We Used To Be A Serious Country With Seriously Weird Video Stores
The rise and fall of a VHS empire. Plus: This week's Movie Pick. And introducing UNDEREXPOSED VIDEO CLUB.
Hey! How are you? Don’t answer that.
Let’s keep things light this week, and take a drive down Memory Hole Lane, back to the site of my baptism into the cult of cinema: The video store.
If you’re of a certain vintage, those words might spark a sweet, stale musk in your nostrils. You see, before Blockbuster, video stores were grubby, cluttered, flickery nerd dungeons, brimming with bricks of VHS gold.
In Bethesda, we had Erol’s. I spent hours roaming its musty aisles, spellbound by the spines and box art, especially the provocative arthouse titles I was too young to rent. Sex, Lies, and Videotape? The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover? Eating Raoul??
Curious if anyone else remembered Erol’s, I did some digging and found myself falling down an unexpected rabbit hole. This is the story of...
The Video King
Erol Onaran arrived in the United States from Turkey with $16 in his pocket.
Over the next 25 years, he turned that $16 into an empire of 63 video stores - and $80 million in annual revenue. His inescapable TV ads supercharged the video-rental market, and by 1985, Erol’s was the largest privately-owned video rental company in the country. At 51, the Video Software Dealers Association anointed Onaran “The Video King.”
In addition to innovating a membership program with rental discounts, Erol’s published monthly film newsletters, and launched a “Movie Discovery Club” with in-store meetings for movie lovers, dedicated to - ahem - “truly enjoyable movies [that] fall through the home-video cracks due to lack of Hollywood exposure.”
Erol’s also partnered with college film departments and hosted various film-related activities. In 1986, Erol’s invited its entire video club - some 400,000 members - to a day at the amusement park King’s Dominion, during which all stores were closed.
Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away in Dallas, Texas, a software developer named David Cook saw an opportunity. Using his knowledge of computerized inventory systems, Cook devised a more organized approach to maintaining inventory, which he rolled out with a cleaner, more corporate aesthetic. He called it “Blockbuster.”
With the help of a waste management tycoon named Wayne Huizenga, Blockbuster spread rapidly across the country, with hundreds of corporate-owned stores and franchises sprouting up, seemingly overnight. By 1990, Blockbuster had thousands of locations worldwide. The Video King was about to be de-throned.
Onaran sold Erol’s to Blockbuster for $40 million. The Movie Discovery Club disbanded, the newsletter folded, and the inventory was stripped of its whimsy and eclecticism to clear shelves for more copies of profit-maxing new releases.
In 1994, Viacom acquired Blockbuster for $8.4 billion. For years, the company reigned supreme, expanding into video games, music stores, and even theme parks.
But while Blockbuster was raking in cash, a man in Los Gatos was racking up a massive late fee. Reed Hastings had misplaced his rented copy of Apollo 13, and now he was being charged $40. Distraught, he escaped to the gym, where he had an idea: If people were willing to pay a monthly membership fee to work out as little or as much as they wished, would they do the same for video rentals?
Three years later, Hastings walked into Blockbuster HQ, angling to sell them on his big idea: A DVD mail delivery business. He asked for $50 million; they told him to be kind and rewind his way back to Los Gatos. Who would pay for such a thing when there was a Blockbuster on literally every corner?
Hastings went ahead without them, launching Netflix in 1999. It took only four years for the company to become profitable, earning $6.5 million on revenues of $272 million. In 2007, Netflix launched its streaming service, the juggernaut that effectively ended the video rental business.
By 2010, Blockbuster held nearly one billion dollars in debt. On September 23rd, they filed for bankruptcy, and Netflix was crowned the new Video King.
Netflix’s reign has blessed us with convenience, and exposed us to an array of international movies and TV series. Nevertheless, I sometimes long for the days of Erol’s. I don’t miss the late fees, but I do wish for the weirdness and community early video stores provided.
“A great video store is built on relationships, in some cases relationships that had gone on for years.” - Dennis Perkins
Underexposed is my humble attempt to revive that spirit in the streaming age - to rekindle the joy and stoke enthusiasm for the many wonders of cinema - new and old, foreign and domestic, regardless of how well they drive clicks or boost SEO.
And to that end, I’m proud to announce a new perk for my paid subscribers - the Underexposed Video Club. Beyond the paywall, paid subscribers can claim a FREE personalized membership card and vote on our first Video Club Movie. Join us!
But first, this week’s Underexposed Movie Pick -
Kim’s Video (2024)
Erol’s may have baptized me, but Mondo Kim’s was my monastery.
In the early 2000s, my roommates and I made regular pilgrimages to Mondo Kim’s Video - often twice a day. Housed in the former site of the Saint Marks Bath House, A Kim’s was a three-story rental emporium where we bathed ourselves in Altman, Ashby, Kiarostami, Yang, Varda, Ford, Fuller, Ray (Nicholas and Satyajit), Kurosawa, Cassavetes, Lubitsch, and countless others. With a staggering 55,000 rental titles and a vast trove of music and DVDs for sale - including rare, obscure bootlegs - Kim’s was not just our video store; it was our film school. Customers were assisted by a brigade of pasty, bird-chested film snobs (my kind of people), many of whom later hatched as notable artistic figures themselves, including Todd Phillips, Alex Ross Perry, Sean Price Williams, Kate Lyn Sheil, and Andrew W.K.
Founded by Korean immigrant Yongman Kim in 1987, Kim’s began as a modest corner of Mr. Kim’s dry-cleaning business on Avenue A. Its unexpected popularity led Kim to expand, opening additional locations on the Lower East Side and Saint Mark’s Place.
“At Kim’s, you seemed to be standing in the middle of an explosion of cinema. It was a store where grindhouse movies rubbed shoulders with Bergman and Bresson… where the avant-garde felt mainstream and genres like action and espionage were displayed like the subversions of sanity they actually were. What Kim’s was about — more than any other video store — was possibility.” - Owen Gleiberman
In the fall of 2008, Kim announced that Mondo Kim’s would be closing, and that he would be giving away the entire film collection to the town of Salemi, Sicily, as part of a village restoration effort. But that was just the beginning of a peculiar mystery - one so vexing, it could be the plot of its own movie. And now, it is.
David Redmon and Ashley Sabin's 2024 documentary Kim’s Video pays brief tribute to the legacy of Kim’s before veering into a shaggy, twisty international crime story of its own. The less I tell you here, the better. The less I spoil, the better - but for anyone obsessed with reviving video store culture, perhaps even a little dementedly so, this one is a must-see.
Where to Watch Kim’s Video
Currently available to rent on YouTube and other platforms.
News Reel
“The Streaming Wars Didn’t Kill the Little Guys. In Fact, They’re Thriving,” the New York Times reports this week. In the second quarter of 2022, 24.5 million people bought at least one niche streaming service subscription. That figure more than doubled by the second quarter of this year, to 51.4 million, Antenna said.
The collapsing media landscape entered a surreal new chapter this week when The Onion purchased Infowars in a bankruptcy auction. Meanwhile, Elon Musk is rumored to be considering a purchase of MSNBC from Comcast. As other old media brands succumb to self-parody, I find some hope in the possibility that new, more thoughtful publications might emerge - perhaps right here on Substack. With Underexposed, I seek to counter-signal the box office-obsessed, click-baity husk of entertainment media by bringing you stories and interviews that are passion-driven, not market-driven. If that sounds like something you’d like to support, consider becoming a paid subscriber, if you aren’t already.
Did you grow up in the video store era? Share your memories in the comments. Thank you for reading, free subscribers. Paid subscribers, join me beyond the paywall for the bonus segment Flicker & Dust: Snapshots of Forgotten Video Havens, a bonus video, and to claim your FREE GIFT for being a charter member of…
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