With 8 days remaining on the Video Fan Kickstarter, the local, independent video-rental store needs your help more than ever.
With 8 days remaining on the Video Fan Kickstarter, the local, independent video-rental store needs your help more than ever.
“It’s really tough,” says owner Doug McDonald. “It’s hard for us to pay off all of our bills and to buy all of the movies that we need.” The local video-rental institution, which has been in operation since 1986, houses over 40,000 movie titles.
Streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Instant Video have reduced the popularity of renting physical media, and Video Fan is no exception.
Video Fan employee Andrew Blossom says rentals this past summer were particularly thin, putting the store in dire straits financially. The business cannot afford to lease its current space on Strawberry Street for another year, and the clock is ticking on the 60-day leasing period.
Blossom is in charge of the Kickstarter campaign, Video Fan Forever, which he and other Video Fan employees designed. Funds raised from the Kickstarter would allow Video Fan to lease the current store space for another year while the company implements a more sustainable nonprofit model.
“The basic idea of the nonprofit,” Blossom explains, “is to start treating the collection not just as the stock of a video store but [as] the other thing that it is; which is a collection that has been amassed over almost 30 years… as a resource that should be protected not just for ourselves but for the entire community.”
The store houses everything from classic Western films to obscure Spanish horror movies, on both DVD and VHS.
Video Fan’s diverse collection draws equally diverse Richmonders. Daniel Carr, a professor of Biology at VCU, is a longtime customer. When asked how many movies he has rented from the store, Carr laughs and says, “Oh, most of them.”
For Carr and others, Video Fan’s status as a Richmond institution stems not only from its movie selection, but also from the unique breed of social interaction it provides. Blossom says, “In talking to people, in an environment like this, you’re able to discover things you never would imagine. It’s just not the same when an algorithm is recommending movies to you on a screen.”
The store fosters a sense of community and brings together locals who might not otherwise interact.
McDonald explains, “We’ve had people that met [here] and got married… I’ve always thought the social part was the important part.” He has seen an entire generation pass through the doors during his time at Video Fan, a fact he finds shocking but incredible.
“It really is a community place,” Carr says.
Despite the increasingly digitized world of film and television, Blossom continues to be a strong advocate for physical media. “When Video Fan gets [a movie],” he explains, “Unless it’s broken or stolen, we have it. And we have it for 30 years, and it’s available to customers.” Services like Netflix and Amazon Instant Video are only able to offer movie titles for a fixed amount of time, contingent on contract negotiations. Thus, he explains, “There’s no consistency for online rental.”
Blossom predicts that when physical media disappears, the streaming prices will not be as low as they are now on services like Amazon. He believes that once corporations control the media market, they will set prices much higher, which is why preserving a collection like that of Video Fan is so important.
“Even if we can’t get a new DVD of a movie in 2023,” Blossom says. “We will have everything we already have and that will still be accessible at Video Fan prices.”
So, what stands to be lost if Video Fan closes? For Blossom, the store’s role as a community focal point and its extensive movie archives are two things Richmond has as long as Video Fan is open.
“When they go away, we don’t get those back,” he says. McDonald agrees. “There’s no replacement.”
