If you believe all the tech pundits, the future of home movie watching will be moving to "the cloud." We're already well on the way to where Netflix DVDs will no longer arrive in the mail and sit, unwatched, on an entryway table.
Soon all films and many reruns of TV shows will be downloaded and sit on your hard drive -- indeed, this option is already available in many cases.
It all sounds great -- if you know just what you want to watch -- and if what you want actually is available. But the truth is, sometimes I still need a movie maniac, a real person who will steer me to some incredibly wonderful foreign classic or who owns that obscure title I've been searching for.
Sometimes, too, I am itching to experience the joy of discovery that comes from browsing real-life shelves at some real-life repository with a highly eccentric collection - and not just computer-generated "recommendations." For that I can't go to the cloud; I need to go to a great video store.
I am referring, of course, not to the usual chain video store (Blockbuster being the most ubiquitous), whose offerings have become more and more limited. I mean those idiosyncratic old-time video stores, like Eddie Brandt's Saturday Matinee in North Hollywood, or CineFile in West L.A., or my local in Santa Monica, Vidiots.
All of these stores are suffering this summer, hit hard not only by the downturn in the economy but also by the DVD-by-mail services. So let me sound a note of warning - they will disappear if we don't support them - and once gone, they will surely be missed (like our vanishing independent bookstores, such as the late-and-lamented Dutton's).
Vidiots has been in business on Pico Boulevard since 1985, located a stone's throw from the Santa Monica bowling lanes and across from the Civic Auditorium. Recently, I dropped by for a chat.
Vidiots' owners, Cathy Tauber and Patty Polinger, both in their 50s, first met at age 3 at the Children's World Nursery School on Robertson.
They remained friends over the years, and in the early 1980s, they realized that although both liked their jobs -- Tauber was working for Frank Zappa, and Polinger was working in international film distribution at MGM -- neither of them was fully satisfied.
"We'd had it. We didn't want to find another job," Tauber said. What they wanted was to start their own business.
They considered several options, but then they read an article in Esquire about "these wacky video stores."
The time seemed ripe for a Westside specialty store that would stock videos of the movies they themselves would want to see: independent, foreign and art films. Jerry Harvey's Z Channel already had introduced a lot of Angelenos to foreign films.
There were a few revival theaters operating, including the Fox Theater in Venice, and a few specialty video stores had opened, such as Videotheque on Westwood Boulevard -- but Santa Monica needed its own neighborhood outpost.
