The following is an edited excerpt from Still Film Crazy (After All These Years) by Patrick McGilligan, published by Sticking Place Books, a collection of interviews with screen artists that is available in bookstores and on Amazon now.
When I moved to Milwaukee in 1983, one of the sanctuaries for film-lovers on the east side of town was a store called Video Visions, which was around the corner from the Oriental Theatre in a small mall that no longer exists, where there was also a Marcus cinema with three screens. People drove to Video Visions from all over Milwaukee County, and indeed from southern Wisconsin.
In almost every good-sized city throughout the U.S. there was a store like Video Visions. Quentin Tarantino worked in one in the mid-1980s, in Manhattan Beach, California, where he and fellow employees and enthusiasts held marathon viewing and discussion sessions and made lengthy oral and written recommendations to their customers based on their oown likes and dislikes. “When people ask me if I went to film school,” Tarantino has been quoted as saying, “I say no, I went to films.”
Gregory Kolp, the store manager of Video Visions for the span of its operation, knew the movie business, knew every regular customer, and could tell you about any video in the inventory because he had watched most of them at least once. After the store closed and he moved to Las Vegas, he came back to Milwaukee to visit, and over several trips we tape-recorded his recollections of the video rental and sales phenomenon.
Here’s a sample of what Kolp had to say about the little independent East Side store beloved and mourned by its customer base.
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“Video Visions began, like many other video stores, in 1983, just as the business of selling videos to the mass public got going strong. The two original co-owners [Jim Howard and his partner] were involved with a record store on nearby Brady Street, which had been renting the new product of videos. Originally the price points of videos were high, and the market for sales was slow to take off. Casablanca cost $79.95, for example. The lowest price for any title was $49.95.
“One of the future co-owners of Video Visions, who had been a University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee film student, convinced his partner to include videos in their record store by buying a single copy of new videos and renting them out, a practice that had already begun elsewhere on a trial basis. When the music business continued to deteriorate, the partners bought out the record store owner, converted entirely to video, and with a bank loan of $25,000 moved into the Prospect Mall [at the corner of Prospect Avenue and Ivanhoe Place].
“More and more people started to buy VCRs to tape their favorite movies off television, and more and more people now wanted to rent videos for weekend enjoyment, and the studios began to release more and more motion pictures in video format. When, that same year, 1983, Raiders of The Lost Ark was released in VHS, it drove the rental business into a frenzy like no other title before it. Raiders proved there was a fan base willing to pay the initial cost of new videos.
“Video Visions was in a different business from the other independent stores within the vicinity in Milwaukee, in large part because it had a constituency that boasted striking differences from other parts of the city. The immediate East Side area had a high population density concentrated in rental units. While many UW-Milwaukee professors lived in the area, so did a high number of students. From being quicker to adopt new media and having eclectic tastes, this younger subset helped set the tone for our inventory.
“From the beginning, Video Visions was a place for the worthwhile and the non-mainstream. The customers who frequented the Oriental and Downer Theaters, part of the Landmark chain on the east side, and other like-minded filmgoers in the Milwaukee area wanted alternative entertainment. There was a lucrative family section at Video Visions, but the primary draws were oddities in the classic film section, horror suspense, the black comedies, the cheesy science fiction, the foreign pictures that flew under the radar and were unrated, and the music videos that were unavailable elsewhere because their owners had no background in the music business. As a general rule, foreign films comprised fifteen per cent of the Video Vision titles. The same could be said of science fiction and horror, which probably accounted to closer to twenty/twenty-five per cent. Unlike the smaller chains and other independent video stores with a single site, adult films were only a small part of Video Visions, with pornography claiming about five per cent of its titles. Of course, the main category driving the business was always new releases.
“The peak video year, according to the Video Vision owners, was probably 1985-1986, and after that came a plateau for about a decade, with fluctuations. One Christmas Eve day Video Visions rented out 1,000 titles for one day, with six to seven thousand rented out for the holiday week. The staff, most of whom had some background in film at UWM, knew the movies and discussed them with customers. At its peak there were more 1,500 foreign films, and more music – rock, opera, classical and jazz – than any other Milwaukee outlet. Video Visions expanded to several rooms at the Prospect Mall, and it got to the point where they had to limit inventory because of physical limitations. The store was so successful that salespeople visited from Hollywood, offering promotional deals and big cardboard cutouts to go with advance copies of latest releases.
“The arrival of Blockbuster to the Milwaukee area changed the equation. The death knell sounded for Video Visions when a Blockbuster, one of 35 that opened in Milwaukee in the late 1990s, opened two blocks away from us. It became quickly obvious that people in the neighborhood had an alternative. People would check out a title with Video Visions and leave for Blockbuster if the title was not immediately available. It also meant customers would not be satisfied with an older catalog if they mainly wanted new releases. Other factors that affected rentals were the longer hours that Blockbuster was able to stay open, the drop box system the Blockbuster stores used, and the fluid inventory. All these changes and practices and trends meant Blockbuster increasingly became first choice.
“Video Visions closed in 2003, after twenty years in business, selling its 10,000-plus inventory of titles in a thronged sale lasting several days, during which the foreign language titles were the first to be sold down to the last. Many of these titles, manufactured in the first excitement over video, have still never been released on DVD.
“The video store that tried to be a repertory theater for home viewing, that wanted to duplicate the urbane offerings of the east side entertainment district in Milwaukee, that wanted to bring a bit of the country’s cultural centers to the locals, could not be sustained because of many different factors, from the inside and the outside, from the psychology of the owners of Video Visions to the concerted effort to drive such operations out of business, from the decisions that took place in the studios and the technological changes that would put the movie rental business in the dustbin of history. Were mistakes made? No doubt. Would it have mattered if they had not been made? Not at all.”
