The Lost Civic Life of Movie Rental Stores

The Lost Civic Life of Movie Rental Stores If a DVD owner from the year 2005 found herself transported back to a video store circa 1982, she would likely find the space remarkably familiar: videocassette cases lining the walls, a movie playing on a television set, maybe some marquee lights framing an announcement board over the checkout counter — all in all, not terribly unlike the video store of two and a half decades later. However, understanding the video store simply as a transactional space in which money is exchanged for goods and services misses the forest for the trees. That same time-traveling video renter might find herself startled by the employee offering to recommend a movie, or by the knot of customers hanging out by the counter, shooting the breeze and discussing film. The early video store was often a place to talk as well as to shop, and the persona and expertise of retailers and clerks structured the consumer experience of home video as much as the shelves on the wall. The people behind the counter, and in many cases those in front of it, were not merely moving through the consumption junction but were, in fact, integral parts of it. Consider the English pub, the French café, the German beer garden, or the American tavern: These are places where patrons can buy food or drink. But an analysis that focuses only on the producer/consumer exchange would overlook the vital role these and other spaces play in establishing and maintaining broader social relationships. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg describes such spaces as “third places,” a category that he uses to refer to “a great variety of public places that host the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work.” Such places serve to unite the neighborhood through simple, day-to-day interaction. For example, Oldenburg writes, “In many [American] communities, the post office served this function well when everyone had a mailbox there; when everybody had to walk or drive to it; and it was kept open, by law, twenty-four hours a day.” Third places offer environments within which communities can cohere. A local bar, for example, offers its patrons a place to socialize outside of home and work, establishing a sense of commonality between its denizens. The primary mechanism for this community-building is simple conversation. As Oldenburg puts it, “Nothing more clearly indicates a third place than that the talk there is good; that it is lively, scintillating, colorful, and engaging.” This orientation toward lively conversation was also a social leveler; third places “counter the tendency to be restrictive in the enjoyment of others by being open to all and by laying emphasis on qualities not confined to status distinctions current in the society. Within third places, the charm and flavor of one’s personality, irrespective of his or her station in life, is what counts.” Another core attribute of third places is the sense of shared ownership among its regulars, regardless of who actually owns the building. “Those who claim a third place typically refer to it in the first person possessive (“Rudy’s is our hangout”), and they behave there much as if they did own the place.” For much of American history, the theater served as such a third place, as sociologist Richard Butsch chronicles in his social history of American audiences. It was a space where classes mingled and served as a nucleus for “community conversation and civic participation.” Describing late-19th-century Yiddish theater, for example, Butsch writes that “the theater was a social center. The Lower East Side provided little public space other than the streets, [and] theaters were among the few places where people could gather at little cost; they were commercial substitutes for the piazzas and other places in European villages and towns, where these immigrants had been accustomed to gather and talk.” The emergence of motion pictures in the media landscape fit well with theaters’ preexisting role in cultural life. Nickelodeons’ lower prices earned them the nickname “democracy’s theater[s],” and an even more diverse set of patrons mixed within their dark rooms. At the same time, in rural America, small-town residents had developed a thriving tradition of gathering at local town halls and opera houses for “homegrown and family centered” entertainment such as “performances by local bands, neighborhood amateur singing, recitals, pageants, tableaux, lectures, and political speeches,” and the initial appearance of traveling motion picture shows was constructed in the mold of this moral, community-centered vision of entertainment. Over the 20th century, however, the movie theater receded in importance as a social and community space. By the end of the 1930s, Butsch argues, “the movie, not the place . . . [was] the attraction.” Talking and sociability were frowned upon at mainstream theaters, except at children’s matinees, which continued to serve as community events for decades. Meanwhile, through the 1950s and 1960s, the drive-in theater took on much of the role that the earlier movie theater had played, serving as a third place for local youth and families where the space and interactions with other audience members were as important as the movie (if not more so). But even this drive-in culture began to disappear within a few decades, and by the 1970s, moviegoing had waned as a fundamentally social (rather than individual) institution. The traditional story told about home video is that its sudden appearance fragmented the moviegoing audience into individuals. As Butsch and others have argued, home video helped the viewing public wall themselves off in their separate living rooms. What this argument misses, however, is the shared practice of acquiring those tapes and then watching them at home — in its early years, the video store became a third place where customers, retailers, and clerks met, talked, and shared a common experience of movies on videocassette. Writing about American taverns, Oldenburg describes the curious position of the bartender: “Good bartenders have the knack of getting their customers together and of making sure that the return patron will have at least one personal greeting each time he or she stops in.” The bartender is the host of the third place, “that font of local information, that symbol of authority, that arbiter of disputes, that ‘character,’” and a good host is essential to establishing and maintaining the vibrant culture of a third place. A key aspect of the video store’s clerk/customer relationship was exactly the sort of local authority that Oldenburg mentions. Just as bartenders were expected to be up to speed on the concerns of the community of regulars, video clerks were expected to have a certain level of expertise with the items at the center of video store culture: the movies themselves. In video stores, the person behind the counter set the tone. Many early store owners were simply social people, eager to engage with their customers. Matt Ratto, whose father, Gary, owned a video store in Merced, California, recalls one thing above all else: “He just talked. He always talked so much . . . He knew everybody by name, and when people would come in, he’d give them recommendations, and they’d chat about the weather, what was going on in Merced or whatever.” At an acting conservatory years later, Ratto found that a colleague who had lived in Merced remembered his father’s store and shared the same memory: “I remember your dad with his big mustache, always talking.” Though early video stores were often seen as questionable influences (thanks to their selection of adult videos), retailers saw themselves as part of a larger community. Gary Ratto, for example, “felt like part of his responsibility was to be able to advise people about what they were going to see, so that they could make judgment calls about whether or not their children should watch it . . . it was very much a neighborhood thing.” Retailers were often strong supporters of community activities, sponsoring Little League baseball teams and even running voter registration drives. In some cases, video stores reached out to local celebrities; former clerk Mark Stencel remembers his boss giving free memberships to members of the professional football team whose training camp was a short drive from the store. For regular customers, it gave the video store an added draw because “there was a good chance that anytime you came in, in the late afternoon, you could sort of meet one of the Washington Redskins.” As the video clerk’s expert identity developed, customer interactions often became less balanced, with clerks asserting their dominance over the movies that formed the video store’s core and, in turn, over the store’s dynamics. “Almost all employees were very knowledgeable movie geeks,” remembers one Movies Unlimited customer. “They’d talk to you if you were renting something interesting, recommend edgy arthouse stuff.” Perhaps the most interesting thing about this comment is the implication that the customer wanted to be judged interesting and edgy, cool enough to be accepted by the video store employees. The store was a meritocracy of sorts, and a customer could be welcomed into the inner circle by displaying the same sort of expertise for which the clerks were hired in the first place. Occasionally, employees developed inside jokes that reinforced their sense of superiority over customers. Notes were left in customer files, particularly as stores began to computerize their records. The clerk culture was strongly adolescent and strongly male. “I remember my assistant manager . . . and I would memorize the account numbers of all the good-looking girls that would come in and rent. We’d say to one another, ‘Didn’t 57803 look hot last night?’ ‘Hell yeah!’” Though experts, clerks weren’t always trustworthy mediators and occasionally developed small games that played off the advice they gave to customers. “The most memorable thing to me,” recalls an employee of the Stop and Shop Video Center in Milford, Massachusetts, “was on Saturday nights after all the new releases were rented out, having contests trying to rent the worst movies to the customers. I won one night by getting one person to rent ‘Ishtar, The Sex O’clock News,’ and ‘Flesh Gordon’ at once.” Video store employees played out this power differential by asserting their dominance over customers. “We knew this customer,” remembers Rich Nathanson. “He came in, and he’s looking at the movies, and he goes, ‘Santa Claus movie, what’s that about?’ And the clerk said, ‘It’s about the fucking Easter Bunny. What do you think?’” Of course, Nathanson is careful to explain, these sorts of comments were made with a wink and the ultimate message that “we’re just joking with you.” While the clerk-customer relationship was at times tinged with chest-thumping, clerks were usually regarded as benevolent figures who offered good advice and good conversation to those seeking either. If anything, customers sometimes overestimated the clerk’s abilities. “The most frequently used in-joke in the store,” recalls Pat Nestor, an employee at the Video Quest store in New York State, “was the ‘WITGiTIHS’ customers. ‘WITGiTIHS’ stands for the customers who would come in and ask ‘What’s In That’s Good, That I Haven’t Seen?’ like we were mind readers and knew what the hell they had already seen.” At the same time, those customers who saw the video store as their third place often developed a personal relationship with their video clerk. Michael Dark, who helped run several stores, was invited to dinner at some of his customers’ homes and even dated several of his customers’ daughters. While clerks were usually seen as the in-store experts, the flow of information was by no means unidirectional. Many of the earliest video store customers were film buffs themselves, and the lucky clerk who happened to be working when one came in might be in for an education. “I remember [one customer who] really knew the old stuff . . . like old B movies and serials,” says Lance Strate, who worked at Arthur Morowitz’s Video Shack in the early 1980s. “That’s where I first learned about Tom Mix and the ‘Phantom Empire’ . . . Also, Adolph Green came in once. I didn’t know who he was, and I remember him pointing out ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ to me.” At their best, video clerks and store owners fostered a true third-place atmosphere in their stores. “There was always conversation in our store,” recalls Jerry Frebowitz, owner of Philadelphia’s Movies Unlimited. “Especially on Saturdays . . . there was so much film talk going on. Total strangers were talking to each other; it was really a phenomenon.” Though his customers always came to rent a movie, Frebowitz says, “They definitely stayed to talk . . . hardly anybody came in to get the movie and leave.” Joshua M. Greenberg is a Program Director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He is the author of “From Betamax to Blockbuster,” from which this article is adapted.