In 2008, wholesaler Eric Kugler shipped his last box of videotapes and made a prediction regarding discs: “The DVD will be obsolete in three or four years, no doubt about it. Everything will be Blu-ray… The days of the DVD are numbered. And that is good news for me.” Geoff Boucher’s story for the Los Angeles Times profiled Kugler, a self-described “bottom feeder” specializing in “distressed inventory,” two years after the final video release by a major studio, David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence. A handful of Disney films, compilations, and workout tapes continued to trickle in, but Kugler gave up videotape long after it was obvious the format was going nowhere. “It’s dead, this is it, this is the last Christmas, without a doubt… I was the last one buying VHS and the last one selling it, and I’m done. Anything left in warehouse we’ll just give away or throw away.”
I wonder where Kugler is now, and what he’s selling—DVD’s maybe? Blu-Rays, too? Against all odds, the DVD has stuck around, with recent films like Obsession and One Battle After Another, among many others, available in multiple disc formats. At the same time, the tech is considered “outmoded” by the general population—or at least the editor of NYT Connections, a game in the Wordle family that I play every night at the stroke of midnight. The other day, Connections lumped “DVD Player” in with “Plasma TV,” “Blackberry,” and “Discman.” As my friend Rooster Quibbits would say, “Wow. Rude.” Because try as Netflix might, the general population still isn’t convinced that streaming is the be-all end-all in home entertainment. Just about everyone has found themselves stumped looking for a movie that’s just not streaming anywhere, just as they’ve spent countless hours mindlessly scrolling through tiles unsure what to watch because everything looks lousy.
It’s a blessing living in a city with a video store like Beyond Video, an oasis not only in Baltimore but much of the East Coast, an alternate history where the video store didn’t disappear but evolved with the times. The store continues to grow and attract younger people who probably weren’t yet 10 years old when Beyond opened in 2018. Another regular sight is parents bringing their young kids to the store, one of the most exciting rituals of my own childhood, and one that’s unfortunately unavailable to just about everyone else in the world. Unless you live in Baltimore!
One Beyond Video’s attributes is the absence of the asshole video clerk. They weren’t ubiquitous, but common enough in the 1990s to give film fans a bad name. I find it amazing that former Kim’s Video employees proudly talk about their days brushing off customers, not being helpful, and competing to see who can be the bigger asshole. Angela Robinson, director of D.E.B.S. and Herbie: Fully Loaded, was “too nice” (??) on her first day at Kim’s and was told to turn it down, “Angela, if you are helpful and nice then we’re going to have to be helpful and nice. If you’re going to work here, just a word of advice, you really need to dial it back.” Can you imagine? Many of you don’t have to. Remember Shakespeare Books?
But Robinson, like so many others, gave in to the petty tyranny of her coworkers: “That was the culture of the place. I totally adopted it, and it became this kind of game to give terrible service. Especially when the line was really long. It was like 6:00pm on a Friday. Everybody’s coming in, they’re all waiting, then I’d just slow down.” In the same book, Alex Ross Perry, another former Kim’s employee, remembers all the “bozos” who’d walk in off the street “just looking for new releases,” as opposed to, you know, Jim Jarmusch and all the other “real” customers. These attitudes belong at the bottom of a landfill.
I never had to put up with asshole video clerks. Video Americain—all good. There was one employee at the Charles Village location who insisted on calling my mom when I wanted to rent The Girl Next Door. Hey man, whatever you gotta do. I could’ve been Paul Williams on the vice squad, it’s true. But I was 14 or so and I could tell the guy was annoyed when my mom (or whoever answered the phone) told him yes, whatever and then hung up.
Growing up in Manhattan, Kim’s was not my go-to video store—I preferred World of Video, just a few blocks from our apartment in Tribeca. Some of my earliest memories are of ambling along in there and taking in the solemn, sacred vibe of the place. You could feel the weight of the past in there just as much as you would at the library. But I never rented much. Even as a little kid, I knew that movies weren’t meant to be seen anywhere other than in a movie theater. Videotapes were postcards, a fine facsimile but nowhere near the real thing. Seeing a movie in theaters in its initial release is really the only way you’re actually going to see the thing. I’ll never know what it was like to find out what The Matrix was all about on the Friday it opened, just as you’ll never get to experience the ups and downs of Eddington with an audience full of people who’ve never seen it. Like sands through the hourglass, these are the Days of Our Lives…
Last week, Alex Lei debunked some “common wisdom” regarding tapes and their “mutilation” of films framed any wider than the 4:3 dimensions of an, um, “outmoded” kind of TV: “It’d be unwise to say that VHS versions are unintended crops—there were the odd pan-and-scans and lazy pieces of reframing, but practically any film made for mass consumption had this post-theatrical consideration built in. Some played into it more than others, but it’s important to keep in mind that so many of John Carpenter’s 2:35 classics were experienced by and most beloved as 4:3 approximations of the original.” Those 4:3 approximations serve as stress tests: a good movie, a great movie, will work cropped to 4:3 and shrunk to the size of an Apple Watch. David Lynch was right about “big image! Big sound!” but there comes a time—and musicians know this—when you have to mix for laptop speakers and car stereos. It’s humbling and frustrating, but always important to remember that just about everyone experienced The Beatles for the first time through sonic technology that was about two steps above the tin can. When a song is as magnificent as “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” you get it, and not just the gist.
But lately I’ve been fascinated with videotapes produced from 2000 to 2005, the final years of VHS. In January, I bought a tape of Six Days, Seven Nights at Beyond Video for a dollar. This was a widescreen major motion picture romance, and it looked FUCKING INCREDIBLE on tape. The movie came out in 1998, and as I’ve watched more and more tapes—hundreds now—from the end of the VHS era, it’s obvious that filmmakers were composing for 4:3 from the jump. You hardly ever see pan and scan in late-1990s and early-2000s tapes—in fact, I can think of only one example, a clumsy bit in Brett Ratner’s After the Sunset. The pan and scan was always jittery, a true mutilation, unlike the cropping of the frame, which serves most films because it puts them in a Classic Hollywood context. You watch Six Days, Seven Nights on tape and you think of The African Queen, and suddenly these passable and disposable films gain a little more significance and resonance because their connection to film history is even more legible.
I’ll continue to watch tapes as long as I can; eventually I’ll run out (VHS sales peaked in 2003, and while tapes were made in 2004 and 2005, there were far fewer than at the start of the decade) and all the used tape players in decent condition will have been bought, destroyed, or fallen apart on their own. I’m more tempted than ever to start shooting movies in 4:3—or 1:33 (no need to involve the Academy in this)—and I’m coming around to John Ford’s opinion of 2:35 widescreen: “It’s like a fucking tennis court!”
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM