Everything about film seems to be shrinking these days. I’m
not just talking about the minuscule screens on tiny gadgets that people use as
substitutes for theaters. I’m also referring to the way people get those films.
They visit itunes, click a few pictures, and a minute later they’re streaming
the latest Marvel comics movie or whatever. Seeing a movie was not always so
instantaneous. If you missed it during its theatrical run, you had to wait as
much as a year for it to come out on video. Then you had to leave your home to
visit the local mildew-stinking video store to find out if it was available
yet. Maybe the movie was out on video, but it wasn’t necessarily available
because some other joker had already rented it. So you had to wait until demand
died down to the point you could pay your two bucks, get it home, and shove it
in the VCR.
This probably all sounds like a pain in the ass to those who
did not grow up in the video store age, and it probably was, but it was all we
had (well, maybe not all we had…there
were also premium cable and pay-per-view channels). It was also something to do
on a Friday night or Saturday afternoon. Sometimes it was more about the
activity than the movie: get a few friends together and spend an hour pacing up
and down the rows of garish yet empty video boxes until you just give up and
grab whatever is closest at hand. I wonder how many hours I wasted doing that
between 1984 and 2004. It was such a big part of my life that there’s no wonder
why it makes me nostalgic.
I’m not the only one. Former editor of Premiere magazine, Tom Roston is another guy who misses those
mildewy days, and he pays tribute to them by gathering a couple dozen
filmmakers to gab about the video store era in his new book I Lost It at the Video Store: A filmmaker’s
Oral History of a Vanishing Era. I’m glad Roston went the oral history
route, because the tone of his introduction is too academic to capture the
sleazy joys of visiting video stores. Fortunately, former video store employees
Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith lead Roston’s roster of commentators, and
they keep the discussion funny and fanatical even though the book is largely
about the business side of video. We learn how the stores came to be and how
they bred a new generation of filmmakers. There is an entire chapter on Reservoir Dogs and how it could have
easily become a direct-to-video release. There is less about the vanished
communal experience of video browsing, which was such a huge part of the era.
But maybe that’s not the best way to make use of film professionals, at least
not when there are only 150 pages of large text to get their recollections
down. However, we do get some fascinating tidbits distinct to the era, like
Smith’s adventures in the porn closet of his store or how Morgan Spurlock would
watch the guy’s head exploding in Scanners
or the werewolf’s snout growing in An American
Werewolf in London frame-by-frame. My friends and I did the same thing with
those “subliminal” images of a demon’s face in The Exorcist. Do people still do that type of thing on their
iPhones or was it particular to that bygone age of crappy pan-and-scan VHS
tapes? Either way it made me nostalgic, and I
Lost It at the Video Store is nothing if not nostalgic and elegiac.
