Ed. Note: When I first started at Film Independent, I met with Josh Welsh, he said one thing he wanted to do was to reach out to people beyond the LA and New York film-scenes, because there were film lovers everywhere. He asked me for ways the blog could highlight all the great work that independent film lovers are doing across the country.  

This new feature was my way of attempting that. Much like our Theater Crawl feature, Disk Jockeys will feature video stores across the country that fight the good fight and provide their communities with access to DVDs, Blu-Rays and VHS that can and can’t be found anywhere else. These stores preserve independent film history. This inaugural post is dedicated to our former president Josh Welsh.

 ***

Beyond Video in Baltimore didn’t pick an easy path. They opened in 2018, long after video stores had become a thing of the past in most mini malls. On top of that, they chose to be a mostly volunteer-run non-profit. One of the founders of Beyond, Eric Allen Hatch, wrote about the journey and how to recreate it in other cities. After reading that article, we wanted to learn more about opening the store and more importantly building a community around the love of movies. We spoke with two of the three co-founders, Eric and Kevin Coelho.

Tell me a little bit about the Baltimore film scene and why you felt a video store was something the city needed.

Eric Hatch: For about 30 years there was a place called Video Americain, where both Kevin and I and also Greg, the third owner of Beyond, worked for many years. And it’s the video store you can see in John Waters’ film Serial Mom. John was a regular there.

It had locations in D.C., but primarily Baltimore. And when that place started closing its locations in the early 2010s, a group of us, a much larger group, got together to try to save Video Americain.

The owner of Video Americain was actually someone who lived in Delaware. A great guy named Barry Solan, who used to run a repertory theater before he ran a video store. So our thinking was, here’s a guy who’s getting older in his 60s at the time, health problems, lives in Delaware. So it doesn’t make sense for him to schlep down to Baltimore for these diminishing returns. But maybe we can reboot this whole idea as a nonprofit.

And I think part of what gave us the confidence that it would work, although there were certainly fears and question marks and worries going into it, was that Baltimore has a really strong DIY ethos in film, but also the music scene, the art gallery scene, people really come out in support. And while Baltimore is gentrifying, it’s happening at a slower rate than other cities. It is a city where filmmakers, visual artists, and musicians can still afford to live and be.

I worked for many years as a programmer at Maryland Film Festival, and now I started a new one called New/Next Film Festival. Greg, one of the other owners, works for the Parkway Theater, which is a project of Maryland Film Festival. I was just on the jury this week for Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Festival. One of our regular customers, Jimmy Joe Roche, runs a periodic screening series called New Works, which is all Baltimore-based filmmakers. So there really is a lot of things happening kind of on the streets as far as film culture goes in Baltimore, much more so than like Hollywood production.

There was a period where Hollywood would come here and get the rebate money and shoot some scenes here. Not so much anymore. It happens occasionally.

But most of the filmmaking that is here is like artists who live and work here, perhaps teach at the Hopkins or make the film programs and are really invested involved.

From the start, you decided to be a non-profit. Tell me about that decision.

Kevin Coelho: I think my last year at Video Americain was 2012. I started working there in 2003. So, I saw the full arc of kind of like the DVD boom of independent video stores, and then slowly year by year streaming and all the other competitors.

When we decided to close one of the two Baltimore locations, which I was one of the managers, I knew, and I was very passionate about, there’s still a place for video stores. A video store, I don’t think, is ever going to go out of fashion, having that physical element, the tactile browsing. There’s always going to be a passionate loyal customer base for that.

What’s going out of fashion is the business model of regular video stores and the business model of paying $4 per rental. You do the math, and there’s no way we could compete against, at this time, Netflix that was charging, $6 or $7 for the basic membership, and you had access to what they were advertising as an infinite number of movies and a video catalog.

So I knew that when I started doing this project, I didn’t want the stress of being a manager of finances get to me, because that was the worst part of managing the video store, trying to make ends meet, giving enough people enough hours to make their paychecks, and just being responsible for the financial end really gave me a lot of sleepless nights. I just wasn’t into revisiting that. So it was very important to me, and I think a lot of other people, that we reopened as a non-profit.

We didn’t have to worry about that, because we knew that if we got the doors open, we’d have a customer base and a fan base coming in. A lot of them have been loyal to Video Americain. I’ve been dealing with them on a customer/video-store-clerk relationship for over 20 years. So we knew it was going to be there.

I don’t think any of us were interested in balancing books and trying to make a profit out of this. It’s a labor of love. So that’s why we wanted to do the non-profit route.

You opened in 2018, during the peak-streaming era.

Can you tell me about how your marketing and your approach for getting people in the door and getting people excited about a video store.

Eric Hatch: The first thing we did to announce ourselves to the public was a Kickstarter.

And that also speaks to your last question about business model, because even though we were confident the people were there, we wanted to make sure they were going to support it, right?

There are existing video stores all over the country that are having trouble making ends meet. We didn’t want to be in that position from day one.

So we did a Kickstarter for $30,000, I think, to make sure there was a binary, yes or no. We chose Kickstarter versus another funding site in that, if we didn’t make it to that $30,000, we wouldn’t get $10,000 of donations that people expect us to work magic with. But we made our goal and exceeded it by a little bit, although it was a nail-biter.

Kevin Coelho: We met the goal with less than a week before the deadline. I was preparing myself that, oh, this isn’t going to happen.

Eric Hatch: Yeah. And we’ve been doing some social media before then, as well as some flyer-ing to accept donations of people’s physical media. There was this long period of us just hoarding movies at our houses of our own collection and things people had kindly donated, and this fear that, ‘Oh shit, this is going to be embarrassing. We told people we had this project and then we didn’t do it.’

All of which is to say, the Kickstarter was the make or break, and we made it.

We didn’t do the Kickstarter until we had a location set up. One of the biggest things we could do as far as announcing ourselves, was we, in our branding, collaborated with Bruce Willen of Post Typography, one of the big graphic-design and art guys in town. He designed our video swirl branding that was transposed into a mural on the front of the building, kind of like the Apple Records store the Beatles had in the 60s. Just a real attention getter that would make people curious.

Beyond that, we’ve done some flyer-ing, we do some anniversary parties, but Instagram has been our main source of engagement. It used to be Twitter a bit more, but Twitter is what it is right now. Instagram tends to be how we’ve connected with other video stores, tends to be where we drop what our new acquisitions and donations are.

The other thing we’ve done is we have a lot of public-facing wish lists. And this was a huge part of our project first, getting the collection together. And I think that that’s where Twitter was actually really helpful. We put out a call to the general public of, ‘We started to assess the collection we have before we open. Here’s some essential titles we don’t have.’ And it really took off. People were sending in discs from all over North America.

We opened in 2018 with a little less than 9,000 movies and we’re close to 38,000 now, with most of that coming from either donations or the membership fees. So that’s pretty incredible.

I think we’ve technically surpassed the size of the Video American collection that we were aspiring to preserve, although it took many years.

And that kind of gets to my next question, which is about the titles. Is there any specific type of films that you are looking for or titles that you are really happy that you stock?

What are you excited to share with the public?

Kevin Coelho: With opening in 2018 and, being 2024 now, the growth of these sort of boutique Blu-ray labels has been a really exciting time to be open to. And I think that’s really helped the excitement of stocking those titles.

In the beginning there was Criterion and Kino and Arrow. But now you have all these OCN labels of Vinegar Syndrome offshoots that speak to these niche cinema aficionados that like the obscure. And these labels are great because they’re releasing stuff that have been sitting in vaults for a long time.

I think CIP, the Canadian label, some of that stuff they’ve been releasing hasn’t been available in this country, or if it has, it’s been really shitty quality. So the fact that like there’s these passionate labels releasing these movies on physical media and having an outlet in Baltimore for that physical media to be seen and rented.

It’s really exciting for me that there’s still really exciting things coming out that, even being in the video store business since the early 2000s, really gets me excited that, ‘hey, oh my God, this has a physical release and this is awesome’. You know, this is great!

Eric Hatch: I would second all that. The other side of the equation is things that haven’t been ported over yet that are really obscure that we have in the collection.

On our House Favorites, we have a copy of Perfumed Nightmare, the 70s film from the Philippines. I’m sure that’ll get a deluxe Blu-ray release at some point. This was true about The Plot Against Harry, which did just get a nice Blu-ray. Things like that where, they weren’t on streaming, they maybe weren’t even on YouTube. You could trade on the dark web for them, but you weren’t going to see them unless you came to us.

There was a video store in the Philly area called Viva Video that closed during COVID. And the owner recently coordinated a donation of tens of thousands of movies that he had in storage, essentially from the closing of that store. We’ve been slowly going through the work of pruning out the duplicates and finding the gems that we don’t have in the collection yet.

It yielded a lot of VHS of things like Todd Solondz’ first film, Fear, Anxiety & Depression, which he’s denounced and which, for that reason, may never be ported over to Blu-ray; films by Carlos Saura and Mizoguchi and other filmmakers that just haven’t had DVD releases.

We’re trying to create the illusion that we have everything, that someone can’t stump us. And we’re so much closer six years in to being open to that, creating that illusion that I dared hoped we would be.

That’s an impressive collection. It makes me jealous even though I’m here in L.A.!

Eric Hatch: Yeah. I was really impressed with Videotechque when I was over there.

Videotechque! That’s my local! And then Vidiots just reopened, too. I am actually pretty blessed over here.

What was something that you did wrong that a lesson that you learned that if you could do it again, you would change?

Eric Hatch: I think there are a few things we narrowly missed. At first, we were going to open with parallel business models: you could do the old, rent for a new release for three dollars or you could do a monthly subscription.

And I think if we had done that, it would have been confusing for our customer base and the messaging would have been a lot less clean, and maybe we wouldn’t have succeeded.

And if we had charged late fees. I think we were all in agreement by the time we opened that we weren’t going to do that.But initially that was part of the plan, too. Everyone misses everything about video stores except late fees. The fact that we’re able to do away with that and that most customers are still good about getting their stuff back is awesome.

This was kind of a crazy dream that came true. It was a long process with a really amorphous group and sort of the trial and error of what the workflow was going to be, what the duties were going to be, who was in for the long haul.

I think that if someone were to try this in another area, you do need a big group of people and that energy. But I think coalescing clear definitions of who does what could be helpful. The long process of us kind of finding what each one of us either enjoys or will grudgingly do. ‘Well, who’s going to take out the trash?’ things like this.

The video store is a super fun project, but there’s still bills to pay. There’s still trash and recycling and things that are a little less fun. So, the more clarity you can have of those nuts and bolts, the better.

We do fiscal sponsorship, which I would advocate for anyone doing this unless they have someone who knows how to start a non-profit. Because if you’re fiscally sponsored, someone else can kind of anoint your project magically to be a non-profit.

The first organization we partnered with was a local one that we should have done maybe a little more research into. They were on their last gasp, and we had to jump ship and find a new one a couple of years in.

Fiscal sponsorship wasn’t a mistake. I highly encourage anyone to do that if they’re trying to open a video store, but making sure that you’ve got a stable, communicative, responsive fiscal sponsor is really important.

Why are video stores still important?

Kevin Coelho: I think it’s important for movies to have a space, you know? Anything anyone is passionate about, it’s important for those things to have a central location or just a place where you go and mingle with other people that are passionate about movies and physical media.

Movies have a place with movie theaters, and that’s great. And I go to the movie theater any chance I get and film festivals and so forth. But how many movies can you actually program in a movie theater on a given weekend?

Five, seven, if you’re lucky, and then how many movies are actually out there being shown in a movie theater across the country? Maybe 50, 55, you know? So what happens after they leave the movie theater? It’s important that there’s a physical space for them to reside permanently in a collection.

And I think that that’s where movie stores are really important; to have that back catalog, to have a place where you could find movies that, after their tenure in a movie theater, can live on. Of course, there’s all these streaming sites and so forth, but if you’re not one of the top 25 movies that they’re really pushing on their algorithm, you’re going to be forgotten about, and you’re going to go in this sort of limbo-ish area, and hope that in five or ten years, someone discovers your movie, and it becomes a cult classic, and then it’s pushed back into the forefront of the public consciousness.

But I think without a physical movie store or an archive or some sort of library to really push movies, it’s easy for a movie to just kind of like fade away into obscurity. So I think that’s an important reason why.

Eric Hatch: Yeah, I second all that and would also say, zooming out, video stores are fun, you know, fun and fulfilling. Shopping online for movies, whether it’s looking for sales on different corporate sites or whether it’s browsing for something to watch on a streaming service, that’s screen time and it’s exhausting rather than fun.

Being in a video store in a physical space. We see it every day we’re open where someone wanders in, maybe just a curiosity seeker, maybe they’re visiting town and just wanted to be back in a video store, but either way, we hook them a bit more than they expect it, because it really it really feels nice.

Most images people have of video stores now are Blockbuster, which I personally am not nostalgic for. I understand why some people are nostalgic for, but that was a corporate space. It was kind of a sterile space. People are nostalgic for the smell. I’m not.

But this is not that. This is a mom-and-pop store with tens of thousands of movies, feels more like a used bookstore, used record store than it does Blockbuster. And it’s just a stimulating place to be in.

And whether it’s someone experiencing it for the first time in their life or experiencing it for the first time in 15 years, you see them light up. We can put it into words, but it’s really a feeling more than a word.

Piggybacking on what Kevin was saying, access– in a video store, it’s all under one roof. Corporations are trying to steer you towards their product, but by doing that, they’re also fragmenting the landscape of film so that you have to have a dozen different subscriptions and you have to research who owns your favorite movie or your favorite series and then figuring out if you can steal a password or get a free trial or if you owe them 14 bucks to watch one episode of Freaks & Geeks or something. That’s not fun, and that’s not access.

Talking again about the film scene in Baltimore, we see the way more people light up about film and become film enthusiasts or even filmmakers because of access. If all they have access to in their house is Netflix and Amazon Prime and Hulu, yes, you can find amazing things that way, but you have to work. Here you have to work not to walk home with really fascinating movies and to have fun in the shopping browsing experience.

 

 

For over 40 years, Film Independent has helped filmmakers get their projects made and seen. The nonprofit organization’s core mission is to champion creative independence in visual storytelling and support a community of artists who embody diversity, innovation and uniqueness of vision.

Film Independent Members watch nominees and vote for the winners of the Spirit Awards. To become a Member of Film Independent and make your vote count for next year’s 40th Annual Spirit Awards, just click here. To support our mission with a donation, click here.

Keep up with Film Independent…

• Twitter
• Instagram
• Facebook
• YouTube
• Events
• Letterboxd
• Newsletter