'Videoheaven' Memorializes the Video Store

The new film "Videoheaven" presents a kind of video-essay about the history of on-screen portrayals of video stores, now mostly extinct. Writer and director Alex Ross Perry, who himself worked at Kim's Video, discusses the film alongside editor Clyde Folley. "Videoheaven" will screen on August 12 at Alamo Drafthouse, with a Q&A with Perry to follow.

Kate Hinds: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kate Hinds, in for Alison Stewart. There was a time when if you wanted to watch a movie at home, you'd head to Blockbuster or Hollywood Video. Or if you were a cinephile, maybe a more curated place like Kim's Video in the East Village, but now the only way you can visit a video store is through the movies. Director Alex Ross Perry got his own start in the film world by working at Kim's Video. Now he's written and directed a video essay about the history of video stores as depicted in films through the decades. It's called Videoheaven. It's narrated by Maya Hawke and edited by friend of the show, Clyde Folley. You can see a special screening of the film on August 12th at Alamo Drafthouse in Lower Manhattan. Alex Ross Perry will attend the screening afterwards for a Q&A, but first, he joins me now to discuss Videoheaven along with editor Clyde Folley. Alex, welcome to WNYC, and Clyde, welcome back.

Clyde Folley: Thanks for having us.

Kate Hinds: Listeners-

Alex Ross Perry: Thank you.

Kate Hinds: Hey, Alex, we want to hear from you.

Alex Ross Perry: Hi, how's it going?

Kate Hinds: Good, how are you?

Alex Ross Perry: I am here, but I'm also not here.

Kate Hinds: Yes, that is true. It is true that Clyde is in the studio, Alex is by Zoom. Listeners, you are here as well. We want to hear from you. What do you miss most about video rental stores? What was your favorite place to rent a film? Did you work at a video store? We want to hear your video store stories and memories. Give us a call. 212-433-9692. 212-433-WNYC. Alex, you worked at Kim's Video here in the city. How did you get your start there, and what did you love most about that job?

Alex Ross Perry: I got my start there as a customer. When I moved to New York to go to NYU, it didn't take me long to discover Kim's, which the St. Mark's location, Mondo Kim's was just steps away from NYU. Once I discovered it, I was there constantly haranguing the staff. "Do you ever need anybody? Do you ever need anybody? Do you have any openings coming soon?" Sometime later, maybe a year or so later, according to Sean Williams, now acclaimed cinematographer and filmmaker, he felt bad for me, and he just wanted me to stop asking.

He got me a job, but not on his floor. He got me a job on the sales floor. If people remember Kim's, you walk in, first floor was music sales. Middle floor was movie sales, DVDs to buy, and for a while, vinyl to buy, but then we eventually got that down to the music floor, which of course should have always been. Then the third floor was the rental, the collection that contained at its peak, close to 50,000 60,000 tapes and DVDs. By January 2005, I was working there five days a week.

Kate Hinds: Wow. Clyde, what was your experience with video stores growing up?

Clyde Folley: What's the best way to describe it? I grew up in Alaska. I grew up in the middle of nowhere. It's not a whole lot to do, but it was my lifeline to-- I don't know, art the world. I don't know. The video stores are responsible for who I am today. Down to when I was four years old and my dad took me to the video store, just being like, "There's a movie I really want to show you because you're going to love it." It was RoboCop.

Kate Hinds: [laughs]

Clyde Folley: That is a hard R.

Kate Hinds: That's good parenting.

Clyde Folley: I know. It's really something, but it's responsible for making me the person I am in a very weird way that maybe I wouldn't recommend, but that's the way it is.

Kate Hinds: Wow. Alex, how did working Kim's Video help you discover your voice as a filmmaker?

Alex Ross Perry: I had always wanted to make movies. Of course, in this telling, I'm at NYU for film school when I discover Kim's. That was a dream pre-video store employee, but really in high school, just having a cable access television station in my high school's basement, which was broadcast throughout the Philadelphia area, the Radner Township cable access. It's a very short line between the community that was down in the studio down there in the Channel 16 basement, and then always searching for another version of that community where school would end 2:30 or 2:45 and we would go down there and just hang out until six o' clock and shoot movies on videotape and edit VCR to VCR.

Then some of these people graduated and went to film school, and I wanted to do that, so then I did that. Then it was down at film school that I found a version of that community. I couldn't find a version of that feeling at NYU. It was too competitive and I didn't relate to enough people. I found that community at Kim's, where it was just a slightly grown up version of being 14, 15 years old and hanging out in the studio. Slowly but surely, as with the TV studio, people started to leave Kim's, and then they were becoming filmmakers.

As I said, Sean Williams left Kim's, and then he was working as an archivist with legendary documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles. Then Sean's shooting, and then he's making a film like Ronald Bronstein's Frownland. Now I'm realizing the pipeline from the studio to film school, from Kim's to filmmaking, was very real. Then Robert Greene, who's edited many movies of mine, he was working at Kim's as well, and him and Sean worked together. That community that I had looked for since I was 14 years old, in the basement of my high school making local cable access videotapes, was found again at the video store.

Kate Hinds: I want to talk about the film now. It's more of a video essay than a traditional documentary. There are no talking heads. It's Mayahawk narrating scenes from films of video stores. Alex, what made you want to tell the story this way?

Alex Ross Perry: I love the format of the essay film. Probably depends how you define it. Obviously you could call Adam Curtis films essay films, but the inspiration, there's two, and they both happened in 2014. Daniel Herbert wrote a book called Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store that I loved. It's an academic history. I believe it's Dan's thesis for his media studies degree about video stores as a retail space in American culture. It's a terrific book. Very readable for something that is written to be academic, written as a thesis. It's statistically compelling. The story it tells is wonderful, very personal. I wrote him a letter and said, "If there's ever anything to collaborate with this, I'm a video clerk myself, filmmaker. Let's figure something out." He wrote back with a deleted chapter detailing video stores on screen, which he had attempted to write. Ed, at his editor's behest, had omitted before even finishing it because his editor said, "You spent half the chapter describing what's happening on screen. This needs to be not describing. You want to get to the point where you're talking about the themes and the analysis of what occurs in the scene of Nicole Holofcener's Walking and Talking, of Seinfeld, of Kevin Smith's Clerks, of Michael Almereyda's Hamlet.

Kate Hinds: Yellowjackets.

Alex Ross Perry: No, not even. Yellowjackets, that clip is from two years ago. This chapter Dan wrote was abandoned in 2014 when he published his book. He had a handful of key texts. I said, "Let's look at those." We just planted that seed of that canceled chapter in the ground. Then around the same time, the best essay film of all, Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself, a 2003 film, was restored and re-released for a 10th anniversary with new HD clips and some new material of movies that maybe hadn't been made yet when he made the previous version. Then it was put onto Blu-ray.

I had already liked the film as a illegal object, but now I got to see it in the theater and own it. Reading Dan's chapter and watching Los Angeles Plays Itself, a three-hour-long essay film about the city of Los Angeles told through movie clips. I just said, "Peanut butter has now met jelly, and now we must make this movie."

Kate Hinds: [laughs] I want to get to listeners. Hang in there. I'm going to get to your calls in just a second, but I want to ask you, Clyde, how did you get involved with the film?

Clyde Folley: I've known Alex for basically the entire time that I've lived in New York. We've probably seen hundreds of movies together. He recommended Dan's book to me in 2013 when it came out and I read it and I liked it a lot. Then summer of 2020 happened, and we were all just trapped in our apartments. Alex texted me and said, "Hey, I've got this project I'm working on. Do you want to edit it?" That's when I started.

Kate Hinds: That's very cool. Listeners, we can take your calls. 212-433-9692. Let's start things off with Jay from Maplewood. Hi, Jay, you're on All Of It.

Jay: Hey there. Happy to be here today. I have just a cute little anecdote. I live in Maplewood now, but like most people who live in New Jersey, I was a New York expat. Around I don't know, 2000, '99, I was in Manhattan with my girlfriend at the time, and we were going into a Kim's Video, and John Waters was walking out of Kim's Video as we were walking in. I say to my girlfriend, I'm like, "Dude, that's, that's John Waters." She's like, "No, it's not." I'm like, "No, it is." "No, it's not."

I literally walk in, I take, I don't know, maybe five steps into the store, and literally pick up a VHS clamshell, turn it over, there's a picture of him on the back, and say, "Is that not the man that just walked by us?" She had to admit defeat. It was a great little victory for me, but more than that, that could not have been written better in a screenplay. That was a great little New York moment.

Kate Hinds: That's awesome.

Alex Ross Perry: See, that speaks to something very important, that this story takes place at Kim's. The democratic nature of a well situated store, certainly in New York or Los Angeles. We talk about this in the narration of the film, where we call out this little gag in Nancy Meyer's The Holiday, where Dustin Hoffman is seen renting movies in Blockbuster, is this idea that movies are consumed by people who make movies. Of course, people who just want to watch a video and have a nice Friday night, that's who's renting movies, but the idea that you would see a musician or an artist or a filmmaker was such a huge part of working at Kim's in the East Village.

The amount of people I saw, the only list more fascinating is the people who other people who worked there saw. David Bowie, a regular over at the Bleecker Street underground Kim's not far from his SoHo apartment, and Lou Reed also sighted in Kim's. We love these stories because it just proves that to access a movie is something that anybody can do in the video store. John Waters, some bozo who just walks in and asks for some pedestrian Hollywood film that we would never carry, and everyone in between.

Kate Hinds: Everyone judges them. That's a piece of the documentary that I found so fascinating was how the clerks often act or depicted as acting as the arbiters of good film taste and look down upon patrons who come in and are like, "I want to watch insert random big budget studio film here."

Alex Ross Perry: That's certainly part of it. Kim's customers, some of whom are hopefully listening, they certainly know that what we had, what we offered people that set us apart, was this one-of-a-kind collection that customers would love. What we could give people was access to things that are otherwise not viewable, and that made our store very special in a very real way.

That type of access is such a huge part of the video store experience and is something that, yes, elements of film consumption have migrated to revival houses and to the internet. That access of as Dan points out in his book, you walk into Kim's, there is before you 50,000 different futures for your evening. That's very specific.

Kate Hinds: And a little daunting. Listeners, we are speaking with Alex Ross Perry, the writer and director of Videoheaven, and Clyde Folley, the editor, and we are taking your calls. Let's hear now from David in Westchester. Hi, David. You're on All Of It.

David: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I worked in an independently owned video store called Film Fest in New Haven, Connecticut, back in '95, and it was a fantastic locus of community. I'd never worked in [unintelligible 00:14:56] or since, but you definitely got to see all sorts of folks that you felt like you saw a real cross section of the community coming through there. To the earlier point of being arbiters of taste, I think that definitely exists, but the way it worked there was we were more trying to find the right movie for the right people.

Kate Hinds: That's a really interesting point.

David: Somebody like [unintelligible 00:15:24] we didn't think there was--

Kate Hinds: I think we're losing you, David. Thanks for calling in. I have another call that I want to line up with that because it piggybacks on David's point. James in Plainfield. Hi, James.

James: Hi. Am I live?

Kate Hinds: You are live. Just tell us your story.

James: I worked at a video store on 8th Street called Video To Go, and we had to answer the phone constantly. "Video To Go, can I help you?" We got it down to four syllables. Vigo, celp you?

Kate Hinds: That's brilliant.

James: I thought that this was going to be a really laid-back kind of job, but I found myself literally prescribing movies to people.

Kate Hinds: Like a doctor.

James: Literally. I thought it's like a movie. It's a movie. It's a video store. Chill. People would have to have the latest video, and they would come in and look for suggestions, and I felt like a video doctor. "I want a video that I'm going to cry." I'd ask, "What did you cry at before?" And I would prescribe a video. It felt really great.

Kate Hinds: Was there a specific interaction you remember as being really rewarding or really challenging?

James: I met some celebrities like the major, major lawyers and major celebrity types. It was really interesting to see what they watched. It didn't always match up to my expectations. We did have an adult section, just saying.

Kate Hinds: We'll get to that. In this conversation. One of our producers just mentioned to me that store employees were the recommendation engine before the algorithms took over. Which is really fascinating when you think about it. Clyde, you work for the Criterion Channel now. How do you feel about modern film recommendation methodology? Rotten Tomatoes when it used to be more of a human connection. There are pros and cons to everything, but now you can go down a rabbit hole on Reddit, which is great, but it also removes the human element.

Clyde Folley: I feel like I'm almost entirely disconnected from most of these modern modes of recommendation. I operate purely on the human level at this point. Just talking to people, my very opinionated friends. I don't know. To me, it's all about finding the surprises and the idiosyncratic. I don't know with that regard. The algorithms, they do nothing for me. I want to know what people have been watching and what they're into.

Kate Hinds: How do you start that conversation? Do you talk to strangers?

Clyde Folley: Oh, I don't think I've ever spoken to a stranger in my life.

Kate Hinds: [laughs]

Clyde Folley: I think 95% of the conversations I have with my friends are about movies. The other 5% is probably music. I feel like we're just constantly having arguments about movies or recommending stuff.

Kate Hinds: We got a couple of texts. "The Clerks are tastemakers in junior high in the late '90s and early aughts. My local video store in Brooklyn Heights was the most incredible place where pretentious kids in their early twenties could teach me how to be cool." Then someone says, "Going to the video store was a vital part of my childhood in the early 2000s. It's bittersweet that I might have been the last generation to have grown up with them." That's from Izzy in Stamford. Now I just want to bring up Pam from Nassau County into the conversation because I think she has a counterpoint. Hi, Pam, you're on All Of It.

Pam: Hi. Thank you. I definitely have a counterpoint. I, as well as everyone, grew up going to video stores. I had a video store in a local small town in Western Pennsylvania where I grew up, and have such happy memories. I have a 14-year-old son, and his favorite place to go here on Long Island is Mr. Cheapo in Commack, which has videos and records. We also were just in LA, and I asked what he wanted to do, and tops on his list was to go to video stores.

We were at, I think it was Atomic Records, and then another video store called Be Kind, which miraculously were right down the street from each other. I think there's at least in our family, a resurgence in interest in going to video stores and buying DVDs. I was just thrilled to see the crowds in the stores and happy that my son loves movies as much as I did. Can't wait to see the documentary.

Kate Hinds: Thanks for listening.

Alex Ross Perry: This is very good and very crucial because you mention Los Angeles has quite a few functioning video stores, and this is largely somewhat new. They're all within the last five years, or in the case of video, it's reopened in the last five years, and that's very special. Of course, we suggest in the film that video stores are a thing of the past, and in many places they are.

Now, that doesn't mean that no city has one. There are great ones all over. Seattle Scarecrow, Portland Movie Madness. Not only Be Kind as you reference in LA, but CineFile, Whammy!, Vidéothèque, Vidiots as I said. LA is a hub for them. What our movie hopes to do is not say, "These are dinosaurs, they're extinct," but to say that for roughly 30 years in films or television shows, it was commonplace to show characters walking into a video store. This moment of comedy or drama required no further explanation.

A contemporary show set in Los Angeles, a sitcom, if characters just walked into Whammy! and started browsing VHS tapes to buy, I think viewers of the show would say, "What the heck is going on in this scene? What are they doing? Why is this a thing? What is this store? How come no one is saying this is strange? This store only sells videos." Whereas for 30 years, that would just be a scene that passed without any commentary on shows that were watched by 40 million people.

That is what the movie is about. Which is not to say these things went away. It's to say, "I live in a small town upstate. Two blocks from my house is a music store, and it's next to an independent bookstore. My daughter goes to school one town over. On Main Street right there is a music store and an independent bookstore."These hubs of retail survived, and they're everywhere. No one bats an eye. Bookstores, music, you can get them anywhere you want. You can get vinyl at Target, but video was decimated.

Music got hit by the internet just as hard, if not harder, and yet there's music stores everywhere. What we try to solve in Videoheaven is why video? Why are there 150 clips that we can put together of romantic, humorous, stressful, frustrating, embarrassing, violent, confrontational scenes in video stores? There are not 150 scenes of such a thing happening in a bookstore. Bookstores have existed far longer, and they still exist. Why was that not dramatized in the same way or with the same consistency as video stores? My whole conclusion is it's not a coincidence that this space was over-indexed in the cultural imagination and is the one pillar of physical media retail that 99% went away.

Kate Hinds: We just have a little less than a minute, yet I barely got to 80% of what I wanted to talk about with you because this conversation has been so great. Clyde, what do you want people to talk about when they see this film? What do you want them to take away?

Clyde Folley: I want them to take away what it is like to experience the entire history of video stores. 50 years from the birth in the late '70s, early '80s to the unfortunate death in recent years. I don't know. I think of watching this movie, it's like watching an old friend die. To me, I think that the movie's funny, but it's also-- I don't know. It's grim, it's sad. I want them to feel something because I miss video stores. I think a lot of people listening miss video stores. I'd say check it out and spend three hours reliving those memories.

Alex Ross Perry: It's a long film and we hope that it's for people who would like to spend three hours in a video store, either at its screenings coming up at Alamo Downtown, where I should say the collection of Kim's Video has been re-archived by Sean and myself and is available to rent for free to the public. We've got about 15,000 tapes and DVDs there. Many of which we can promise are not available on streaming or Blu-ray, or anything.

Kate Hinds: We'll have to leave it there. Sorry to cut you off. My guests have been writer and director Alex Ross Perry and editor Clyde Folley. Their film Videoheaven will be screening on August 12th at Alamo Drafthouse, Lower Manhattan. We will have more All Of It on the way, coming up after the latest news headlines. Stay with us.

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