This language was magic, because anyone who spoke it was your friend.

May 7, 2020 10:33 AM

Probably it was no way to run a business, and things only got more confusing after Brian got a partner in the store who was also named Brian. The floor was rarely swept by anything more than the dragging belly of the store cat, and the unheated back room stank of vinegar from the old 35mm film prints that were stored there alongside accumulating boxes of unsorted VHS rarities that came to resemble the final shot of Raiders Of The Lost Ark. This was all some time ago, more than a decade. But it’s no bold assertion on my part to say that much of what we feel nostalgia for is the kind of inconvenience that creates a more eclectic and interesting reality.

"The Death of a Video Store," on Chicago's much loved and recently shuttered Odd Obsession Movies.
posted by alexoscar (36 comments total)

I guess he looked even more like a vampire than Brian then, but it was the 2000s, and a lot of people were trying to look like vampires.

This is fantastic.
posted by benzenedream at 10:57 AM on May 7, 2020 [4 favorites]

Back in the early 80's, there was an old woman, maybe in her early 80's, who ran a 16mm film rental business from her upper west side apartment. Two of three bedrooms were full of film racks. She had all of the old experimental art films. I would rent the entire Oskar Fischinger collection from time to time.

You could preview on a Moviola. She appreciated it if I would spend some time there, and load up films from her collection, and we would watch them together. I want to say it was called Star Films. I believe that collection is now at MOMA.

That was a much more "authentic" experience than watching youtube videos.
posted by StickyCarpet at 11:07 AM on May 7, 2020 [22 favorites]

Aw, rats. This is sad but not shocking news. Odd Obsession was an A+++ browsing experience, although I always felt a little judged by the clerk for whatever I ended up renting. My most memorable find there was a Soviet live-action fairy tale movie (not Jack Frost/Morozko, but not unlike it) where the English version was dubbed on top of the original Russian, performed entirely by one guy with a thick accent, who gamely tried to do different voices for all the characters and was constantly getting behind and trying to catch up by speaking extra fast.

I'm looking around my apartment and I don't even have the means of playing a tape or DVD anymore.
posted by theodolite at 11:11 AM on May 7, 2020 [4 favorites]

Nice. I never worked in a video store but I managed a rep cinema, which is sort of a parallel world (although we did have video rentals at one point as well). The place went under in 1998 because the city of ~500,000 seemingly could not support a rep house. Weirdly, not one but two shuttered cinemas in the old hometown reopened as rep places last year, joining a third, a former cinema that was mostly live acts but did screen movies occasionally as well. They are all at this moment closed because of The Current Situation, but it gives me hope that at least the two reopened ones seemed to be doing well.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 11:20 AM on May 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

Previously, on the general topic of disappearing video rental stores.

Time to update the map.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:35 AM on May 7, 2020

That was a much more "authentic" experience than watching youtube videos.
posted by StickyCarpet

Sorry, but this is eponysterical.
posted by kaibutsu at 12:07 PM on May 7, 2020 [5 favorites]

Generally, your memories of the video store era roughly corresponds to what video stores you had access to. If you lived in a city or college town and had access to a video store that organized its videos by director, your memories will be positive -- perhaps very positive. If you grew up in suburbia or rural America, you might recall entire walls occupied by the same Adam Sandler movie, and you'll likely see the streaming era as an improvement.

I miss Kim's Video. I miss Reel Life. I miss Lost Weekend. I miss the very act of going to a video store. Browsing the aisles, picking up things just because they looked weird or odd or stupid. The video-by-mail era gave us the experience of renting Schindler's List, only to have it sit on TV console for weeks because you were too ashamed to return it unwatched. The streaming era brought us the 20-minute scroll through an infinitude of uncompelling options, followed by giving up and going to bed. Nothing like this ever happened at the video store -- you never left the video store empty-handed. And you usually watched what you rented, because the alternative was watching the censored version of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles on cable for the zillionth time.

And if you did have access to a place like Kim's, the streaming era represents a remarkable downgrade. A good video store hosted titles you'll never find on streaming. Honestly I don't even know where I'd go for bootlegs or rarities anymore. I suppose I could buy them online, but who has that kind of money?

Bring back Kim's Video!
posted by panama joe at 12:43 PM on May 7, 2020 [11 favorites]

> That was a much more "authentic" experience than watching youtube videos.

Is it? Or do we just really want it to be? Genuinely curious.
posted by Godspeed.You!Black.Emperor.Penguin at 3:19 PM on May 7, 2020

The pandemic wasn’t the only nail in the coffin, but it was the final one. Odd Obsession wouldn’t come back.

I've seen several local businesses announce recently that have ceased operations citing the pandemic as the reason, but acknowledging that things had been tough for a while. My reaction to seeing this happen has gone through three phases, the third of which this article has assured me is the correct one.

The first was feeling awful for the owners, their employees, and the community, who have all lost something that was important to them, without an ability to bring it to an end on their own terms. The second was a feeling that maybe for at least some of the owners, it was a blessing in disguise, because otherwise they'd have raged against the dying of the light for as long as they could and probably still had to go out in a puff of smoke whenever the recession we were due for happened, so at least this gives them an excuse to move on to the next chapter. Now, after reading this, it's clear that the stubborn refusal to let their business close isn't an antipattern to be pitied, but a wonderful instinct that increases the diversity of our experience for far longer than our capitalist system would otherwise allow. Yes, the weirdos who choose to do this are probably doing it largely for themselves as the author acknowledges, but we all benefit so much from having the choice to not move forward, to not adapt, to not upgrade.

I've never even been to Chicago and didn't really spend much time in video stores as a kid the way I did in music shops and bookstores, but this piece really hit me in the feels. Thanks for posting.
posted by tonycpsu at 3:39 PM on May 7, 2020 [6 favorites]

Here in Indiana, about all we have left are the handful of stores in the Family Video chain. They tend to be only in smaller towns. All DVD, though. No tapes anymore.

I wouldn’t ever say they have much in the way of offbeat films (you might find Eraserhead, for instance), but the selections are usually pretty deep in terms of age. The dirty little secret about “Family” Video is many of them still have an adult section off in the back.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:03 PM on May 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

That was a much more "authentic" experience than watching youtube videos.

Is it? Or do we just really want it to be? Genuinely curious.

Well I think it really was. This woman had put in all that time/money/care to assembly this extensive collection, and that reflected on the material itself. She was a part of this, without her some of these might never even have survived, she had supported some of their creation.

These were first-generation prints from the master negatives, and the Moviola is the device most if not all of them were assembled on and evaluated by the filmmakers themselves as they were created. That's how the artists viewed their own work as they made it. The tactile experience of loading the film is the same that the filmmakers experienced.

Some of the film cans were hand-labeled by the artist.

And then there is the distinctive smell, like being in a painter's studio looking at canvases.
posted by StickyCarpet at 4:14 PM on May 7, 2020 [6 favorites]

All this reminded me of Cine16, which was a weekly showing of 16mm films from the collection of a fellow named Geoff Alexander. They were shown on Thursday evenings at the Agenda Lounge in San Jose, California. I first heard about this back in 1990s.

The Cine16 website is abandoned but I did find an article from 2000 about the series so it must have still be running into the '00s. I know a lot of the collection consisted of educational films, from publishers like Coronet and Britannica, made back in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. (I remember seeing a bunch of these in grade school, circa 1960-69) I think Alexander got them pretty much for free from libraries and schools which were just tossing them. No idea what's become of this collection.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 5:43 PM on May 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

Honestly, if I could time travel, I would visit Global Video in Rochester in the 1990s. Small, perfect store, it had it all - the smell, the posters, the magic. The clerks mostly went to grad school in film at RIT and I was majoring in film in undergrad. Seems like there isn't even mention of it on the internet, but it was there, and I spent many an evening picking out movies with my dad on weekends home from college.

This article brought that all back, and led me to tears a bit for multiple reasons, but I'm very glad I read it.
posted by k8lin at 6:02 PM on May 7, 2020

This is a beautiful piece, thanks for posting it. I love film but was never at this level of enthusiast, but I was this age and had similar experiences. The abrupt pause and subsequent amputation of small diverse businesses on the brink is something to reflect on.
posted by warriorqueen at 6:39 PM on May 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

^ never made it to Rochester, but it's also the place with that cool House of Guitars, & rats?
posted by ovvl at 6:43 PM on May 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

The loss of disorderly stores is a tragedy. More so if the odor of old media is lost.

Where the owner knows more about it all than you do but keeps it hidden for the first few years.

"But now old friends are acting strange
They shake their heads, they say I've changed
Well something's lost, but something's gained
In living every day
posted by Twang at 7:29 PM on May 7, 2020

> And then there is the distinctive smell, like being in a painter's studio looking at canvases.

Yeah, I get that, and I agree with you with the caveat that I think it's a more personally authentic experience. I don't think it's objectively or universally more authentic. Especially with the implied value judgement and hint of gatekeeping that could easily be read into it.

Just saying, maybe we shouldn't derogate the authenticity of other people's experiences. Even as part of our own grieving process for times and places lost to us.
posted by Godspeed.You!Black.Emperor.Penguin at 8:12 PM on May 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

The first article was a nice personal reminiscence, and like a lot of the comments here I can draw up my own version -- though my memories are mostly of waiting for my brother as he combed the racks of the B-horror movies, as I would usually scoop up an NES cartridge within a minute or two.

Thinking Chicago-centric, or even artsy/specialty video stores at large, I'd like to read an article comparing Odd Obsession and Facets -- another Chicago niche video store that the first article mentions about halfway through. Facets has been around for 40+ years -- what are some of the reasons they 'made it' and Odd Obsession didn't? A cursory glance at Facets highlights some clear differences: they branched into film distribution, they have a small theater, a film school. Starting in 1980 versus 2005 would obviously influence things. But, still, I'd love to read an oral history or a detailed article of the two stores recounting their first decade or so, learning more about some of the key figures for each, and (hopefully) get a better understanding of how the two stores ended up with such differing outcomes.

And that interest stems from less a personal interest in film (read my above memory of the video store!) than my personal connection to the two stores. Milos Stehlik, the founder of Facets, was my first landlord when I moved to Chicago. Josh Brown, the last manager of Odd Obsession (also mentioned in the first article) is a buddy of mine.

Stehlik was happy to chat about film or coming to Chicago from Czechoslovakia, but always retained the patina of a businessman whenever I'd talk with him. Josh is an artist through-and-through -- check out his MC work with Psuedo Slang. And of course his devotion to film. Though usually sporting a Mav's jersey for our weekly basketball runs, one week it was "hey Josh, which jersey you got tonite?", and he took off his jacket to reveal a Charles Bronson T-shirt! ha.

Sure, I'm painting a stark business vs. artist dichotomy based on two people I know, but I feel like there's deeper, fuller story to dig out from all the players involved. Hoping someone, someday cranks it out.
posted by Theophrastus Johnson at 8:45 PM on May 7, 2020 [3 favorites]

There was a place like this in my old college town. It survived until 2015. It was wonderful, in a way that was tied up in what "aspirational coolness" meant when I was 20.

As it was shutting down, the owner wrote articles on the store website's blog and gave interviews to the local small-town newspaper. One thing he said was that, up until the very last day, rentals of cult/underground videos were still going at the same rate as in its glory days. The store began to bleed when nightly rentals of mainstream discs dried up.

This is a general truth: the hip cool scene you remember only existed because it could float on a vast sea of ordinariness. That's also true for record stores, campus-town rock bands, or Ask Metafilter: it was never the just patronage of "regulars" who kept them alive from day to day.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 8:47 PM on May 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

The dirty little secret about “Family” Video is many of them still have an adult section off in the back.

The video store in the little Maryland town where I grew up had one separated from the rest of the shop by a beaded curtain. You could kinda see into it from the horror section, where I spent a lot of time lurking as a preteen, staring at the lurid, fascinating box cover art.

To this day, beaded curtains retain a vaguely titillating air of mystery for me.
posted by ryanshepard at 9:19 PM on May 7, 2020 [3 favorites]

Looks like Black Lodge Video in Memphis survives, although it apparently went beyond the veil for about five years...

To this day, beaded curtains retain a vaguely titillating air of mystery for me.

"Everybody's hugging!"
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:08 PM on May 7, 2020

If you grew up in suburbia or rural America, you might recall entire walls occupied by the same Adam Sandler movie, and you'll likely see the streaming era as an improvement.

I dunno, I grew up in deep suburbia and our local Blockbuster(!!) made available to me:

-the entire filmography of Jodorowsky, Fellini, and Akira Kurosawa
-Salvador Dali's La Chien Andalu (with the added bonus film The Land Without Bread on the tape)
-Caligula, starring a young Malcom McDowell
-Christian F, a film about german teenage heroin addicts with an entire soundtrack by David Bowie who plays himself in the movie
-an oddly specific section of 2 dozen Japanese films about murder suicides
-so many more weird titles I would give anything to track down and see again

...so I'm thinking it's down to local management. My formative years were much enriched by this selection. Streaming is nice but it doesnt scratch the itch of finding a rare and memorable experience.
posted by ananci at 11:12 PM on May 7, 2020 [3 favorites]

Austin recently lost a video store that had been around for 35 years (Vulcan Video) to covid-19, and so many of the details in the piece echoed the history of Vulcan ~~~ attracting weirdos but also regular-ass people, knowledgeable but not-too-pretentious staff, etc etc etc.
posted by 23skidoo at 11:46 AM on May 7
Vulcan was the best. Great staff, always someone to recommend a movie I'd never have seen otherwise, seeming somehow to pick up on my vibe and guiding my grubby hands to this movie or that one. And music, too, always interesting music playing, I'd perk up my ears and ask "Who the hell is this?" and it was some Austin band that I needed to hear, and of course the staff knew all about the music they played, too. Streaming off this service or that one and/or swiping movies (downloading "Breaking The Waves" as I key this in) -- while I'm still seeing movies and hearing music I'm not getting input from the staff, and now it's mostly luck, good or bad. And of course movies/music I already know, which is fun of course but not guided. It was the same when Larry Monroe died, best disk jockey I've ever heard, he turned me on to so many great musicians and so much music history, I was all the time calling in and asking "Who the hell is this? Jesus christ, this is great!" and he'd fill me in. These were all great pieces of Austin as I knew it, 78704 is turning now into fancy-pantsy stores where women buy dresses for over a grand and restaurants where dinner is over three hundred bucks, I still love Austin but so much of what I love is what it was, and not what it is. It's like having this great friend who doesn't wear make-up and dresses unbelievably stylish out of thrift shops and drives a funky old Volvo wagon and would never, ever fake an orgasm no matter what and then not seeing her for a while and then running into her and hardly even recognizing her, somehow she got Dallas or LA smeared all over her and we talk and it's good to see her probably except I miss the fuck out of who she was and I'll never care anymore for who she is.
posted by dancestoblue at 12:50 AM on May 8, 2020 [3 favorites]

.
posted by nzero at 5:08 AM on May 8, 2020

Was one of the first shops I frequented when I lived in Chicago. There was a shop cat too that I would chill with. Wonderful memories.
posted by Young Kullervo at 5:59 AM on May 8, 2020 [1 favorite]

Is it? Or do we just really want it to be? Genuinely curious.

I genuinely can't tell. I have real nostalgia for video stores - particularly Lost Weekend in SF, and that place in Berkeley that tried to become an online shop and then went out of business 15 years ago whose name I can't remember - but, actually, the selection wasn't all that great. They had a Kurasawa shelf and a Hitchcock shelf. . . and shelves labeled "N. Europe," "Italy," and "Japan," and a few others. The rest of the store was filled with mostly-bad Hollywood new releases. It was a good place to re-watch things I already liked and knew they had. It was rarely a good place to discover new things. Talking to the staff was never useful, even if they meant well. (You can stop listing other films that have the word "life" in the title. . . that's not how film-viewing works.) I can't help but love the memory of those stores. But, in truth, I can see a lot more interesting film from home now than I ever could visiting cool shops back in the day.

We've traded obscure gems and blockbuster garbage for obscure gems and C-rated vanity film garbage mixed with shitty television, but in exchange we got far more international options. I'm not entirely convinced that's a bad thing, except for the consolidation of decision making and the leadership of the particular companies that are winning now.

Perhaps the Chicago shop was better curated and staffed than the shops I've visited. They sound like cool people.
posted by eotvos at 7:46 AM on May 8, 2020 [2 favorites]

One thing that often goes unmentioned is the part rent-by-mail played in luring us away from video stores. Like, I first signed up for Netflix back in 2008, when Kim's Video was still very much a thing. I originally joined so I could catch up on the Battlestar Galactica reboot, which enabled me to watch the new episodes with my friends. Netflix had an incredible library of contemporary TV shows, which I'm pretty sure no physical video stores had, especially a specialty place like Kim's.

What's weird is that, at the time, Netflix actually had a pretty great catalog of foreign and rare films. Not nearly as good as Kim's, but they didn't charge late fees, which more than made up for the holes in their selection. And of course, Kim's was still extant, so I could still supplement my viewing with regular visits to St. Marks.

I can't even remember when I switched my Netflix subscription to streaming-only, but I know it was a while ago. It looks like they still have a rent-by-mail service. Does it still feature a decent selection of foreign/weird/cult films? If so, that would really be the only way to see those movies now, except for the ones that have been illegally uploaded to Youtube or whatever.

Sadly, I pretty much never watch movies anymore. Most of this is probably because of the deluge of high-grade prestige TV shows, but I bet at least some of it is because I don't have a decent video store anymore. A shame, that.
posted by panama joe at 8:02 AM on May 8, 2020 [1 favorite]

Also, QFT:

It was probably pretentious, but in my experience pretension is a very effective motivator for young people.
posted by ryanshepard at 8:22 AM on May 8, 2020 [4 favorites]

...so I'm thinking it's down to local management.

This is definitely true. The Odd Obsession of my teens and 20s was Video Spectrum, an unassuming independently-owned video rental shop in Bowling Green, Ohio--a college town, sure, but definitely deep in the suburbal/rural US midwest. Video Spectrum made it to 2011. RIP Video Spectrum.
posted by pullayup at 8:29 AM on May 8, 2020

I remember going to the movie store so many times, especially if you went with someone else, not being able to find anything and just randomly picking something. The rental terms too - they were so awful. When you first started, you got it for 24 hours for like $3 ($3 in 1990 = $6 today), there were fees if you didn't rewind, and I believe the number of 'popular' movies you could rent was limited.

But the stores had personality - and there was soooo much material that was never transferred to other formats from like VHS for example and the crazy copy protections mean they aren't available on Youtube or Amazon unless some random person went to the effort to defeat and upload it. Music stores were like that too - you think Youtube, Apple, or Amazon have everything at your fingertips? Not even close.

Also people (especially teens) liked going to stores because we were way less connected then - you might see your friends or you might get to race some random person to the hit you wanted to see.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:11 AM on May 8, 2020

Hollywood Express (RIP--made it to 2014 or so) had a specific weird influence on my life, as it's where I took a flier on some VHS episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which ended up getting me back into SF/F fandom as a young adult after several years off. So, indirectly responsible for several good friends I still have! The staff didn't direct me to it, though, that was from Usenet.
posted by praemunire at 9:14 AM on May 8, 2020

Maybe this is the wrong place for it, but what movie blogs / sites do people go to for a curated list of movies that are worth watching? I'm not talking about a site that reviews everything with filtering like Rotten Tomatoes or MetaCritic, but a site that reviews non-current movies and recommends why you should watch a certain film. The closest site I've found to a good weird video store is 365weirdmovies, but they don't really cover movies that are exemplars of a genre, e.g. a perfect noir film, or new directors that should be lauded.
posted by benzenedream at 9:27 AM on May 8, 2020

Probably it was no way to run a business, and things only got more confusing after Brian got a partner in the store who was also named Brian

The closure of the VHS and DVD rental shop on the corner of Ronald and Main Streets, run by live-in proprietors Jeff and Geoff, was a major rip in the social fabric of our little town. I have no idea how that business ever made money, but we all miss it.

On the upside, those premises are now a music store and recording studio, so there's that.
posted by flabdablet at 9:42 AM on May 8, 2020 [1 favorite]

Toronto long had some super 'cool' video places... Suspect video and Queen video were my favourites... both lasted till only a few years ago. Long after they were relevant to my life but wow did we rent some really odd things from them back in the day.

I think the biggest thing we are losing is the culture and community... don't get me wrong being a wierdo online is a lot of fun but it was a different kind of fun to do it in the real world.

.
posted by cirhosis at 2:01 PM on May 8, 2020 [1 favorite]

the little Maryland town where I grew up had one separated from the rest of the shop by a beaded curtain

That reminds me of a video store I would patronize, north of Montreal, on a back country road. The shop owner ran the store, with his two daughters working the counter.

There wasn't even a beaded curtain, there was a rack right in the main store. The store owner apparently had a thing for these two Japanese girls who had a few popular videos in stores. One or two of these were featured on racks in the US, but this Guy had almost predominantly these girls in particular, and their rather rarified, specialized, and kinky, oeuvre in total.

I wondered what his young daughters must have thought. Why does dad specialize in this particular thing?
posted by StickyCarpet at 6:57 PM on May 8, 2020

.
I was only in Odd Obsession once, back in 2013, to sell some VHS of some shot-on-film adult movies. The staff were nice and also took my mainstream Hollywood VHS, as well. I was grateful then, and I still feel grateful.
But I still do lightly nostalgize my single days roaming into mom-and-pop video stores, back on Long Island in the 90s and in Chicago until the 2010s . I feel the urge to pull out the collection of membership cards and try to spoof "People Who Died" to name them, but I'll lie down until the feeling passes.
Or at least I'll just mumble from memory some of the ones I hit most often:
Video Maxx on Bay Shore Road
Oak Neck Video on Montauk Highway
Thorndale Video on Thorndale Avenue
Frank's National Video on Granville Avenue
Nationwide Video's locations on West Belmont Avenue and on North Broadway
Before I left Chicago, I meant to go to the nearest general video store I knew remained, Express Video on Okaton Ave in Skokie. Just to buy one more thing for the road. But time ran short and everything else was more important.
The only other indy video store I know anywhere is Video Max on East Chestnut (PA Rte 224) in Hanover, PA. The owners have been down to open only Friday and Saturday, afternoon hours, because of health issues.
sigh.
posted by Mutant Lobsters from Riverhead at 2:11 PM on May 9, 2020