How dig­i­tal killed the video star

It’s unlike­ly that any oth­er type of ded­i­cat­ed retail out­let rose, pros­pered, fal­tered and van­ished as quick­ly and deci­sive­ly as the video rental store. Once ubiq­ui­tous through­out the UK and North Amer­i­ca, the act of rent­ing a phys­i­cal for­mat from a chain like Block­buster (which had almost 9,000 shops glob­al­ly at its peak in 2004) will now be a fleet­ing, periph­er­al mem­o­ry for just about every­one under the age of 20.

Jon Spi­ra spent many years of his life in thrall to the world of rental video – as a cus­tomer, as an employ­ee of both Block­buster and sev­er­al inde­pen­dent shops, and ulti­mate­ly as an inde­pen­dent video shop own­er. Now an acclaimed film direc­tor (Any­one Can Play Gui­tar, Elstree 1976 and the upcom­ing Elstree 1979), Spi­ra recent­ly pub­lished ​‘Video­syn­crat­ic’, a mem­oir of his youth and ear­ly adult years spent work­ing in video rental. Here he recounts the expe­ri­ences that informed this wist­ful, rumi­na­tive and hilar­i­ous book.

“I had always want­ed to own a video shop. I had gone to video shops and worked in the video trade for so long that they were a big part of my life, and I held a deep-seat­ed, arro­gant notion that hav­ing worked in them for so long, I knew how to do a great one. When the oppor­tu­ni­ty to have my own shop pre­sent­ed itself in Oxford in 2002, it was actu­al­ly a bit late – I assumed [the indus­try] had about eight years left. There are cer­tain kinds of jobs you do because you love it, and because you want that lifestyle, not because you ever expect you’re going to make any mon­ey out of it. That’s real­ly what Video­syn­crat­ic was about: we nev­er real­ly fig­ured out how to mon­e­tise it effec­tive­ly; we paid our rent, we paid our bills and we had a real­ly good time.

“Clerks is prob­a­bly the film that had the biggest influ­ence on me. It’s an access point for inde­pen­dent film, and it was the first inde­pen­dent film that didn’t just appeal to a kind of elit­ist audi­ence. I real­ly love that about it. I was a big Kevin Smith fan, and I idolised his first three movies, Clerks, Mall Rats and Chas­ing Amy. I sup­pose that in turn it might have influ­enced the shop. That said, no one in our shop was open­ly hos­tile, though we did have a Clerks poster on the back wall fac­ing the cus­tomers which said ​‘Just because they serve you doesn’t mean they like you’. No one ever com­ment­ed on it.

“I would argue that Block­buster was almost the ulti­mate retail expe­ri­ence. If you think about it, they were cater­ing to their audi­ence in a pure man­ner. The main prob­lem with Block­buster was that there were too many of them and they killed the inde­pen­dents. If there was one Block­buster in each town and one inde­pen­dent, you wouldn’t have had a prob­lem, because they had two very dis­tinct audi­ences. But Block­buster killed off the inde­pen­dents and didn’t replace their busi­ness mod­el, and they didn’t ser­vice the mar­ket they killed off.

“When you walked into a Block­buster all you saw was new releas­es. They’d order 80 or 100 or even 150 copies of a new release. I think they actu­al­ly changed what the audi­ence want­ed by plac­ing val­ue in ​‘new­ness’, but I don’t know where that came from. When video shops start­ed they were called video libraries, and it was more about find­ing some­thing good. Even as a kid who was obsessed with films and watched lots of new stuff, I nev­er fig­ured out why that was a fac­tor in want­i­ng to see a film, the idea that it was the newest in the shop.

“When I was doing my Kick­starter cam­paign for the book, I was scour­ing Face­book because I want­ed to adver­tise the cam­paign as much as I could, and I found all these incred­i­ble VHS groups. I didn’t even realise that VHS col­lect­ing was a real thing. Every day these peo­ple post about things they’ve found either on eBay or at car boot sales or in char­i­ty shops. They’re try­ing to track down the pre-cert tapes [fea­ture films on VHS released before the BBFC began cer­ti­fy­ing all UK video releas­es] and oth­er rar­i­ties. Watch­ing what they’re say­ing and how they’re inter­act­ing, you can see their char­ac­ters emerging.

“I think the next thing we’re going to see in dig­i­tal cul­ture is the rise of the cura­tor. We’ve got end­less choice but no one knows what to watch. The cura­tion on Net­flix and the oth­er VOD plat­forms is ter­ri­ble. There’s always been a role in our cul­ture for cura­tors. When I was grow­ing up there was a pro­gramme on TV called Moviedrome, which kind of felt like hav­ing a crazy cousin who would say to you, ​‘Hey, you’ve got to watch this!’ It was great to have some­one explain why these films were good, it gave them con­text. I used to buy eight film mag­a­zines a month, most of which are gone now, and what’s online has a lot more to do with mar­ket­ing, espe­cial­ly when you’re look­ing at Net­flix and Ama­zon. The way they’re push­ing stuff – it’s not curation.

“Back in the day – not just in terms of video watch­ing but also cin­e­ma going and even TV – you had to be in a cer­tain place at a cer­tain time to watch some­thing, you made a cer­tain com­mit­ment to that and you saw it the whole of the way through. With Net­flix and oth­er video on demand ser­vices, you don’t make that same invest­ment. If you look at people’s Net­flix accounts you often see a whole line of ​‘con­tin­ue watch­ing…’ Peo­ple pause a lot or get dis­tract­ed. I’m not angry about it; peo­ple can do what they want to do, but the fact is, watch­ing a film isn’t so spe­cial anymore.”

Video­syn­crat­ic is avail­able now.