On an overcast November morning in Cobble Hill, Aaron Hillis patiently manned the counter of Video Free Brooklyn, a well-curated 375-square-foot film repository of sorts.
Hillis, a longtime movie critic and programmer for film festivals, read an interview by indie filmmaker and former video store employee Alex Ross Perry three years ago. The 10-page interview was written for Indiewire about the closing of community video store Reel Life South in Park Slope. “It was this very wistful, well articulated piece. I read that the same week that the opportunity to take over [a video store] came about. It was one of the reasons why I bought this store,” Hillis said.
When Hillis took over the store, he primarily focused on curation. He scrapped 500 of the 5,500 existing disks, and now boasts a collection of 10,000 titles. The collection at Video Free Brooklyn reflects Hillis’ background as a film critic. Hillis aims to stock the store with titles that are hard to find elsewhere without compromising quality “If I haven’t heard of something and I do research and see that something got terrible reviews and it didn’t even play in a theatre, I’m not going to waste my money on it.”
The store is a small, light-filled space on one of Cobble Hill’s main drags, Smith Street. The dark blue storefront and fairy lights in the window may emulate a similar quirky façade as many other Brooklyn businesses, but a clever sidewalk sign that reads “still wasting your time on Netflix’s terrible movie selection? Watch better movies” sets it apart.
Video Free Brooklyn is singular in the sense that everyone that works there also is professionally involved in the film industry in some capacity. Michael Pantozzi, a self professed movie nerd and actor who has worked at the store for three months, said that Hillis contacted filmmakers that he had worked with before hiring him. “He knew a director I had worked with really well. I got this job essentially because of acting work I’d done on a movie.”
Of course, not all video stores have fared as well as Video Free Brooklyn. In 1988, The New York Times reported that video rental industry generated close to $6 billion dollars. As of 2015, there are only six independent video stores operating in New York City.
The first video stores started popping up in the 1970s with the invention of VHS, and quickly became commercialized by Blockbuster in 1985. While Blockbuster somewhat sterilized the convivial, independent streak indicative of these stores, the archival and tactile interaction with VHS became a popularized phenomenon.
Video store culture was in full bloom in the late ‘80’s through the 2000’s. Stores overstuffed shelves with thousands of VHS and bootleg tapes, creating an accessible film library for aspiring filmmakers and film-buffs, both behind the counter and in front of it (director Quentin Tarantino notoriously worked at a video store in L.A. in the ‘80’s). They were the cool, independent havens where The Godfather and The Blob existed on equal footing, and where employees would be open to extensive conversation about either. They even made their way into movies. In Wes Craven’s 1996 horror romp Scream, they were dubbed the unofficial gathering place for cinephiles and high-schoolers to banter about films they wanted to check out.
So why all the talk about the eventual doomsday of “the video store?” Well, to address the elephant in the room, Netflix has enjoyed a considerable amount of success recently. In October 2015 shareholders report, Netflix claimed about 69 million users worldwide, 40 million of whom are in the United States. Other streaming services like Amazon Prime and Hulu also create a bit of competition.
Even iconic New York City video stores such as Reel Life South and Kim’s Videos in the East Village succumbed to the rapidly increasing use of online streaming, closing in 2012 and 2014, respectively.
For those still standing, like Hillis, differentiating themselves from these popular services is essential. “We do something that a Netflix algorithm cannot, which is figuring out what people want to watch when they don’t know what they want to watch. There is something about the joy of discovery that you can’t possibly do online,” said Hillis.
There are stores that have modernized themselves to appeal to the desires of present day customers, like Video Free Brooklyn and We Deliver Videos in Yorkville. Both stores have thrived off of the support and recognition of their respective communities by continuing to interest loyal customers.
Owner Drew Palermo opened We Deliver Videos on 1st Avenue and 88th Street in 1999, before DVDs had even taken off. It was a different time; not high-speed internet, no Facebook, no Twitter (the horror).
Palermo managed to get the word about the store out through flyers, Yellowpages, and an old-fashioned neighborhood opening day party in the summertime.
“It was more guerilla marketing than anything else,” Palermo recalls, smiling. Organized like a railroad apartment and brimming with shelves of shiny multicolored DVD rentals, the store appears to have stood the test of time.
With over 41,000 customers in their database to date and over 40,000 titles in their inventory, Palermo has certainly created a successful business. “A lot of people come here because they sort of know or assume we have the title that they’re looking for. And in most cases we do,” Palermo said.
The store truly is a direct product of the neighborhood it inhabits. We Deliver Videos only delivers within a 50-block radius, from the Upper East Side to the Upper West Side. According to Palermo, they sign new customers up quite frequently. “I just signed up somebody literally 15 minutes ago. We sign up about 20 new people a week,” Palermo said. A number of customers have patronized the store for years. “We [also have] kids that were infants when they signed up and now those kids are 17 and going off to college.”
These stores are both still standing because of their direct interaction with the neighborhoods they occupy. In both of the neighborhoods, there is a palpable local community that patronizes these stores as opposed to run of the mill chain businesses.
Hillis says matter-of-factly, “We’re just gonna keep it going High Fidelity style. It’s the little shop that could.”