Video store nostalgia is all the rage right now, so here I’ll provide some more. Growing up, my neighborhood video store was Manhattan Beach’s fabled Video Archives, about which I’ve already written a fair amount. I have not, however, yet written about the other important video stores in my life, of which there were several.
I’ve patronized quite a few such outlets in my day, including a well-stocked 20/20 Video on Santa Monica Boulevard, a Warehouse outlet located across the street from Video Archives (sorry, Quentin!), a long-defunct Lincoln Boulevard hole-in-the-wall whose name I no longer recall, Laser Blazer on Pico Boulevard (which specialized in laserdiscs and DVDs), some place called Video Liquidators (about which I don’t remember much) and a store in Vancouver, B.C. bearing the late Rogers Video logo. None of those places, alas, will be profiled below.
What I will be profiling are the most memorable video stores I’ve known (all but one of them located in the LA area). I’d have liked to have included iconic locales like Seattle’s Scarecrow Video and NYC’s Kim’s Video, but I never set foot in either, while my sole encounters with the nearly-as-famous Rocket Video in Hollywood consisted of having poked my head in once or twice, and the only time I entered Redondo Beach’s Video Out-Takes (which birthed Video Archives) was to partake of its 2006 going-out-of-business sale.
So with that in mind, here (presented in alphabetical order) are my Big Six:
1. CINEFILE VIDEO
According to LA WEEKLY’s Scott Foundas, the 1999 opening of this West LA establishment was “one of the most significant happenings in recent Los Angeles film culture.” I say that’s overstating the case, but Cinefile Video was unquestionably one of the premiere video rental stores of the aughts (and, unlike most of the other stores profiled here, is still open). Featured quite prominently in the 2008 indie GOOD DICK, the store was founded by disgruntled employees of Santa Monica’s Vidiots (see below), whose funky film nerd-friendly layout was essentially replicated with Cinefile.
Its primary selling point is ultimately, as the saying goes, Location, Location, Location. It’s next door to the iconic Nuart Theater and (more importantly to muay) fairly easy to get to from my residence.
2. MONDO VIDEO A GO-GO
A store that was, in the words of its onetime proprietor Bob Timme, the “distributor of bad taste and perversion to thousands of sick borderline cases like yourselves.” That’s per an article in a late 1991 issue of the BEN IS DEAD punk zine (the “Gross” issue, appropriately enough), written when Mondo Video A Go-Go was located in San Pedro. In 1992 one of the store’s founders, the late Robert Arthur Schaffner, moved it to North Vermont Avenue in Los Feliz. There Mondo Video, which had sections devoted to G.G. Allin, Kenneth Anger and Charles Manson, shared space with the fabled Amok bookstore and used clothing boutique Archaic Idiot (run by Shaffner’s neighbor Ana Medina), making for, in the words of counter-culture guru Lenora Claire, “the epicenter of weird shit” in LA.
It was there that I first encountered Mondo Video, and the perpetually-drunk Schaffner, in the early nineties. Back then the area was, according to Schaffner, “all hookers and clinics and sleaze, and we loved it,” but as gentrification set in Mondo Video came to look increasingly out of place. It moved to Melrose Avenue in 2002 (a location I never got around to visiting), and shut down for good in ‘07, after which Schaffner was felled by health issues, and found dead in his Lancaster home in January 2019.
My parting thoughts about Mondo Video-A-Go-Go are best summed up by Mondo employee Erek Micheal, who said of his former place of business that “It was a product of its time and it will never happen again.” A regretful amen to that!
3. RED HOT VIDEO
I’ve been unable to find any background information on this long-defunct chain (not to be confused with the notorious Canadian outfit of the same name, although the two may well have been related) outside some dimly-recalled comments made by an employee. This individual claimed that Red Hot Video’s raison d’etre was its adult video section, which took up roughly half of each store; the non-porno section, included solely to skirt censorship laws, consisted of old videotapes (in their original boxes) arranged in no particular order, and offered for sale because the management didn’t care enough about them to create a rental database (a luxury reserved for the all-important adult videos).
Red Hot Video outlets were scattered throughout the LA area, but my preference was for the Westchester location on 8840 Sepulveda Boulevard (currently a Starbucks). It had a mind-blowing selection of rare videos that went for around $5.00 apiece; among the more prized acquisitions made from this location were uber-rarities like the After Hours Entertainment version of SWITCHBLADE SISTERS, the Paragon Video releases of DEADLINE and THE APPLE, THE SEDUCERS (a.k.a. DEATH GAME) from Screen Gems, the Gorgon Video DEVIL DOLL and quite a few others. My only regret regarding Red Hot Video is that I didn’t make a greater effort to fully pick that Westchester location clean before it ceased business in the early aughts.
4. TOWER OUTLET
This much-missed establishment was just what its name indicates: an outlet that sold discarded stock from the late Tower Records and its sister store Tower Video. Initially located on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks (across the street, appropriately, from a Tower Records), and then in a Hollywood Boulevard mini-mall (beneath the Hollywood Galaxy multiplex), the Outlet’s merchandise included cds, books and, most importantly, countless videos purged from Tower Video rental stores throughout the country.
Action, drama, horror, cult, foreign, arthouse, grindhouse, documentary, etcetera: the Outlet had it all (a claim made in a 1995 LA TIMES article about how it’s “unlikely that a copy of STAR WARS or GONE WITH THE WIND will be among the titles offered” at the Outlet, but that “it is a prime spot to look for a cheap copy of RABID GRANNIES or PORKY’S REVENGE” is complete bullcrap—ALL those films could be found). The only drawbacks were a ton of ex-rental stickers (of which Tower Video seemingly had more than any other store) covering the boxes, which tended to be sliced down the sides (so they could fit into clamshell rental boxes) and held together with rubber bands. But those annoyances aside, Tower Outlet was for a time the best place to find used videos in the LA area, with constantly replenished stock and prices that were somewhat reasonable (with the range, as I recall, running the gamut from $5.95 to $14.95).
5. VIDEOMATICA
This establishment was a legend in its home base of Vancouver, BC, but little known to the world at large. That, I say, is the world’s loss, as Videomatica was one of the largest and most comprehensive video rental stores I’ve ever encountered (with a business model that was strong enough to withstand the opening of a Blockbuster across the street). I patronized it extensively during my 1994-95 stay in Vancouver, with Videomatica being the only North American video store I knew of that carried NTSC copies of then-obscure classics like Tarkovsky’s NOSTAGHIA, Greenaway’s THE FALLS, CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING and LA JETEE.
The store closed its doors in 2011, 28 years after its inception, but has since reopened as a sales-only outfit.
6. VIDIOTS
A controversial choice, it seems. This longtime Santa Monica staple, started in 1985, has been bad-mouthed by several of its former employees (who quit to form Cinefile Video in 1999), and dismissed entirely by no less an authority than Quentin Tarantino. I’m honestly not sure where all the ire comes from, as in the mid-nineties Vidiots was my go-to video rental source (eventually displaced by Cinefile), and my experiences with it were always positive. Evidently I’m not the only one who thinks so, as in 2015, when the store was set to close, Annapurna Pictures’ Megan Ellison saved it. In 2017 Vidiots did finally shut its doors, although it’s set to reopen soon in Northeast LA’s historic Eagle Theater.
What was so great about Vidiots? It had a look and vibe that were appealingly friendly and informal, was one of the first video stores I knew of that categorized its stock by director, had a foreign film section that was extensive enough to support the division of its titles by country, and advertised quite extensively. Plus, in a move that rendered the store a legend in the eyes of quite a few eighties and nineties-era cinephiles, Vidiots was possibly the first video outlet anywhere to stock the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky (at a time when they weren’t legally available) in Japanese VHS form.
Final thought: I’m happy to hear Vidiots is reopening in Northeast LA, but Santa Monica will be much emptier without it.