Tom Roston’s “I Lost It At The Video Store” may be the
breeziest, most engaging film book you’ll read this year. This
longer-than-usual longform oral history, published in a handsome hardcover
edition by the adventurous house The Critical Press, lets a very voluble and
opinion-generous (not the same thing as opinionated, although the border
between the two states can be unusually porous) group of filmmakers tell a
fascinating story: how the availability of movies via home video changed
cinema’s aesthetic, the movie business, and the way future filmmakers and other
artists got their educations in the craft.
Author Roston is an old colleague and an old friend; we
worked closely together at Premiere magazine from the late 1990s until the
magazine stopped publishing in 2007. A couple of things I always admired about
Tom were his commitment to Getting The Story Whatever It Took (he actually got
tattooed with Angelina Jolie while working on an early profile of the future
diva) and his ability at cultivating and maintaining meaningful
contacts/sources in the industry. It’s the second talent that serves him
particularly well here. His cast of characters, so to speak, is wide-ranging,
reasonably diverse, and pretty heavy—from Allison Anders to Quentin Tarantino, with a lot of names you want to hear from in between. It’s not just directors;
the book’s subtitle “A Filmmakers’ Oral History of a Vanished Era”
notwithstanding. Several one-time video company execs and distributors are also
interviewed. These characters, who include Richard Gladstein, whose LIVE
Entertainment was a driving force behind “Reservoir Dogs,” and Larry Estes, who
helped get “sex, lies, and videotape” made with home video money, provide what
I found to be the most interesting anecdotes about how the business of home
video provided a quantifiable shot in the arm to independent film production. I
began my career in journalism at a magazine called Video Review, so the video
store was part of my “beat” in the mid-80s; like a lot of the filmmakers
interviewed in the book, I saw firsthand the way an education via home video
could influence both a creative aesthetic and a critical one. (Video Review
actually ran a debate about “letterboxing,” as the pre-widescreen-TV practice
of preserving a widescreen aspect ratio for home viewing was called, back
before high definition was even a gleam in the eye of home theater
people.) The down-and-dirty stories
behind “Reservoir Dogs” and “sex, lies and videotape” were ones I didn’t know, even though I was aware
at the time how now-defunct semi-studios like Orion Pictures tried to exploit
“synergy” between the home and theatrical markets.
Some of the anecdotes from filmmakers who actually worked at
video stores before getting their own credits are pretty funny. Nicole
Holofcener’s tale of a store colleague with whom she didn’t get along becoming
a significant person in her subsequent life as a writer-director is
instructively mortifying. More than one filmmaker admits to an ambition of
getting his or her own “shelf” in a video store—the post-modern equivalent of
getting a retrospective at a repertory house, perhaps. I was taken with some
observations more than others; when Joe Swanberg observes that home video was,
in a sense, just another film marketing ploy, he seems to be under the
impression that he’s the first person who ever came up with that idea, of course.
And I do rather wish that Roston had gone a little further back in illuminating
the ways that the market for “adult” entertainment set a
perhaps-ultimately-unconstructive business template for the home video
business.
The oral-history format also allows a ball or two to drop,
narratively. In the chapter titled “Follow The Money,” Greg Mottola happily
recalls that the home video deal for his debut feature “The Daytrippers”
generated enough revenue that he was able “to pay everyone who worked on the movie
back.” In a subsequent quote, Tom Di Cillo says “I have never seen a dime” from
home video sales of his films “Johnny Suede” and “Living In Oblivion,” and
continues “I don’t think that this is unusual.” There’s no follow-up there, and
I would have liked one. I don’t know if that’s a question for which Roston
couldn’t get an answer, or the natural oral-history flow of “then this thing happened” would have been compromised, or what. But
this is a minor quibble.
In total, “I Lost It At the Video Store” is a really fun and edifying read
about a subject that people love to talk about. This fact was made manifest at
the book’s launch event at Book Court at the end of September. Hosted by Aaron
Hillis, who was a stalwart and inventive contributor to Premiere’s Home Guide
back when I was its editor, and who now wears many cinephiliac hats while
running one of the last surviving video stores in the tri-state area, Video Free Brooklyn, the panel featured Roston, actor/director Tim Blake Nelson,
writer/actor Zoe Kazan, and actor Paul Dano (the two are Brooklynites who are
also avid VFB customers). Director Doug Liman, another of the book’s
interviewees, showed up and was called to the panel by Roston. The freewheeling
talk was fascinating and astute (among topics touched on: how home video may or
may not have initiated a tyranny of close-ups in contemporary film style) and
suggested the topic may well be capable of yielding a sequel to Roston’s book.
