Sorry Blockbuster

When I was a starry-eyed film student in the mid-oughts, I contributed to the downfall of Blockbuster Video. I had already been taking advantage of their unlimited movie rental plan they had been trying to use to compete with Netflix (those crazy kids were still just mailing DVDs), watching a few movies a day, but this was a bit more specific.

My partner at the time had moved to California with me so I could go to school and he got a job at … Blockbuster Video. A few months into his tenure there, I found a stash under our couch and in the closet of our studio apartment ... of DVD cases and DVDs that were meant to be thrown out.

For those of you who don’t remember video store days, let me paint a little picture of peak 90s retail capitalism.

It’s Friday night, maybe it’s October 6, 1999. You’re in high school and your besties are going to have a sleepover so movies HAVE to be rented. Everyone’s talking about The Blair Witch Project, which had just been released on DVD, and you guys have to get it to see which one of you loses their shit and can’t watch it, thus redefining the pecking order of your friend dynamic. This is an idea every sleepover is having on the exact same Friday night in every Blockbuster Video in the U.S. and they have to be ready or they’re going to lose business.

So they pre-order 100 copies of The Blair Witch Project on DVD. Everyone gets to rent it, friendships forged, memories made. But a month later, the new Austin Powers movie is going to be on DVD, and so you gotta pre-order 100 copies of those! And you don’t need 100 Blair Witch Projects anymore, maybe like five? So you sell some, but there’s still way too many and space is limited. So a Blockbuster employee up to their ears in Blair Witches gets out a razor blade and slices up 50 DVDs.

This was the same process they were doing in 2007. My partner struggled with hoarding disorder, and this practice broke his brain. He could not destroy DVDs. Some of them had never been watched. Maybe rented out one or two times. All that time to ship, manufacture, get a story out to someone, and it just becomes trash. And he was legitimately horrified at the waste of it all.

It was hard not to be sympathetic. I had worked for a department store in high school and had watched many a springtime outfit get put in the trash compactor to make room for fall line of clothes. And every time a new hire saw it, they would always say, “Wait, why don’t we donate this to Goodwill or the Salvation Army?” and with a precisely set smile, my store manager would tell them she’d talk to corporate about some sort of donation next time. And it never happened, and she knew, and we knew, it never would.

It’s inherently hard to see the waste of things in a world where we use too much and waste too much.

But, what the fuck were we going to do with 25 copies of Rush Hour 3?

About six months into his job, and as the boxes began to pile, I put my foot down. We had to start getting rid of these movies. I bought that couch from Ikea, and I wanted to use it for my tushy just like the Swedish Meatball Gods intended, not another DVD shelf.

And that’s how I became a DVD seller on eBay, selling five-disc themed DVD bundles organized by genre. Horror bundles, new releases, action bundles, indies … We sold them on average for like $1-5 a disc, not a huge income, but it wasn’t hard for us to clear 200-300 a month. And for a broke college girl getting her Masters degree at a school she could not afford, it was like constantly finding a gold ingot in your junk drawer. I was buying the brand name mac and cheese. I had gas in my car!

Anything that we had WAAAY too much of, we saved a few to sell, then donated the rest. And the thrown-out movies just kept coming. We had turned into EXACTLY what Blockbuster Video was afraid of happening. Why buy a Blockbuster used copy of Crank for $13.99 when you could get the exact same thing for $2.50 on eBay? When I scoped out the competition, there were tens of us online, selling used Blockbuster DVDs like they were nothing. I could only assume employees at other stores were doing the same thing, pretending to scratch and throw away hundreds of discs like my partner had. The cases were still white, blue, and yellow. There was no denying where they came from.

What made me feel amused by the whole eBay seller situation was that Blockbuster couldn’t sell these DVDs. It didn’t have the ability to house them, to list them, to pack and mail them, and make it worth their time. The return was too small and the efforts too costly to make a dent in their billion-dollar debt that would eventually consume them.

Blockbuster had no way to make the specific profit that I could, simply because it was just me, a studio apartment in Santa Ana, and a decent internet connection.

There’s a lot of nostalgia for the ambience of the video rental store. As a denizen of L.A., and a film nerd, I’ve been to stores like PrismFX that made a generic (and totally not Blockbuster) blue and yellow colored video store to sell their camera glass filters, or pop-up Blockbuster cocktail bars where you order the Jaws VHS and get something with blue curacao and a splash of grenadine. Vidiots is thriving, CineFile has endured. It is a charming space. And I’ll argue, it’s best as it is now, without asshole corporate overlords dictating blanket needs for a film community.

Because that’s what Blockbuster was. An asshole.

It had a stranglehold on the video store, icing out moms and pops, like those big box retailers always do. And on top of that, they had a “family friendly” mission statement, which meant censoring or not distributing all that indie not-rated weird stuff and queer stuff. Imagine being in your 20s, walking into film school and you thought you saw Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También, so you thought you could say the ending was “bleh” and didn’t really tie up the story, but you actually hadn’t, because you rented it at Blockbuster and the climax of the movie (in this case a literal MMF threesome) was edited out.

Thank you for making me look real real dumb, Blockbuster!

And yes, it was theft. But wage theft is a pretty fucking serious theft problem, so get to me once you shake down the Waltons, okay? Actually, I wasn’t doing the dumpster diving, so I was more like some smooth-talking fencer with charisma up the wazoo. But I’ll take my part of the responsibility. I’m not the one who put the gun to Blockbuster Video’s head. It actually did that to itself. But I may have mined some granules of lead for the bullet.

And I’ve never felt bad about it.

Instead, I’ve always been weirdly proud of it. That I have the ingenuity to find what others miss, to thrive even when I graduated from a film school in the middle of a writer’s strike and an economic recession. I wasn’t living the high life, but it allowed me to hang on, stay focused on my dreams, and to endure when it felt impossible.

And that’s the greatest lesson I learned from the ever-changing film industry.

It always feels impossible. It always has a giant question mark above its head. And when you feel you know the answer, it changes.

When I was in school, it was film to digital. What does that look like? How does it change the process, how does it open up access to new voices? Then the streaming wars, then the streaming bubble bursting, studios consolidating, another strike, a pandemic, and now A.I. looms as if to say we are all expendable, like toys in a box at a garage sale, the viewer thinks they’ve grown out of.

And yes, I do feel sad, and frustrated, and occasionally hopeless. But I also know what to look for. Already, verticals have emerged, an indie like Obsession made half a billion dollars, and a new Skydance X Warner Bros-Discovery merger has created an even bigger studio that needs to make even bigger swings to stay solvent.

I don’t know what the answer is yet. But I know there is one.

And somewhere out there is my eBay and 25 copies of Rush Hour 2.

*Featured image by Fabricio Oliveira