I've been a member and have rented movies from Scarecrow for years, and am fortunate enough to live within walking distance of this Seattle treasure. For those of us who remember the experience of hanging out in video stores and bookstores, checking out new stuff and talking with knowledgeable staff about recommendations, there is nothing like it.
Old Seattle has, in the past few years, been razed by developers. As the landscape changes, and everything old is replaced by cheap, ugly construction, places like Scarecrow become ever more rare and more precious.
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You have to be a pretty rabid film fan to own a VHS player these days. I suspect technology, not disinterest, is the reason for Scarecrow’s decline.
It would have been interesting to know their customer demographics. Mostly older people?
They have thousands of DVDs. It's not a VHS-only store.
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Wonder how much it costs per year to keep this place running. There is a GoFundMe page that's been around for 11 months. Hope they manage to hang on. I'll be donating.
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"It belongs in the museum!"-Indiana Jones
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I truly lament the loss of these stores. We had a couple of great places in Canada where these films were available either as storefront or mail order and they are gone now. So sad. Someone is missing a bet not to have an internet site for them
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Scarecrow is great, a treasury of movie history. I first stumbled into it when George had his personal collection of heavy metal and sci fi videos in the small storefront on Latona in Seattle's Green Lake neighborhood. We became friends and had many long, interesting conversations about movies. He always had something obscure for me to watch, and he was always right. Word spread about the glory of Scarecrow and there was a steady stream of cinemaphile visitors: Tarantino, Bertolucci, Ebert. It was terribly sad when he died so young. The store went through its rocky IRS/bankruptcy years, but was saved by loving investors. May its doors remain open to movie lovers forever.
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Can't sing enough praises for this place. I teach film here in Seattle and some of the classes I have taught (on cult cinema, on cinemas of small nations) have been inspired by and have relied on Scarecrow's presence. Three of my grad students just presented work in my grad seminar on the cinemas of Tajikistan, Palestine and Norway. Their brief: rely on the Scarecrow collections.
Where else can you browse the shelves, be curious about a national cinema you have no clue about (Ghana? Mali? Mauritania? Trinidad and Tobago? Malaysia? Rwanda?), browse the actual DVD and VHS covers, stare at the cover art and decide this is a movie you want to watch? Or the lesser known works of an auteur? Or the hidden gems of a cult genre? What about shelves devoted to avant-garde and experimental film? Or to documentaries about film history? Documentaries about books?
Scarecrow offers not an predictive algorithmic access (If you liked this...you might like this!) to the universe of films, but a tactile, spatial, visual, embodied one. It caters to the auteurist, the cultist, the cinephile, the casual viewer, alike. The pathways to the discovery of cinema, and for that sake, cultures and peoples, are driven by curiosity, cover art, staff-generated sub-genres ("Nature gone amuck!") and...wandering agape through aisles and aisles of movies.
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A couple of decades ago, Quentin Tarantino was in Seattle and called Scarecrow to ask directions to it from his hotel. The staff at the store said that they would be glad to send a car to pick him up. No, said Tarantino, this was a pilgrimage, and he was coming on foot. It was summer, and he was sunburned and exhausted, but not sorry, by the time he reached the store.
There are films you can find at Scarecrow and nowhere else: the wonderful 1970 version of The Railway Children, for example, directed by Lionel Jeffries, with a young Jenny Agutter. Likewise Tiger Bay, with an even younger Hayley Mills, playing opposite her father. (You may have to put down a deposit of $200 to rent either of these, but you get it back.) Also a large collection of East German films. This place is a treasure, and it would be a tragedy, and a huge cultural loss, if ever it went under.
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Netflix is responsible for killing off stores like this one. Well, not really. Actually, those who've used Netflix did it. That includes me, I'm sorry to say.
I helped snuff out a great one in my hometown because I discovered that Netflix offered, at the time, a huge selection of great, classic movies (and they'd deliver them to your mailbox!). But eventually, studios found they could make better deals with Netflix's new competitors, and the great selection ebbed away. Now that they're moving over to original content, all you can find on their site are kids' movies and mass market schlockbusters. They carry a relative handful of classics today. And to think that I helped kill off a wonderful mom-and-pop store with thousands of movies and a knowledgeable and helpful staff for this!
If you live somewhere with a store like this, you might want to go out of your way to support them while you still can. I wish I had.
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@Sixofone
Oh, and BTW ... The Criterion Collection is supposed to be rolling out their own web site in April for streaming movies from their extensive collection of classics. If you're not familiar with them, they are to DVDs as the Library of America is to literature (except the LoA is a non-profit). Their commentary tracks are second to none and often they've restored the movie. Whether their streaming service will include the commentary, remains to be seen.
I'm hoping to drop Netflix for them if the pricing's right and the commentary's available.
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In other news, a radio station in the UK is flying over the assistant manager from the last Blockbuster video store in US, to hand delivery Point Break for a special showing!
https://mobile.twitter.com/absoluteradio/status/1103945078614167552
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Eddie Brandt's in Los Angeles.
www.ebsmvideo.com
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I have some cool stuff in boxes too. And I wonder daily: can it hang on?
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Here in Tucson AZ we have CASA video, still in business.
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I live in Chicago and I am always amazed that for a few dollars you can walk into the Art Institute and see some of the greatest works of art ever created, or the Shedd Aquarium and see an ocean full of aquatic life, or the Museum of Natural History and see millennia of rare artifacts, or the Museum of Science and Industry and see the evolution of human invention, or the Adler Planetarium and see the outer reaches of space.
In this day and age, with so much social greed, selfishness, corruption, and political unrest, I find these treasure troves of human history and discovery absolutely miraculous. And they give me hope. Hope that our age of social disintegration is not the rule, rather, the exception.
These museums show that there are still people out there who care, and can appreciate, the real gifts the human race has to offer - which is the illumination, and through it, the continuing expansion of human culture and the human mind.
While this may sound high-brow is relation to this article, it isn't meant to, because I truly believe that this store, and others like it, act as cultural repositories. And if they were to cease to be, we would all be the worse off for it.
Having Netflix, Red-Box, and Amazon Prime as our only sources of film is like having an art museum that primarily shows the lesser works of failed artists. And the reason is because these entities are run solely for profit by corporations and businessmen, not curators - like those who run Scarecrow Video.
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RAO Video has been in business in downtown Little Rock for over 30 years. The owners has an adult selection upstairs but downstairs is a great selection of foreign, independent, and classics. Not anything you will find at a Redbox.
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And Oakland has VideoRoom on Piedmont Ave. they are certainly having such trouble moving in the 21st century (eg, you have to use a Yelp URL https://www.yelp.com/biz/video-room-oakland cuz their site is broken!) but it is a great community resource for neighbors.
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So I guess you aren't aware of MOVIE MADNESS in Portland, Oregon, which has an incredible stock of videos not available anywhere else, AND manages the wonderful HOLLYWOOD THEATER, which shows fresh prints of obscure films.
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@Toby Tobiason
Having been to both, I can say that, while Movie Madness has a wonderful collection of paraphernalia, Scarecrow, hands down, has the larger/more extensive collection of films.
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Sounds good. on a smaller scale. check out the video library in santa fe nm. been around for 32 years.
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The whole culture is so obsessed with chasing the latest medium and the newest technology that we forget the point of it all, which it supposedly the content the medium delivers. There were so many great films that never made it to video, so many that made it video but not to DVD, others that made it to DVD but are unavailable to stream. Likewise the transition from vinyl to cd to mp3, each step increases a prejudice for the new and a general narrowing. Not to mention the fact that anything you see or hear in a theater or auditorium will be more important than something you watch on a phone or ipad, with their constant interruptions.
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@Martin: You are so right! Thank you for your comment.
Where's Ted Turner when you need him?
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Video Underground in Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston is a treasure with the added bonuses of: opens at 7am serving phenomenal coffee made to order, personalized personable service and fun weekly Friday night films. Support your local businesses and meet your fellow neighbors.
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There was a movie I watched in 1978 (!!!) while babysitting & never got to see the end because the people came home...
--that-- a few years ago, I FOUND at Scarecrow and watched!! (The movie was The Hard Way with Ida Lupino.)
It's a one of a kind place...
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You can rent a DVD of The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T from Netflix!
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@John Feinberg
Good luck doing that in the mid 90's.
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Obviously, their main business is no longer video rental: it's nostalgia.
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@Montesquieu Actually, no. If you read the article, you'll note they do a lot of outreach and community events. There's a business there, but it's evolving. It's certainly not the clubhouse it was when George ran it. There's a place for physical media in this world. It might not be a storefront though.
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Beyond Video opened in Baltimore, MD last and is total gem I love it send films https://beyondvideo.org/about/
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Video stores shall return.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8PnFoG5t183xI4ZxIweLHg
LOL, my mother took me to see "Song of the South" sometime in the 70s. It was always part of the Disney Summer run of movies in the theaters.
We still have a couple of great DVD/Video rental stores in Austin: Vulcan Video and I Love Video.
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Let's not forget Naro Video on in Norfolk VA
http://www.narovideo.org/
So glad to hear that there are others out there!
We've got Vidiots in Santa Monica--an amazing place.
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I sure hope they make it.
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I suggest Seattle Public Library take over Scarecrow. There is a branch library a block or two down the street.
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@Cosmo Spacey
That is an excellent idea!
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OK, I admit it. I read the title and was ready to rage quit my NYT subscription because "How could the Times not know about Best Video in Hamden" and call this place the last of its kind. But then I read the article, and I decided to step back from Defcon 1. Scarecrow might have more titles, but if it does, Best Video is right on their heels.
If you live in Connecticut and want a really great movie experience, you just have to head here and get your film on. And your music. And your coffee. And your adult beverage.
Laura Holson, you just need to take a Metro North ride to New Haven, ride up Whitney Avenue and visit here.
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@Alex I had the same reaction. We have Movie Madness here in Portland. It's an institution.
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Thanks for the tip @Alex!
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I'm glad to hear that Scarecrow has turned non-profit to prolong its existence. Too often, culture, history, quality and even people fall victim to capitalism, incessant greed and convenience. Not everything needs to be quantified in terms of cost/benefit.
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The answer is quite obvious. Scarecrow should create a streaming service. Roku can help set this up. Scarecrow just needs a little start-up funding. One poster, kr, mentioned Videotheque in South Pasadena. Perhaps they should collaborate? I'm sure there are others...
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@Will Schmidt perlboy - Not sure if this would work, because simply possessing a copy of one of these films would not give them the rights to stream it. However, they could take a page out of the Netflix playbook and offer video rentals by mail of hard to find films.
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@Will Schmidt perlboy
Or people could get off their couches, interact with human beings, and actually enjoy the experience of discovering something new in a tactile setting. That's the obvious answer.
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@Ze Tiago
Come on guy, there is no harm watching a video, especially an obscure one from the likes of Scarecrow, with your S.O. Lots of tactile opportunity there, right? Who watches videos, other than porn, solo?
@Ross
Hm, yes, licensing and copyright issues...
When Netflix offered snail-mail rentals, before streaming, and you paid a monthly subscription fee for access to its library, was that a way around copyright infringement? Surely Netflix did not own the IP rights to all the titles in its library? Perhaps they cut the copyright holder in for a piece of the action? How did that business model work?
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We donated to the Hollywood Movie Theater purchase of Movie Madness here in Portland, OR. It is a !museum! our community worked hard to help preserve. I'd recommend this model to other "last-surviving" video stores of quality: https://hollywoodtheatre.org/movie-madness/about/
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I handled the Latsios's bankruptcy in the 1990s. The IRS was ready to shut them down on the spot, but Rebecca, Sue Pope and I managed to keep George's buying mania under control, and the IRS at bay, long enough for the sale to come together.
One interesting wrinkle I recall was that the original Scarecrow sign was a silhouette of the Wicked Witch of the West on her broom. Warner Brothers insisted they change it to the crow shown in the storefront photo.
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@Donald Bailey
Thank you so much for all you did for Scarecrow. Those were some dark and stormy times. So glad Scarecrow is still here, many thanks to you.
Rebecca
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Thank you for helping George and Rebecca get Scarecrow though this difficult time intact.
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A few years ago, we lost a great one in Portland, Maine!
You can check out a video about it here:
http://p3maine.com/videoport-a-short-doc/
DVDs killed the video store.
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@Fredric Alan Maxwell Streaming movies have almost killed the DVD store.
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Casa Video in Tucson, Arizona is epic, too.
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I'm sorry, but Scarecrow is not the LAST great video store. There's another thriving, idiosyncratic store--rocking all the titles you could ever hope to ask for--in South Pasadena, where people of all ages can be seen cruising the aisles on any given night... Videotheque http://www.vidtheque.com
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Portland, OR has a video store that went through a similar travail last year. Movie Madness's owner was about to retire, but he offered to sell the store to a local cinema, the Hollywood Theatre (which itself has been non-profit for several years). Thanks to a crowd-funding campaign, Movie Madness still lives (as a .org rather than a .com): https://moviemadness.org/
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@mkt42 Yep. What's more, they'll track down videos for you.
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Don't forget Movie Madness in Portland! Thousands of titles from all genres! It has somehow managed to reinvent itself and stay alive...and we love it.
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Similar concept in Hamden, CT just a short drive from New Haven up Whitney Avenue- it's called Best Video and it too transformed itself into a non-profit community cultural center. As the decline of Blockbuster and others have shown, a video store on it's own can't survive the streaming era, but hopefully more of these types of non-profit film, music, and arts organizations with large vhs and dvd (and other media) collections can grow and thrive.
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This was and is a great place. If I still lived in Seattle I'd be there weekly. Browsing there was like browsing in a great bookstore. You stumbled upon things you never knew about and now couldn't wait to watch. Looking through movie titles online at Amazon or Netflix never seems to yield such serendipity and it mostly involves sorting through action films and rom-coms that all seem alike. I hope Scarecrow lives on!
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