Alex Ross Perry’s new film “Videoheaven” is a unique achievement – an ode to video stores that elegantly charts the rise of the local video store, its expansion and corporatization and the ultimate demise of the rental business altogether. Along the way, Perry makes some keen observations – among them, that video stores will now only live on through movies and television shows shot in and around them.
The fact that “Videoheaven” compiles so many of these moments, from movies popular and obscure, makes it an invaluable chronicle of not only a specific time and place, for sure, but also an attitude and vibe. It also charts a seismic shift, when product moved from the physical to the digital and communal spaces where you could talk about movies changed from shooting the breeze with your favorite clerk to engaging with strangers in an online chat room or message board.
And, depending on your age, watching “Videoheaven” will make you long for a different, simpler, more stimulating time. Especially if you spent your formative years in a video store, which is what I did.
In 2000 I got my first – and for a long time only – job at an independent video store in the suburbs of Connecticut. At the time there were three other video stores in the immediate area, which is insane especially considering that the town had a population of fewer than 60,000 people at the time.
This widespread proliferation is neatly summed up in “Videoheaven” via a clip from “Remote Control,” a 1988 curio by cult director Jeff Lieberman, about aliens who want to control earth via a phony 1950s sci-fi movie.
“There’s a moment which we have in our edit where they’re driving around and the other character says, ‘Where’s the nearest video store? They must have given these tapes to every other store.’ And Kevin Dillon says, ‘It’s two miles up the road.’ And we were just like, This is the exact clip we needed,” Ross told me.
All of those other video stores in my small town were corporately owned – a Blockbuster Video, Family Video and Hollywood Video – but we were different. My boss, who owned the business and the lucrative plot of land it stood on, was the son of the owner of the pizza place next door, which had been there for roughly 100 years and served the best, greasiest Greek-style pizza you could ever imagine. There was even a deal, on Friday and Saturday nights, for a pizza and a movie rental.
When I first got there, VHS was still available and being rented. We didn’t charge fees to rewind the tapes and employed a big bank of machines that would simply rewind them. On the weekends I would take used tapes to the local flea market and sit in a lawn chair all day, selling titles for $5 a pop.
But things were leaning towards a new format – DVD. It promised enhanced picture and sound, plus a bounty of special features and, crucially, movies being presented in the aspect ratio they were first exhibited in. (Pan-and-scan, a practice that crammed widescreen movies onto 4:3 images for videotapes, is a pox.)
But DVD was a pricklier format. We had to buy a resurfacing machine that would clean the disc of scratches. It was big, unwieldy and expensive – you had to match a colored disc (basically sandpaper) with the severity of the damage. And the amount of times I had to explain to customers that, no, the letterboxed image was actually the way you’re supposed to watch the movie, was too often to count.
The video store where I worked lasted much longer than you’d probably expect, into the 2010s, where every other customer would say, “It’s incredible you guys are still open” or “Jeez, even with Netflix around?” (This had been a question we’d been fielding for years, first as Netflix operated as a mail-order DVD brand and then when it switched to direct-to-consumer streaming.)
I had moved away when it finally closed, which was bittersweet. It was turned into a running store. And I lost touch with my boss, although I still keep in touch with my friends who used to work there – we’re all still obsessed with movies, in our own way.
The video store was a warm, easygoing place. Neighbors would run into each other. New friends would meet. Free from the regulation and sterilization of corporate mandates, we would get thousands of titles. Sometimes we would import movies from other countries. Our customers loved the selection and the atmosphere — the industrial carpet, the TVs hanging from the walls playing our favorites, the staff picks sections and conversations with our knowledgeable team. It was a warm hug of a place, the perfect environment to foster any budding movie lover’s appetite for cinema and to instill that sense of discovery in folks who maybe weren’t that interested in movies.
Which makes the large-scale extinction of video stores such a sad, melancholic phenomenon – one wrapped inside a mystery that “Videoheaven” pokes at.
“Why did tens of millions of customers turn their back on these retail spaces? That doesn’t happen with anything else,” said Perry, noting that while video stores are gone, bookstores and even music stores remain. “My whole point of trying to make this was to explore the answer of, ‘Why did this one pillar of media retail, and only this one pillar, get so decimated?’”
Perry had been working on “Videoheaven” for 10 years, using Daniel Herbert’s academic book “Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store” as inspiration (at times our erstwhile narrator Maya Hawke quotes directly from it) while also weaving in ideas and theses all his own. The movie, which runs three-hours, is full of clips of virtually every instance a video store pops up in a movie or TV show. It’s a documentary mixed with a video essay mixed with a nostalgic ode to something long forgotten and deeply missed.
And one of the tantalizing ideas that Perry presents in “Videoheaven” is the notion that the death of the video store was hastened by the on-screen depiction of video stores in film and television as places staffed with snobby, rude employees that are apt to ridicule or embarrass you (the consumer). Seeing these depictions in the documentary (which really were overwhelming), I was struck by how diametrically opposed the atmosphere of the video store I worked at was – jovial, communal and, most importantly, fun.
This thesis was not in Herbert’s original book and hadn’t been on Perry’s mind as a video store employee (he worked at the fabled Kim’s Video in New York City and when I told him the video store that I worked at, he nodded like he knew it too).
“As someone who loved these spaces and mourned their loss, looking at hundreds of these clips, one day I noticed the way that these were messaged to the American public on sitcoms watched by 30 million people or huge films for mass audiences, were almost entirely negative after a certain point in the ’90s,” Ross explained.
He pointed to a 1994 episode of “Seinfeld,” where George (Jason Alexander) had a negative experience at a video store as emblematic of this phenomenon. By Ross’ count, these negative depictions went on for at least a decade.
“My thesis just one day was these depictions laid the groundwork for mass customer dissatisfaction,” Ross said. “Where there was previously maybe minimal dissatisfaction, but by no means widespread.”
The video store, as a place of consternation and distress, became prevalent in films and television shows, a concept that intrigued Ross. “The text, which is to say, our excerpts from movies and shows, supported this thesis 100%,” Ross said.
Instead of more positive views of video stores, in countless movies and television shows, the experience at a video store “was to show conflict, consternation, frustration, disappointment and embarrassment,” Ross said. “You do not have 175 clips of people having a bad experience at a music store. It just doesn’t exist.” (Imagine if Jack Black, in “High Fidelity,” was just an asshole.)
And to his point, Ross explained — there are still record stores even though we stream things on Spotify and MP3s have been around for a quarter of a century. But there are a handful of video stores operational today. “I don’t think that’s a coincidence,” said Perry.
Without video stores, physical media collection has been pushed to the periphery. Big box stores like Best Buy and Target don’t sell movies anymore; Walmart only stocks a smattering of titles. New product has become the realm of the ultra-specific collector’s market, populated by labels like Arrow Video, the Criterion Collection, Shout Studios and Kino Lorber, who lovingly restore and release cult movies and certifiable classics alike.
And then there are a healthy amount of VHS die-hards, incredibly committed fans who watch a bygone format and are transported, fuzzily, to a certain time and place. Ross is among this latter group.
Ross said that in his personal collection, VHS tapes outnumber discs “five to one at this point.” He has DVDs, some Blu-rays but no 4K Ultra-HD discs. But tapes are where his heart is. The weekend before we spoke, he was at VHS Fest, which took place July 11-13 in Lehighton, Pennsylvania, and is described as “three nights of boffo big box beauties and clamshell classics from the hazy ‘n’ crazy glory days of the video store.” Movies (via VHS) are screened at a drive-in and vendors and collectors swarm the site. Ross brought home 10 tapes. He’s also involved in an ongoing project of cataloguing Kim’s Video’s massive archive at the Alamo Drafthouse location in Lower Manhattan.
His commitment to VHS extends to the distribution and promotion of “Videoheaven,” which probably shouldn’t come as a surprise. Last week, he screened the movie at Vidiots, a former Santa Monica institution that reopened in 2022 in Eagle Rock with an adjacent theater. And Ross dreams of a world where, before the movie is available on digital, it will be sold as a two-tape set (like “Titanic” was, years ago) at screenings of the documentary.
“If we accomplished that, it would make me happy,” Ross said.
Sounds downright heavenly.
