Goodbye, Formative Years

One VF trend that I’ve noticed over the last few months is that myself and Bobby seem to be encountering lots of things from our youth (hell, even from just a few years ago) that are in some way different, gone, or nowadays totally unknown. Following on the heels of Bobby’s farewell to Don from Don and Mike is my ode to an important institution of my formative years: Hollywood Video.

Why Hollywood Video? Aren’t they just a corporation that messed up? How did they and Movie Gallery ever hope to compete against Blockbuster, Netflix, and GreenCine? At the risk of asking too many more rhetorical questions, I’ll just hop back and answer the first one. I have many memories of Hollywood Video, from the fond to the not-so-fond. Start with the fond. My first job was with Hollywood Video, way back in the Summer of 2000 (that’s eight whole years ago, give or take a month). I was a young (16) and eager upstart. I was becoming a pretty serious student, but I knew I wanted a job over the summer and into the next school year. I had considered myself an aspiring movie buff but knew that I had a lot to learn and watch. I wanted some pocket money to feed my habit–shared, at the time, with Bobby and our close group of friends–of becoming quite the terrible “mallrat” (this is a larger story for another day, children). Hell, I wanted to have a job to impress girls! So, here I am, on the threshold of the work world. Hollywood Video gave me a chance. I started at $5.15 an hour (federal minimum wage). Thank God I didn’t have to support myself. The money wasn’t that important at first, just the ability to get food once or twice a week and otherwise socialize in the vast world of commerce. At the end of my first year (I was to return to Hollywood Video during one summer in which I worked two jobs), I looked at my account. I had rented nearly 600 films that year! Thanks to this company, I had laid a firm foundation for movie buffdom. Better yet, I had ensured myself a leg-up on everybody in college. I had somehow mixed enough Foreign, Classic, and otherwise historically significant films into the mix to constitute an Intro to Film Studies class. I had single-handedly gone from having seen less than 15 horror films in my entire life to qualifying myself as a minor expert on the genre, at least on material from the 1970s and 1980s.

The not so fond. Did I mention how little that job paid? The long, late-night hours (were you working until 2 am on weekends in high school?), the general agitation of the costumers, and the tendency for the store to get incredibly dirty incredibly quickly made the job a little crappy. By the end of that year, my other friends with jobs were out-earning me and working less ridiculous hours. Hollywood Video also managed to attract a lot of iffy managers. I had something like 6 different store managers while I was there. I heard rumors that some had up and quit, some had been caught doing unscrupulous things, some had transfered, some just disappeared. I had some great managers (my first lived his dream of moving out to the West Coast and going to film school…not quite sure how that turned out, but live the dream)! I had some fun co-workers. I had some co-workers who smoked way too much, Pip.

Movie Gallery bought Hollywood Video a little while back and absorbed a lot of debt. Both companies were in trouble. News stories of panic and closure started to appear. Blockbuster itself was even in rearguard retreat because of the new paradigms of home video distribution. Gone, apparently, were the days of going to the video store at 10:30 on a Friday night because it was the only thing open, a great place to run into friends, night-owls, crushes, and other assorted characters. Gone were the days of browsing-as-pleasure. Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin knew how important this was to the development of capitalism in the 20th century…but Amazon and Netflix recommendation pages were starting to supersede it all, by way of a presentational format that allowed you to shop in a bathroom whilst wearing crotchless trousers. I long defended Hollywood Video against all comers on the strength of their deep selection. Before they started to liquidate their VHS holdings about 4 years ago, each store had nearly three times the selection of a given Blockbuster. Where else could you get copies of Coonskin (1975, Ralph Bakshi), The Devils (1971, Ken Russell), City of Women (1979, Federico Fellini), and Shock Treatment (1981, Jim Sharman) in the most culture-deprived suburbs of Northern Virginia? The inevitable march of DVD pushed the best holdings out the door. While Hollywood still had the edge on DVD catalog selection, they never planted the same assortment in a given store as they had in the VHS era. For that reason, despite its corporate singularity and bad side, Hollywood Video did a great thing in promoting a general cultural dialog, at $1.99 a pop for five days, in places that did not have a cultural dialog.

This has all been prompted by my direct confrontation of a closing Hollywood Video earlier today. I had never been in this particular store before (I wonder if my old store is still open?), so it was not the intense attachment to place so much as a general moment of personal reflection. Scrawled in tired handwriting on the back of a piece of cardboard was a sign that said “Last day. Open 10 am til 10 pm, or until stock runs out.” The closing process had probably been going on for a while. The store had about as many people as it would have otherwise had in the early evening of a typical Friday. Certainly more people were gathered on a Sunday morning to witness the death of this particular store than to share in its life. Another scrawled sign “All fixtures for sale. All merchandise 90% off. All sales final.” This Hollywood reminds of a Soviet distribution store or a drug-front bodega. Lots of shelves, very little merchandise. The contents have certainly been picked-through. Luckily, my tastes are probably a lot weirder than most people, so I find 12 movies and spend around $10. The haul, in no order: Two Evil Eyes (1990, George A. Romero and Dario Argento), I Bury the Living (1957, Albert Band), The Witch Who Came From the Sea (1976, Matt Cimber), The Navigators (2001, Ken Loach), Freejack (1992, Geoff Murphy), She-Devil (1989, Susan Seidelman), Zombi 3 (1988, Lucio Fulci), The Ogre (1996, Volker Schlondorff), Incident at Loch Ness (2004, Zak Penn), For Your Consideration (2006, Christopher Guest), Fay Grim (2006 Hal Hartley), and Wassup Rockers (2005, Larry Clark). Incidentally, I also take this as an opportunity to remind that one of the first “article types” on VF was the detailed description of the “haul.” One of our intentions, not lost over the years, has been to share those bizarre, unlikely shopping experiences. This was passed on to us in 1999 and 2000 by a little ‘ol site called X-Entertainment. That place is still alive and kicking, as are we. However, it feels like the inertia of age has begun to affect us both.

Digression aside, it looks as if some of these discs have never even been watched. That was one of the wonders of Hollywood Video. It just sort of sat there, waiting for unique individuals to wander in and discover all the different niches it could accommodate. Some stores never found people interested in taking advantage of some niches. Some stores had very beat up copies of strange films that sort of reflected the weird trends that can form, at a micro level, in a given place in a given time.

I managed to get another, secret item that will form an article in the weeks to come. Stay tuned. But for now, I take this opportunity to respectfully say goodbye to Hollywood Video. Sure, not all stores have closed. Hell, the brand could re-invent itself…somehow. I’ll always be thankful for the personalized film studies education and the less-than $6 an hour. The place propped me on my feet and helped set me down a career path that is quickly coming into focus as a viable, enjoyable future.

It goes without saying–though I’ll say it anyway–that its worth paying a visit to any Hollywood Video stores that may be closing in your area. You might discover some great bargains, or even a few undiscovered, unwatched, and neglected movies just begging for your attention.