --> 0:25:30.439 right like Disney creating those straight to video sequels to 0:25:30.480 --> 0:25:36.159 their cartoons. They're the baddest, the wildest about funny. His 0:25:36.280 --> 0:25:39.320 characters in the Pride right now that we all know 0:25:39.440 --> 0:25:42.160 each other sad bare back and give the Lion King 0:25:42.280 --> 0:25:48.960 too simplest Pride on video today. But DVD hits in 0:25:50.680 --> 0:25:58.919 this is d v D, and this is what happens 0:25:58.920 --> 0:26:04.560 what you watch d v D. And the studios all 0:26:04.640 --> 0:26:07.040 kind of knew that things were done, and so if 0:26:07.080 --> 0:26:09.399