"♪" "[film projector flickering] [chatter in Spanish]" "If it grabs me then we'll get it." "That's, uh, that's the name of the game." "I don't have any hard, fast rules." "I just kind of..." "I just kind of look, you know." "Obviously, I'm gonna be looking for some- some trash." "Some cheese." "We're lookin' for Chuck." "We're lookin' for Charles Bronson." "We're lookin' for Dolph Lundgren." "That kind of thing." "Action." "I've seen a lot of..." "door handles." "They got, uh... doorknobs." "And, uh..." "lotion." "I" " I never expected to see a whole table full of... lotions and... shave gel." "We've got socks here." "All the socks you could possibly want." "Still waiting on some tapes." "Still hoping for some tapes here." "Doll heads... doll heads." "It's the same old stuff." "I'm surprised to not already have seen Titanic." "That's, like, the most... most common tape I see." "The two disc.." "Er..." "two tape Titanic... um..." "Oh, what do you know?" "It's the- the two tape Titanic." "I'm gonna have to go with Shakedown." "We're gonna have action." "You can see it right here." "There's explosions." "And there's Peter Weller." "What else do you need?" "A dollar." " A dollar?" "[No sound]" "We've got five for two." "Got some kids clamshells." "But we also got some other ones we're gonna go through." "[Laughs] No, definitely not." "Clarissa... can't explain that." "The Adventures of Timmy the Tooth is something very creepy that I have personal nostalgia for." "It's been a long time." "Thank you." " Thank you." "Something about dental movies, animated things that they make for- about, uh- dental hygiene, always seem to be really creepy." "Frank Gorshin is in this movie." "What?" "Frank Gorshin was, of course, The Riddler, on the original Batman." "So, I hate to say it, but..." "We're gonna have to buy Game Day, starring Richard Lewis." "Uh, the Gorsh factor just hit." "It just sunk in." "[Chatter in Spanish]" "[Latin music in the background]" "Titanic." "Two tape Titanic set, again." "Always." "You know you're gonna have to rewind it." "Why not just go ahead and buy a rewinder?" "[Lo-fi 80's style synth music]" "♪" "And there was this thing in the corner, next to the TV, that..." "my parents said," ""It's for playing and recording movies"." "I saw this thing and I thought," ""Well, How does it work?" "This sounds like heaven"." "VHS tapes were so widespread, and they were so common, and so prevalent... that..." "I think for most people... they were just sort of part of the everyday, you know, background of your life, growing up." "Or, if you were an adult during that time frame, they're just something that you had." "It wasn't until a little, you know, maybe by '84 or 5, where everybody and their mother had the machine." "Because we'd had just enough Christmases to get the machines in everybody's home." "Videocassette got me, you know, hooked on movies." "I loved going to movies as a kid, but the VHS tapes, bringing those movies home," "I could watch them any time I wanted." "Getting us all together to go to the theater was a big deal, and it didn't happen very often." "We had to get there, pay, get popcorn, all that." "So, home video was the standard for me." "They opened, in our neighborhood, this, uh, video store." "And it was called Pop N' Go." "And my mom is from Mexico, and she would call it "Po-Ping-O"." "[Laughs] So she would alway say, "Oh, Let's go to Po-Ping-O."" "And the popcorn was so good." "I remember going, and the giant, like, cardboard cut-outs of, like, movies coming soon." "And that's the first time I ever saw The Toxic Avenger, in the giant cut-out." "And I was a little kid, and I was like," ""I've gotta watch this."" "Back then it was huge." "It was like the Friday night thing to do." "And it was, you know, I mean, you really took your time thinking 'cause you- it was $29 to join." "You know, so it wasn't free to join." "So I'd spend my Saturdays, get on my little bicycle, my Ninja Turtles bicycle, and go from one store to the next, like, looking for this title." "Whatever it might be." "And I remember specifically," "I really wanted to see Basket Case." "And none of the video stores had it." "And so, for like, months, I would go to every one, and be like, "Did you's guys get Basket Case yet?" "I wanna see Basket Case."" "I saw Apocalypse Now is out, and I went "Oh, I need that."" "And then I saw Blood Feast was out." "And I went, "Oh my God, I need that."" "And I saw Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was out." ""Oh my God, I need that."" "So, I bought my first Betamax, you know, with the top loader, with the big piano keys, and the remote was attached to a wire." "[Laughs] You know, so it really wasn't even a remote." "[Speaking Japanese]" "Well, video took cinema out of the movie theater." "So, you know, it takes a lot of money to build a movie theater." "It takes a lot of seats." "You put the seats in, you have to get all the people to sit in the seats to make it profitable." "And so I think, If you- If you say worldwide, yeah, I think it was kind of like a democratization." "It was a form of wider exposure." "It's Friday night, you're with your friends, you're having a sleepover, you're at the video store." "You wanna make each other laugh by finding the dumbest thing possible." "I think that was a huge, huge part of it, really." "Sitting around with your friends, laughing, eating pizza..." "What is better than that?" "It was a very special time, where you could, all of a sudden, be introduced to all of this stuff that never... never would have been available." "Never would have shown on TV." "Um, never would have been in your movie theater." "Certainly in a place like Nottingham, which is kind of a small city in England." "I grew up on 42nd Street." "So I had access to movies... the average person normally wouldn't have, unless," "I guess, you lived next door to a drive-in or something." "So I loved the fact that I was seeing crap that no one had even heard of." "What surprised me was how much of that crap came out on VHS." "[Synth music]" "♪" "I'm very proud to say that I have 82 movies that start with "dead", "death" and "deadly"." "82." "So, I've really made it." "I'm really a great success in life." "Above you can see that I have my big boxes, my oversize clamshells." "Things like that." "Um..." "I have things alphabetical, to keep things simple." "The way I've done it, is color." "Because to me it looks the most aesthetically pleasing." "I just tried doing it in a Roy G Biv kind of way." "And just came all the way down to black and white." "I also do my books that way." "And for me it's a system that totally works." "You can ask me any video and I can be like," ""Okay, that one's green." And pick it out." "And it's really easy for me, and I think it looks really nice." "This is one of my all time favorites, though." "Corey Haim:" "Me, Myself and I." "So good." "I know Corey passed, ya know." "And I love Corey." "I'm not really even making fun of him, but this is the awesomest thing ever." "The direction in my life right now" "I guess proceed with, um..." "in the business, is... gradually, um, from being the little boy, from a younger, you know, brother, trying to get to be the older brother, or the only brother." "[80's pop music]" "♪" "I don't know if this is the pride of my collection." "This is the tape that I've gotten the most fun out of recently." "It's called Bubba Until it Hurts." "[Laughs] "It's for men and women..." "It's not just another pretty workout."" "3, and 4, and 5, and 6, and..." ""Unlike many exercise programs, Bubba Until it Hurts utilizes a minimum of jumping."" ""The lack of jumping up and down makes this program ideal for apartment house dwellers."" "It's just like, why would you put that on your VHS?" "Like why would that ever be a marketing point?" "And at the end he goes, he's like" ""Now that you've met my friends, let's get to work..." "I love you."" "He says "I love you."" ""I love you, now let's get to work."" "It is like, "Whoa, Bubba Smith, not until it hurts, please."" "In order to get to it, You've got to go through it." "I love you and welcome to Until it Hurts." "We have my favorite movie here," "I have Heavenly Bodies." "Three copies of it." "If you love aerobics, if you love Canadian features, this is exactly where you need to go." "Rolling Vengeance, see, it's coming right at ya there." "It's even got a drill right in front, because it's fuckin' badass." "[Engine roaring]" "This is one of my prized possessions." "The Leslie Nielsen Bad Golf Made Easier, signed by Leslie Nielsen." "I don't know if you can get in on the gold signature of the man himself." "Stand directly in your opponent's line, and lean imperceptibly to one side or another as he tries to read the break." "This is a movie called Death Rider." "This is a shot-on-video western." "And it is really one of the most impossibly... hypnotically awkward things that you will ever see." "I thought you were dead, Clayton." "No, that's my brother you're talkin' about." "And it's kind of a passion project by this guy Ronald Koontz, who is the lead actor, writer, director, editor, cameraman, and he 'proudced' the film." "Probably my favorite 'proudcer' is Ronald Koontz." "Now I'm getting into all the ones that I gasp about." "The Windows 95 Easy Instruction Video Guide, featuring Matthew Perry and Jennifer Aniston in character." "Because this was right when Friends started." "So it's all this, like," ""Oh really?" "You click on the start window?"" "That is pathetic." "[80's style synth horror movie music]" "♪" "When I first started, I was like," ""Oh man, dude, I have 80 movies."" "It was just, like, phenomenal to me that I could, like, pick through 80 movies." "But then I got to 500 and... pretty soon I go to 1,000." "Zombies, occult, supernatural, slasher movies." "I got a slasher closet over there." "If there's at least three movies that I can categorize together," "I'm like, "Okay, that can be a sub-genre." "So I have one right now, it's got four movies and it's about homeless horror." "Get a job, loser, you shit your fuckin' pants." "So, that's a little sub-genre I have." "I've learned a lot about culture in general, just by doing all these little sub-sections." "There's a lot of things you have to search out." "A lot of things you have to look for, not even knowing what you're looking for." "And you might find something that you never knew was out there." "♪" "The video revolution began in Japan in the mid-70's, when the engineers at Sony began to develop a tape format." "And at the same time, the engineers at JVC, they developed their own." "Back then, you know, everything was Betamax/VHS." "And so, you went to a store, there was always both formats." "Ridiculously, they used to charge" "$3 more for a VHS tape, because you were buying more plastic." "Really nothing happened in any numbers until '79, when it began to explode." "Both formats were originally head-to-head, fighting for the supremacy." "And it was sort of thought that maybe both could exist together." "Which proved not to be the case." "I, of course, bought Beta." "[Laughs]" "So, you know, wasted all these zillions of videos, that I bought in the Beta format." "And, of course, Beta went bye-bye very soon after." "If you're looking at videocassette recorders, and you're confused by all your choices just look at the most important feature of all," "The picture." "And Sony Betamax records a sharper picture than VHS." "Beta was technically superior, but, it had one huge flaw, which was that it was only one hour long." "VHS format was two hours long." "VHS videocassettes play longer, which can save you money." "Big deal." "One of my closest friends is Robert A. Harris, the restorationist." "And he was always talking about the latest technologies." "He was keeping me alerted about the war between Beta and VHS, and how the cheaper one was gonna win, because the public just doesn't give a shit." "He was correct." "When I rented The Last Unicorn on Beta, and stuck it in my grandmother's VHS player." "That was not good." "That's when I understood the difference between VHS and Beta." "'Cause I didn't get to watch The Last Unicorn that night." "For any TV show, like, whatever, any new show that's out right now, of course their goal is "Well this is gonna be on DVD, it's gonna be on Hulu, it's gonna be watched forever and ever."" "But back then, they didn't really realize that." "[Speaking Japanese]" "Oh, and you've missed your football on TV." "Anything for you, Mom." "Oh, you are a good boy." " Bye!" "When you have a Phillips television recorder, you don't have to miss anything." "The Phillips television recorder records TV when you can't watch." "So you can replay anytime." "[Bell rings]" "Who the" "The Phillips television recorder." "Mums." "I don't think any member of the audience actually said," ""Gee, I need a machine that will help me control my schedule."" "But once the machine was made, then they came up with concept of time-shifting, and that was a concept that really worked." "That you could actually shift the TV schedule around." "They've made it so simple to use, the cat can operate it." "Kittles, I want you to record an ITV program at 10:30." "Sony C6." "So simple, the cat can use it." "The TiVo age only exists, because we were raised with VHS." "Because we were the first generation that could be sent to bed with a promise," ""It'll be here tomorrow when you get up."" "That changed our relationship with television." "I discovered that, uh..." "I could program the VCR." "That was, like, a big day..." "You know for me," "Like, as a nine year-old to get around the parental controls and tape R-rated things." "You can watch your TV shows when you wanna watch it." "That's the advertising campaign that really pushed Betamax to the top of the heap, and was a big success for two years, until VHS caught up with them." "With an even better reason to buy it, because they could record longer." "Suppose it's over three hours." "Relax, Panasonic VHS tapes up to four hours of sports, movies, specials, on one cassette." "VHS used that to actually win out in the format war with Sony." "At a certain moment in time, people were like," ""I don't like that you can share this thing with people." "I wanna control the mechanism of distribution."" "You know, "Only programmed on television", right, you know." ""Only available in movie theaters."" "So when the VHS tape comes out, for a ton of the people involved on the manufacturing side, it's a watershed." "But there's people in content and distribution, before everyone has decks and they can monetize it, they're like, "I don't know if this is a good thing or not."" "So this whole notion of selling something, where you lost control entirely, was a new notion." "And it made major movie studios very, very nervous." "Box office kept increasing, so it's not like people are staying home and avoiding the movie theater." "It's a new bunch of people putting new money into home video." "And that's what's really driving this incredible explosion of the film industry in the 1980's." "The guy who financed Brain Damage for me was a man named Andre Blay, and he's credited with starting this." "He had a company in Michigan called Magnetic Video, that was dealing mainly with 3/4 inch tapes for industrial use." "And he got the idea one day," ""Wow, I wonder if I could put Hollywood movies on half inch."" "When I made the decision to buy movie rights," "I said, "Well, I gotta go to all the Hollywood studios."" "And I wrote them a letter saying that the home video revolution is about to begin." "And I could help start this new industry." "So he writes a letter to all the major studios about, you know, "C'mon, give me a film," "I'll put it on tape, and we'll see what happens."" "And no studio was interested." "They thought it was a crazy idea, they thought it was a stupid idea," "They thought it would devalue the films..." "But Fox said, "Eh, fine, let this guy do it." "If he fails, he fails." "You know, who cares?" "We'll get some money out of it."" "This is pre" " Star Wars, so 20th Century Fox is probably a company that's not doing that well." "In any case, they hedged their bet." "They gave him films that were at least four years old." "The Sound of Music, and, you know," "Patton, and all that stuff." "And, uh, they sold for an exorbitant rate." "They were like, 89, 99 dollars." "[Screaming] [maniacal laughter]" "The only world we recognized was getting our films in the theaters." "Charlie Band was the only one in our circle that was thinking about the home video market." "So what I did was I thought," ""Well, let me go find or license the rights to other successful independent films." "Even my lawyer had no real idea of how to write the document, 'cause no documents had been written prior to license these video rights." "You know, what is the territory, what is the price?" "No idea." "It was a pioneering time because nothing existed." "Next step, let's not sell them the pre-recorded tapes, let's actually rent it to them." "Andre never anticipated the rental market." "And he said he remembers the day he got a phone call from a store saying, "Hey, can I rent this?"" "And he went, "..." "No!" [Laughs]" "And the store says, "Well my lawyer said I can."" "And it was like, "Oh, no." You know, so, that started it." "And, uh, the punch line to Andre's story was eventually... all the studios saw how lucrative the market was." "They all came out with their own, you know, label." "Except for Fox, of course." "So, Fox had to buy Andre out." "They had to buy" " So he- [laughs]" "Whatever he bought it for, boy, he quadrupled that, okay?" "The video at that point was kind of taking over for the drive-in circuit." "Video was the new market for the kids to rent the horror films, and the films they wouldn't see at the mainstream theater." "Well, I definitely don't think that my career would have gone where it had, without video." "My movie was released in all kinds of foreign countries on video." "If it wasn't for video, for me," "I know my popularity would be much, much smaller than it is." "When videocassettes first came in, we jumped in, we loved it." "We thought it was great." "And, in fact, it was great." "And there were mom and pop shops, there were video stores opening up all over the country, all over the world... that needed movies." "In the early days, the appetite for video was so pervasive, people could pick the wrong location, they could pick the wrong videocassette titles, they could hire surly staff, they could have terrible hours, and horrible policies," "and people were still gravitating to these stores." "It was just- there was such a hunger for it." "[Speaking Japanese]" "So the idea of having movies that were at your disposal when you wanted them was..." "kind of remarkable." "And there was no talk of picture quality or aspect ratio, or any of that." "It was just availability." "So you had to kind of be aware that as much as you wanna use that frame right to the edge, you wouldn't." "You'd kind of... give yourself a little cheat on either side, 'cause you knew that when it went to video, the edges would be cut off." "I looked at a few of them," "I was appalled at the improper aspect ratios." "And the lack of rich contrasts and resolution, and, uh... never did buy one." "And predicted they wouldn't catch on." "Original aspect ratio never caught on 'cause people thought they were being gypped." ""I've got black bars on the top and bottom of my picture!"" "Yeah!" "That's so you see the sides!" "They ne- it never sunk in!" "Now I know people that have the widescreen TV's, so if they watch Casablanca, they zoom in on it to fill up the picture!" "I don't get it, I don't get it." "I don't get it." "Sometimes it looks better than the widescreen." "If you get the VHS of Pat Garrett  Billy The Kid, it's horribly pan and scanned and, like, they zoom in at times." "But it's got this interesting aesthetic to it, which I like and actually prefer that." "You can't make that camera movement with a camera, like, it only exists in however they used to make the pan and scan." "So when you saw stuff like that, you just thought, like," ""That was a weird camera movement."" "I don't know, I" " I enjoy pan and scan." "It doesn't bother me." "I don't like it when it's completely cropped..." "Like, where they just cut it off." "Where they just don't give a shit." "They just cut the left and right off, and then stuff is missing." "Or when they smoosh it, I don't like that." "But I like that weird... the- the weird ones where it moves back and forth." "I think that's pretty good." "Oh, fantastic!" "Closer, closer." "The warmth, the wetness." "Unbelievable!" "This is what it's all about!" "This is heat." "This'll make me famous!" "We gotta talk about the VHS movement." "And I've been lucky." "I've been there at all the innovations." "I've been here at all the changes." "We went from a qualitative media, to a quantitative media." "The video concept made it easier, but did it make it better?" "I don't know." "[Speaking Japanese]" "It was the very tail-end of the theatrical distribution, and it was more of, um, video stores were just popping up all over." "So you had a lot of independent, adult bookstores, and business was thriving." "The video boom came out of the facility to watch this material at home, and no longer have to be ashamed, theoretically, to go to a theater." "And I knew that once this door was open it would never be closed." "Why don't you move the teddy bear and come sit by me." "Nah, I got a better idea, why don't you come over here." "Pardon me, Teddy." "[Speaking Japanese]" "Any major consumer electronics medium... it's success or failure in the market will be determined based on it's relationship with the adult entertainment business." "And I think VHS is where we learned that." "[Speaking Japanese]" "I like the way a film looks, but I think that video probably makes the end consumer feel like he's a part of the experience." "[Speaking Japanese]" "What video did change about the porn industry was the idea that since we're distributing on video, we can shoot on video." "Changed the economics of that business." "And made the business so much bigger than it had ever been before." "What if we took these big boxes you know, in their trays and made them smaller, and maybe even we could attempt to sell them in alternative markets, like airports or bookstores." "And they were selling like hot cakes." "And the business took off." "And that's how we created the sell-through title." "Media had this crazy idea of releasing tapes at the, then, shocking price of $19.95." "They were calling it sell-through." "Every other company was going," ""Oh that's a stupid idea, it's ridiculous."" "You know, 'cause they thought the more money it cost, the more money you'd make." ""Gee, I wish they'd sell Basket Case for that."" "Because it would be the only film like that." "A disreputable, unrated, blood and gore film, out on the market." "And... teenagers, which were my core audience, they couldn't afford $49.95, but they could all afford 20 bucks." "Media thought it was a terrible idea." "They thought it was such a bad idea, they said," ""We'll do it, but, if it doesn't move, we're gonna go right back to the regular price."" "[Screaming]" "By the time Halloween came around, my god," "Basket Case was everywhere." "We made a fortune." "It did spectacular." "I mean, I bought this apartment." "This was my down payment that I needed from the bank to buy this apartment." "Suddenly the sell-through market was born." "I'd like to think Basket Case had a lot to do with that." "[Screaming]" "It was great for independents because, the major studios really caught on very slowly, to video." "And there were so many examples of independent films, that were brand new to that audience, that were more desirable than the big studio films." "So, many times, those little pictures would out-perform," "Not theatrical, on TV and other deals that were happening." "But when it came to the video market, in those early days, it was incredible." "It's the return of cult hero Freddie Krueger!" "And for the past two summers, Freddie's nightmares have been the nation's top video rental titles." "Now, it's Freddie's third time around, and he's all set to claw his way beyond the 200,000 mark!" "The advent of home video also made companies very successful." "Very small companies very successful." "And I think that's largely why we have so many insane VHS oddities now, is because there would be a huge Hollywood movie that would hit, like Indiana Jones or Friday the 13th, and you would get a whole plethora of films" "that were aping that, made for 12 cents." "Production price tag, you know, Terminator, 80 million," "Puppetmaster, $400,000." "It's like, you know, it's not an even playing field, but in the video store, they're all on the same shelf, they're all in the same size boxes." "Look, if idiots like Troma can make a movie that... sells million and millions of dollars of videocassettes, well, then anybody can do it." "[Screaming]" "Distribution was handled very differently." "There were a lot more distributers." "There were people that were willing to experiment in home video." "It was so new that it felt like the wild west." "It felt like anybody could get a foothold and be a major player in VHS distribution." "I was approached by a couple of producers who.." "Wanted to produce a video which would go straight to home video." "And this was something new." "My idea was I would create an electronic aquarium." "People found this intriguing." "Here was this new thing that used this new medium that had been created." "What really, I think, caused the early explosion in video, was Jane Fonda's workout tape." "And now count to four." "Heels forward." "And then, one... two... three..." "So, this was a tape that did something original, which was, gave you an opportunity to exercise, in your home, in front of your TV, by yourself." "Don't need to go to a gym." "It was a very good concept." "And it had never really been done before." "Well, the early days of video, it was a seller's market." "It was great." "I mean, they couldn't get enough." "This was a worldwide exposure, and there was a window where if you made a clever movie, and it was relatively well done, and it was in the right genre, you know, it was an action film or horror, or sci-fi," "you would make some money." "So it was Toei, which is one of the... traditional major studios in Japan, that sort of launched this straight-to-video market." "Whereas, in the U.S., largely, video was, for a very long time, sort of demonized by the traditional studios." "[Speaking Japanese]" "[gunfire]" "[speaking Japanese]" "Vestron Video, they were very aggressive." "If you had a movie, and you went to some place life AFM, the American Film Market, or Cannes, and the video rights for your movie were not locked up, almost immediately, you'd be visited" "by a salesperson from Vestron, saying, "Here... here's a million dollars right up front, give me the movie." "In the initial stages, you would go into a store and find something that you wanted." "You wouldn't see a commercial, you wouldn't read anything in the magazine or newspaper." "I mean, it was just that new." "All these stores were opening up and they needed to fill the shelves with new titles." "So there was this huge demand." "It didn't matter if they were good or bad." "You have a pretty flourishing industry that's based on renting video tapes." "30 to 35 thousand video rental stores across the country." "Most often mom and pop operations." "Charlie would have title contests for his employees." "And if you came up with a title that he used, you'd get $500." "So everybody would come up with 10 or 15 titles and he would narrow it down to, like, a hundred, and then he would commission box art." "And then Austin Furst would come in from Vestron." "He would just come into the room and he'd go around, and say," ""I'll take that one, and that one, and that one, and that one."" "And then Charlie would bring the writers and directors in and then say, "I want you to do this one and that one."" "[Synth music]" "That was an era of great equivalency at video stores." "I think people would rent anything with a cover that interested them." "It wasn't about studio, it wasn't about movie star, it wasn't about budget." "When you're looking at a shelf, it's very democratic." "The best cover catches your eye." "One thing I do, is go to video stores whenever I'm in them, and find the movie, and I pick it out, and I put it flat so it's facing front." "A little extra advertising can't hurt." "[Laughs] I really do." "I'm like, looking around to see that nobody looks." "A lot of them I picked just on the cover art." "Malone!" "That's a cover buy." "Have I watched it?" "I'm not gonna lie to you and tell you I've watched this movie." "But, if this happens somewhere in it, then it's a good movie." "Also, there's something to be said about something so large, you could kill a small child with this." "Like, you could bludgeon somebody to death with this." "That was a handful, when you bought one of those." "And it left a lot of space for a really good artist to actually create something that in itself was a work of art." "When you did a major film it was fun to see it." "It's the kind of job that a lot of illustrators really cherish, and love to do." "It used to have a battery and you'd press the button, and then Frankenhooker says, "Wanna date?"" "Um..." "Because that's one of her catchlines... catchphrases in the movie." ""Wanna date?"" "She's a Frankenhooker." "I have the box but it doesn't work anymore." "But it was this talking box." "And you'd press here, and you'd hear a voice go "Wanna date?"" "When you push the button on the box, she goes, "Wanna date?"" "It was obsessive." "You just sat there," ""Wanna date?" "Wanna date?" "Wanna date?" Wanna date?"" "When this was in the stores, that's all people were doing." "I think the talking box did more to sell the movie than the movie did." ""If you only see one movie this year, it should be Frankenhooker."" "Of course it should be." "I mean you see things that are like, wow, this box art is not selling." "And, especially being a buyer for as long as I have," "I can really look at stuff and go," ""This box art will sell this movie."" "Looking at those, like 2000 Maniacs, just... the blood coming out of the mouth, or the Color Me Blood Red, with the woman, like, just totally splayed." "Guts hanging out." "I was just like, "That is for me."" "People have a certain amount of nostalgia for kinda old VHS stuff." "And some of it was pretty great." "Most of it was awful." "I mean, if you're objective about it." "There are terrible, terrible, unspeakably bad movies that have some of the best covers I've ever seen." "I admire the fact that those companies figured out," ""Man, all we gotta do is wrap it nicely."" "This was ultimately used as a video cover, for Chevy Chase Funny Farm." "Sometimes it's just the simpler image that read better." "It was a great way for so many artists to make a living, and there was a lot of great art produced, especially during the 70's and 80's." "We would fight to get our name in there, and... some would allow it and others would take it out." "And so we'd kinda hide it in somewhere." "My name is in the hair." "If you turn it upside-down and have a look at it, you'll see it." "When somebody does kind of a cheap, fast photoshop, here's a bunch of floating heads, you know, buy it because these actors are in it." "Like, that artwork isn't gonna move the needle at all." "I dunno what happened, I mean, they actually used to use color." "I don't see color all that frequently." "It's like they're designing shit for dogs." "I think that everyone forgot how awesome a painted cover is, of a dude with his shirt off..." "holding a machine gun." "Why would you take a photo of that when you can paint a beautiful portrait of it." "That's the stuff that's gonna keep it out of the mainstream." "You know, the big box stores don't want that painted artwork." "The amount of work I was given from the movie studios really started to slow down in the early 90's." "Then, all of a sudden, they said that I had to learn how to do it on a computer, or they couldn't use me anymore." "Once I mastered the tool of the computer," "I was able to create what I did before, maybe even a bit better." "Don't give me art." "I can't stand art." "The worst covers on the planet." "Criterion." "I'm sorry, guys." "They're the most boring covers ever made." "How could you not wanna see this?" "How could you not wanna own this?" "My god... you know, this..." "this is a cover." "Yeah." " Yeah." "Criterion, go fuck yourself." "This is how you sell it." "[80's style synth music]" "♪" "So by 1986, home video is giving as much money to Hollywood as the box office." "And it's all new money." "20th Century Fox is bought up by the News Corporation." "Paramount is bought up by Viacom." "Because of home video, you actually have Sony, an electronics manufacturer, deciding never to lose a format war again." "And the way to do that was to buy up a film studio." "So they bought Columbia." "So by the 1990's, you have a new landscape of media conglomerates." "And they represented that film was switching over to a major brand." "That you can spin-off from film, into many different markets with the sales of videos, music, toy action figures, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera..." "You know, we're down now, to the same basic five or six corporate pipelines that supply almost all of our media, and unfortunately, they're not voracious enough to sort of reach outside their own catalogues." "So you don't have that sort of... hunger in the marketplace anymore." "Blockbuster came in and they took over." "And they really got rid of all the mom and pop chains." "It's name says it all." "It was about blockbusters." "That's all they were interested in." "Video rental is gone." "You know, that was the dominant way of seeing films, you know, 20 years ago." "And it's dead." "Even though we lost all that, yes, we have the internet" "I'm not gonna say that the internet isn't great." "It's incredible." "In some ways it's almost worth it." "Yeah, there's definitely a sense of loss, of course, I think." "But, it's awesome to see the places that are still around, like Cinefile, Odd Obsession," "Scarecrow, I Heart Video, Vulcan." "They're still going strong." "This is our video tape costume, that we have someone who, uh... gets in and jumps around, during the trivia contests that we do." "And it's pretty easy to get on, you just slide it..." "Kinda like this." "And jumps around like that." "We were thinking of hiring some guy to just be on the sidewalk and just waving at people." "But... nobody wants to do that for minimum wage." "What VHS had, because it dominated for so long, was just an appetite." "They had to fill those shelves." "They had to have new product out." "And so distributers reached deep into their catalogues, and they had to." "That was, I think, the greatest era of discovery." "VHS had an unusually long life for a home video format." "And I think that is something that we'll never see happen again." "We'll never see Blu-Ray dominate the market for 15 years." "It just won't happen." "When I first started it was like," "I'm a college grad," "I've had a business, and now I'm gonna work in a flea market." "People would ask me in church, or whatever," "I sell movies at the flea market." "And it's like "Ugghh!"" "The funny thing about digging through all of Wayne's stuff at the house..." "Is that there's no separation whatsoever between genres." "Basically you'll have, like The Brave Little Toaster and then Enormous Wangs of The Northern Yukon, er whatever, and they're just, like, right next to each other 'cause they're both oversize boxes." "That's a great film, you should check that one out." "We're The Picture Show." "Been here since 1990." "Got lots of customers that were kids, would come in, their parents would buy 'em kids movies, are now married and bringin' in their kids." "So, that's the biggest thing that keeps me goin'." "And so I have people comin' in, most of them over 55 or 60, that still like VHS, still buy VHS, that's what they want." "And then, young guys like you, who are collectors, and they want the old stuff, and they wanna get into all that." "This is a typical VHS buyer." "Uh, kind of, low-class." "[Laughs] Here's a movie about a donkey named Paco." ""He'll steal your heart and your wallets."" "Wayne charges a lot for his VHS." "Like, you know, way more than anyone else in America probably charges for their VHS." "It's like a flat rate of 9 bucks if he likes you, 10 bucks if he doesn't." "And there's no way on earth that Paco is worth 9 bucks." "He actually is stealing my wallets." "[Jones] You gotta have the real movie people." "The people that know you can't get this stuff on Netflix, or whatever." "[Jones] Yeah." "And those people are fewer and fewer." "I've just kept on keepin' on." "[Carlson] But you have a personal... fondness for VHS I'm sure." "[Jones] Oh sure, Yeah, I still watch VHS." "And if I've got a choice to watch somethin'" "I got all this new stuff around here, but I'll end up watchin' an old movie." "You know to me, it's like an old friend." "We display about 17,000 titles on VHS." "We display about 12,000 titles on DVD." "Probably up there, I have another... 15, 20,000 duplicates, and around here in the two rooms," "I probably have close to another 50,000..." "VHS." "[Carlson] So, that's over 100,000?" "50, 60, 70, yeah, probably at least 80, 85, maybe." "And I don't really know." "I'm not countin' 'em." "This is the video room inside Wayne's house, which is like total chaos." "Like the earth has vomited up, you know, 12 video stores." "You do the best out in the country." "You don't wanna be in town." "You're fightin' all the Best Buys and the Wal-Marts and on and on." "Up there, I'm the biggest movie thing to a lot of people comin' in from a 40 or 50 mile radius." "We can talk intelligently about 90 percent of the movies up there, and we've probably seen three percent of 'em." "If you don't know, then you go, "I hear it's a good movie."" "Or... "Yeah, that's a real good, that's a pretty good movie."" "Are you ever honest and say "I hear it's terrible"?" "No, no, no no no no." "That's absolutely a no-no." "And you go, "It's a pretty box, look at the box."" "Well, most of it, you've just heard people tell you it sucks, but you don't know it, 'cause I haven't seen it." "Nothin' was more depressing, to me, than to wake up on January first, and know exactly what you're gonna make..." "I want to at least have the possibility of makin'... $50,000 or makin' $10,000." "But at least I don't know." "It's still out there." "This VHS home video system has every single function you will ever need." "It was made by JVC, the people who invented VHS." "A home video system so advanced, it's used in more sets around the world than any other." "But the best invention is our cordless remote control unit, which puts every function of the machine itself into the palm of your hand." "VHS came out and the rewind button was introduced." "That was pretty much revolutionary for film-makers, 'cause you could just, easily, with the press of a button, just go back and constantly re-watch how Tom Savini stuck an arrow through someone's chest." "You could go back and pause it and look at it closely." "Also understand and dissect the structure of editing." "Because usually editing is designed to be very seamless, and you couldn't figure out how shots would be put together to create a flow, and an effect, and a gag especially, or a stunt." "It's really increased the ability for people to understand the language of film." "[Speaking Japanese]" "VHS kind of, I think, taught a lot of people about the nature of film, the nature of editing, the nature of sound, and how those things mattered." "Not on purpose, but on accident, like..." ""Oh okay, this tape is falling apart," "Oh, 'cause it's a physical medium." "Well, why is that?" "Oh, because it's just magnetic oxide stuck to a tape in a pre-determined pattern." "Oh, okay."" "Instead of having stacks of film books, we had stacks of VHS tapes." "That's what helped us discover our love for cinema, it's what inspired us to go start shooting our own movies." "And I remember even cutting my first films on two VHS players." "Everyone had a VHS deck in their house in the 1980's." "That was, I mean, everyone that I knew did." "So, you record something, you put it on a VHS tape, you can share it with everybody." "You could just leave the camera running... and you were also aware that it was easy to record sound." "Um, so that was really revolutionary." "And for someone who was raised on home movies on film, the idea of video was almost magical, it felt like this was too good to be true." "Think about film history classes." "Film 101." "Whatever university you've been in, whatever high school, the first films you looked at were the Lumiere films." "You've got a train coming into a station," "You've got factory workers leaving a factory, and you're feeding a baby." "These are the canonical titles of early cinema, that every textbook has." "And they are home movies." "I made my first feature on VHS when I was 12." "I would dress up my brothers in, like a gorilla costume, or we made fake guts that came out, or we did a fake episode of Cops." "It's mostly unwatchable and it's mostly deeply embarrassing." "♪ Papa was a rolling stone, Yes he was ♪" "♪ He was a rolling sto-one" "Before that it seemed like, well, making a movie is like this whole different thing." "There's no way that you could ever do that." "That's what people in Hollywood do." "But then, when I figured out, you can just get a video camera, and you make this movie, and you can show it to your friends, like, the next week, that was so exciting." "And then I was kinda hooked." "[On the video] Well, this sucks." "Come on let's go have a party or something." "Eh, this is dumb, I'm bored." "Waste of time." "But I think it was the fact that it was so accessible, it was the fact that it was universal." "It's like, "Alright, well let's go skate, and I'm just gonna bring the camera with me."" "It wasn't, like, this whole production." "You know, and I think in the grand scheme of things, we'll understand that there was the invention of film, and that that became domestic at one point, but that distinction between what was 8mm film" "and what was home video," "I think was just this weird, you know, maybe... 20 year blip in our evolution." "I was 10." "I saw the movie when it first came out, and really was overcome by just Indiana Jones, the character himself, and the world that he inhabited." "You know, being a single kid, and kinda nerdy, you know," "I wanted to create worlds for myself." "That was my motivation." "And then getting together with my friend Eric Zala, we wanted to recreate this Raiders film." "And of course, when you have a passionate idea, you find the tools to do it." "Eric had more of a drive to see a shot-for-shot remake of Raiders in its entirety." "I think for myself, maybe it was that idea." "But I think for me it was more," ""I just wanna play Indiana Jones."" "[Boulder rumbling]" "We worked from memory for the first three years." "Video stores weren't as readily available." "You just couldn't get stuff." "And so you were left to your own to go back to the theater and see the film again." "We bought the script that was published, we bought fan magazines." "I snuck a tape recorder into the movie theater just to get sound effects, and ended up getting thrown out." "And then when the film came out on laserdisc in '84 or '85 we watched it and realized we were pretty close." "The whole seven year project, really we just did it for ourselves." "But there's a nostalgia there for this generation of filmmakers that were teaching themselves on Betamax." "Something as simple as setting up your Barbie dolls, you know, or that could be something as complicated as wanting to remake Raiders of the Lost Ark in it's entirety" "VHS will always have a historical place because it was the first way in which images were circulated and duplicated, in a cost-effective way." "There were not the economic constraints that were associated with image-making before." "That's revolutionary." "I remember renting some of those, sort of, low-rent titles in the mom and pop video stores." "But then you would get 'em home and they would have this look, like" ""This doesn't look like a real movie, this doesn't look like a real film." ""Kinda looks like TV news, or something."" "And you'd get, like, a shot-on-video movie that would give every appearance of being a real movie, but it wouldn't be." "Wake up, bitch!" "No..." "No!" "This isn't real!" "There's something about, like, watching something shot-on-video." "It makes you feel mo- for me, like I could- it feels- there's more of, like a voyeuristic thing, 'cause you associate it with home movies." "And so then when you see a movie made on video you kinda get this feeling like you're seeing something that maybe you weren't supposed to." "Everybody was like, "You know, you gotta shoot it on film, what are you doing?" "You can't shoot a feature on video."" "I'm gonna take my time with this, we're gonna treat this like a movie." "Just the fact that it's being shot on Super VHS-C is gonna be irrelevant." "Sledgehammer... they..." "made it on VHS for VHS." "And I" " I think, as far as I know, it's the first one like that." "And made with a sense of professionalism, like," ""Maybe this is the new way."" "I was here in Ohio doing it and guys like Tim Ritter were down in Florida, you know, doing the same thing, and he was going door-to-door to video stores," "But eventually you had guys that cracked the nut at Blockbuster, and were getting stuff on Blockbuster store shelves." "The unprofessional quality of the shot-on-video movies to me, is what makes them beautiful and makes them..." "I dunno, it's weird, it's like they were trashy back then, but now there's an artistic quality." "Aaaaaaah." "Despite being an ex-boxer and marine," "The Rock finally succumbed to the vicious, relentless, blood-thirsty, unyielding, resilient, devil ant!" "[Unconvincing dying gasp]" "And have you seen the giant horny toad monster?" "Errr, he'll attack ya, errrrrrrrrr!" "And the devil ant!" "Errrrrr!" "I make monster comedies, I've been doin' that since 1990, and I've been makin' monster movies ever since." "My plot is I got a monster out there and he has to be destroyed!" "He has to be stopped!" "That's the plot of my movie." "They call Detective Rock to stop the monster, you know..." "Who always doesn't believe in the monster." "[Imitates sound of phone ringing] [muffled voice] Yeah, Detective Rock." "Hello." " Rock." "Rock" " Hello." "Yeah." "Yeah." " Hey, what?" "Ozzy's dead." "Hey man, I'm tryin' to eat, man." "You know you shouldn't be interrupt- callin' me this time." "You shouldn't be interrupting' me, man." "Ozzy's dead." " What?" "Greg 'Ozzy' Ozumeck is dead?" "Yeah, bitten by a devil ant." "Got bitten by a devil ant?" " Yeah." "Oh c'mon, man, that's an old wives' tale and you know it." "And it's got a lot of comedy in there, and it's got a lot of action, like monsters battling people." "A lot of victims." "And then at the end of the movie the monster gets killed, or he gets stopped, or whatever." "Thrown in jail or somethin'." "This is a person who has... one day sat down and decided, "I am going to improve the world with absolutely no financial support, and no critical support from anybody, and I'm gonna make this my life's mission."" "He is- he is like a living embodiment of a middle finger in the face of everybody who ever told you that you cannot do what you wanna do." "Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome David "The Rock" Nelson." "Eeerrrrrr!" " Ah!" "Errrr eerrrrr I'm gonna get you with my devil ant if you don't watch this movie by The Rock!" "I was a door to door dictionary salesman from '87 to '91." "So that sorta helped my sales, you know." "It helped me, it taught me how to sell to people." "And after that, after I was let go," "I started sellin' my movies in '93." "I went door to door with my monster movies." "I had interviews, I have an introduction, so you're getting a full-length movie, it's like two hours." "Plus you get previews, plus you get a long intro by me, flexing my muscles and stuff." "I'm gonna show ya, look!" "The Rock's got it!" "Show 'em!" "I drink like four glasses of milk a day, and I eat good," "I get my protein, you know, a beef patty maybe with some rice and maybe some veggies, or a small salad, and I... you know, every day I have a banana or an apple." "You know, get my fiber, get my fruit." "So, you know, all natural body-building," "I never took a steroid, it's all natural, bud." "46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52!" "Ladies and gentlemen!" "David "The Rock" Nelson!" "Are you jealous of my body?" "[Audience] Yes!" "Are you jealous of my body?" "Yeah." "The thing is, I got enough footage for like 100 movies right now." "I'm always filming' stuff." "And I film so much stuff that I forget where everything is." "So, a lot of times I have to reshoot something if I want it." "It takes too long to fast-forward, rewind to find that." "So I say, "I'll just do it over again."" "And it turns out pretty good the second time." "Go ahead and stab the knife in my chest, Sodom, go ahead, right in my heart." "Why not?" "I got ideas comin' outta my head, man, I'm 55!" "What's wrong with you guys sayin' you're old, when you're like my age, or younger!" "You're not old!" "Don't tell me, "Oh, I'm 48," "I'm gettin' too old fer this."" "Man, you're just a kid!" "Get motivated!" "You know, some of you will say, "Oh, you gotta do it digitally."" "Yeah, digital schmidgital!" "I don't need a computer to make a movie," "I never have!" "I just shoot the dang thing." "If you got a video camera, stick a blank tape in that machine, and film the dang thing!" "Quit makin' excuses," ""Well, I don't have all this money." "I need a budget so I can buy all this digital equipment."" "Use what ya got!" ""Well I didn't go to film school," "I don't know if my movies are gonna be good er not."" "Don't worry about it!" "Just listen to your heart and you do it!" "You take charge of your own vision!" "And don't worry what other people think!" "And don't let your mom talk you outta making' monster movies!" "I told my mom, I said." "My mom said, "David I wish you'd grow up, and do somethin' more constructive with your time!"" "I said, "Mom, you can't stop me from makin' movies, because you know I'm gonna do it anyway!"" "[80's synth pop music]" "The infamous glitch that all video store owners know." "When you're watching and there's a glitch, and you're like," ""Oh, it's gonna get nude in two seconds."" "Here's a news flash, nudity was gigantic with teenage boys." "It was a big thing back in the 80's." "Watching a video tape as a kid, when you can start to see the lines rolling through the picture you know that someone's watched it a lot at that point, and you know that there's gonna be tits coming on soon." "You get ready, you sit up in your chair, 'cause you think," ""Holy shit, some fuckin' weird pervert has watched this part so many times that I'm ready for the money shot."" "When you watch a VHS tape, there's almost like a archeology" "Where there's history written into the physical material of the thing itself." "You get to see the parts that are really beat up." "You know that someone rewound that and watched it over and over." "It's like the part where there's boobs or the part where the guy explodes." "You know that was someone's favorite part and they couldn't get enough." "[Screaming]" "That was the first, I think, anybody had the power over being able to see boobs, again and again and again and again and again." "Cable had been a reality in our lives, so you could see boobs..." "but then they were gone." "And they were just a golden memory." "I had a video tape of Kentucky Fried Movie and I lent it to a friend." "And when he gave it back, it was like, every 10 minutes or something, it would just go" "And I'd be like, "You watched all those nude scenes over and over again in one weekend!" "Because now my tape is ruined." "But it's also kind of funny." "And whenever I watch it, I can think of you being gross... and hilarious."" "My Ghostbusters tape, I bet people can't even make out the whole scene where he goes," ""I came, I saw, I kicked some ass"" "because I thought that was the greatest shit ever" "I rewound that scene, I was like," ""Whoa, he kicked some ass, that is what Ghostbusters do."" "We had a guy at one of our video stores that I worked at, where we eventually had to cancel his membership because we figured out it was him." "But his hobby was renting children's movies, and then splicing in pornography in the middle of them and returning them to us." "So they'd go back on our rental shelves." "I have finished planting detonators." "We have less than two minutes!" "[Moaning]" "It entertained this guy." "And with VHS that was a tangible thing he could do it to." "My friend lent me a tape of a movie he taped for me recently." "I went all the way to the end of the tape just to see how many layers of things has he taped over" "And you kinda catch the tail-end of a movie from Cinemax or, like, a music video, or this TV show, all the way to the something that was taped originally from 1987." "And it was really great just to see who this guy- you know, what he was watching, for the past 25 years." "Lawrence of Arabia is one of my favorite films." "And when I go see a print of that in the theater, every scratch, every break, every place you see a splice, there's a story behind that." "Something happened with that movie, something happened with that print when it was shown to an audience." "And there's something about that that, to me, 'cause you know that print's had some life and some legs on it." "VHS could do that." "It's almost like VHS has a built-in hit counter." "In that, like, you can tell how many times it's been copied by the way that it looks." "And so, you knew that when you got a tape, if you were in tape trading, like, the shittier it looked and the worse it sounded, you just knew it was gonna be gold because that meant that 10 people before you" "had copied it, and thought that it was funny enough, or great enough, or weird enough, to make a copy and then pass it to their friends, who thought the same thing." "So it was like this vetting process, you know, where..." "Uh, this distillery of images, or something." "So that by the time you got it, it was like, potent and, you know, gonna get you high. [Laughs]" "Priest is bad, man." "Priest is number one in heavy metal, man." "And then who comes next?" "Iron Maiden, man." "[Jeff Krulick] What would you say if you saw Rob Halford right now?" "I'd jump his bones!" "[Krulick] What do you think, uh- What do you like about him?" "He's great, man, he sings great." "Group's great." "[Krulick] How 'bout Dokken?" "Great." "Excellent." "[Krulick] Are you fucked up?" "The Southpark Christmas Special," "I never had a copy of that and somebody I knew had it and they were like," ""Really?" "You don't have a copy?" "That's crazy." "Everybody has a copy of this."" "And so I was like, "Well, make me a copy." "You know, just, come on, if everybody has it, give me one."" "I remember the guy being like, "Well, what do you have for me?"" "And that was the first moment where I was like," ""Oh..." "That's right, tape trading."" "The Winnebago concepts and engineering departments have developed a multi-functional bathroom privacy I don't even know what the fuck I'm reading." "I wonder what the fuck the real dialogue is." "What the fuck is this thing?" "Oh, the windshield for fuck's sake." "I gave that guy a collection I had gotten from somebody else, that had Winnebago Man on it." "That had Larry Williams, it had Jesco," "It had the Jackass pilot," "The best of the worst of Star Search, which was really awesome." "And I got the Southpark Christmas Special." "Dude!" " What?" "Don't put the magic hat on the snowman." "'Cause if you do he's gonna come to life." "Cool!" "No it's not cool!" "My sister in Minnesota put a hat on a snowman and it tried to kill her!" "Fuck him, let's do it anyway." " Yeah." "I decided to get in this business." "One, it was economics, I didn't have really a job," "I was working at a porno theater," "I'd just had a son." "What am I gonna do with my life?" "So the very first thing I did was the obvious." "I took out a little ad, 30 titles." "Mexican horror titles and some other obscurities." "I ran that ad for a couple months." "The first week I got, like $500 in the mail," "I was like, "Oh my god."" "Make my copies, send 'em out." "And then the next week $1000, the next week," ""Oh my god, this is insane."" "So I" " I quit my job... and I started being a bootlegger." "You'd read someone's ad in a magazine and you'd respond, and you would write down what you had and what he had, and you would trade." "And you'd make a copy and it was usually bad, four or five generations later, but you'd still get to see the movie you wanted." "And what started happening, as I started to get into more and more extreme type of films, is things would be taken by customs." "It was really funny because they've got this checklist, and it said, "Your product has been seized by Canada customs."" "And I remember twice," "I ordered tapes that got seized at the border." "And one of them was Nekromantik." "The "necrophilia" box was checked. [Laughs]" "If you were ordering a movie that was banned or prohibited, you'd have the guy tape, like, an episode of All in the Family for like the first five or ten minutes." "Of course, you're not gonna have the tape labeled" "Degradation of the Shit Eaters, Volume 6," "He's gonna put, you know, "All in the Family Reruns,"" "or something like that." "That was a pretty solid trick." "To me, it wasn't offensive in any way because these films were impossible to find." "And what they were doing was helping spread these movies and getting them out to people to actually see them." "I think that's why in the DVD market, in the beginning, you were seeing large units of things move, because they could go to a convention like this, and say, "Oh, okay, those guys were moving that many bootlegs," "or that many trades amongst them." "It's a safe bet to put out a nice remastered copy."" "But I think it was an important time, and a lot of movies were discovered by trading." "And in the case, specifically of Dead Next Door, there was such a long window of time, from the time it was made to the time it actually came out, that it was bootlegged a lot." "But it benefitted the movie because everybody found out about it that way." "We didn't have to go out and do a bunch of publicity, the publicity came to us." "[Speaking Japanese]" "It's kinda funny, you know, I'm dealing with these companies..." "I think they know, maybe they don't, but I feel kinda g- you know," "I maybe bootlegged some of their stuff in the past, and now I'm dealing with them on a professional level, playing their movies in the theater, but... these guys all know." "I mean, any guy that's gonna be hypocritical and say, you know, well the first time you saw Cannibal Holocaust was via a pirated tape." "And talk about cruelty to animals," "McDonald's has to be on top of the list." "I mean, when you think about those poor little McChickens walking around without their McNuggets. [Laughter]" "I think the appeal of this type of material that VHS definitely encouraged and helped spread, these viral videos, are that they capture something authentic that wasn't meant to be captured." "We finally go to the point, I think in the last five years, where just everything truly is ours now." "Where, when you put something out there, I'm sorry, it's just- it's not yours anymore." "It's everyone's." "Before, you would have- and in a way it was patriarchal, and it was problematic, 'cause you would have to wait for someone else to approve of what you were saying and presenting, and have to go through that whole dance." "But, in that there was a pre selection process, so that, by the time something got to the screen, you knew that someone thought that it was worth something." "You look at YouTube and you're like, "I love cat videos."" "I could spend a good portion of- and perhaps I do spend a good portion of my day watching cat videos." "Cat videos have always been important." "If you look at what people were shooting on film for home movies in the 50's and 60's, they were filming their cats." "But I think the incredible pressure now is to understand what it is you need to watch." "And the orthodoxy comes really from what other people are clicking into." "And then the question is, "Well, how do they find that?" "And how is that discovered?" "[Speaking Japanese]" "Duane, I was wondering, what fashion trends do you follow?" "Well I usually look in magazines or... see what the kids at school are wearing." "Duane!" "Already you can see a remix culture appropriating different clips to do different things with it besides just what the producers in a centralized industry, such as Hollywood, or the New York television networks do with it." "I don't watch stuff that I hate and then put it on there, which I think a lot of people think, for Everything is Terrible!" "They think, "Oh, it sucks so you gotta put it up there."" "It's like, no, I don't wanna put anything up unless it's incredible." "Crack cocaine." " Coke!" "And this is what you smoke it in." "It's awesome!" "Makes you feel good all over." "Yes, some of the stuff we do doesn't show people in the best light ever." "But... they did produce that stuff to begin with, we're just spitting it back out." "I'm Fabio." " I'm Micky Dolenz." "I'm Al Michaels." " I'm retarded." "Hey Toby, you da man." "Oh, Mr. White, I'm just a tire." "There's so much undiscovered stuff still." "How can we share that with everybody?" "Let's just organize this as best we can, because that's really all it is, is just kind of taking control over those tapes." "[Cartoon punching sounds] [explosion]" "Whoo!" " That's right, little buddy." "Get away!" " Oh my god!" "So it's fascinating that these technologies, you know, leapfrog each other, building new uses." "And none of this is driven by people really anticipating what the new use will be." "It's almost like you have to build a machine and then see what people do with it." "There's really no need for archaic things like cable anymore." "Stuff like that." "It's like, "Why would you do that, when you can literally watch whatever you want at any time."" "I guess there are people that are collectors, and put things on their shelves, and it reflects who they are, and I think that that's a loss." "But I, um," "I think that there'll be virtual ways for us to collect, and we're gonna figure that out." "I'm sure studios are really excited about the way things are going, about the fact that there's not going to be physical media." "I mean, the Walt Disney corporation, you know, is made up of lovely people, but that whole idea of The Disney Vault," ""We're putting The Lion King back in the Disney Video Vault so you can't buy it again for a while."" "It's a completely artificial sense of scarcity, designed to create a completely artificial sense of demand." "Studios are now completely dominating what is available to you." "And they are completely in control of what you can have." "And they can give that to you and they can take that away, like a malevolent god." "It infuriates me." "The notion of somebody else having control over my access to media in general bothers me." "When I read the story about the Kindle and how all the people who had purchased, it couldn't have been a more ironic title," "George Orwell's 1984, woke up one morning, because of a licensing disagreement, it was gone." "It just wasn't on their Kindle anymore." "That's terrifying." "That is absolutely not in the spirit of purchasing something." "That word becomes meaningless at that point." "You don't purchase digital media." "You rent it." "And it's at their pleasure." "The reality is all physical media is going away." "All of it." "On a business standpoint, if it takes off, it'll be good for us, because we won't have manufacturing." "We won't have to do all those extras and the supplements, and the interviews, and the documentaries and the paper labeling, and the shipping." "So you think about it, and it sounds like a great idea." "But then, it kinda goes against what I like." "And, you know, collecting." "With Netflix, with torrenting, it's hard to want to go out to a video store." "Like its hard for me at this point." "I don't really go to the video store as much as I'd like to anymore." "This is where we keep most of our video tapes." "Sadly, I had to, the other day, move them all to make room for Blu-Ray..." "boo ray." "If DVD was a short lifespan," "Blu-Ray's gonna be, like, gone before you know it." "Honestly the primary reason to keep something physical is nostalgia." "We'll continue to put out physical media until the plants close." "My 18, 19 year old students, who love film, are passionate about film, seem to have no interest in having a video collection." "You can't begrudge this generation not wanting to collect this, because it's too accessible." "It seems to be splitting down the middle, to people who are going to go to the ends of the earth to keep the old stuff, the old ways." "And then it's the other side that are just- they don't want anything anymore." "It's gotta be non-physical media that they can keep on a hard drive or just have it streamed to 'em and forget about it." "And then the other guys that are going to build a shrine." "I have more than enough to keep me busy for 10,000 lifetimes." "Um, for future generations," "I don't give a fuck about those people." "I love streaming as a technology..." "I'm gonna hang on to my DVDs," "I'm gonna hang on to my Blu-Rays." "Just as as much as I love iTunes and Spotify," "I still have a record player, because I like it." "[Speaking Japanese]" "People stopped buying video as soon as the content was cheaper and even easier to consume." "And then we found out that the masses don't care about bonus features or optimum quality." "It's only the collector market that does." "Netflix Instant is a really important step towards what the studios want." "And I think what you'll eventually do is you'll have a pipe that comes into your house, and you will subscribe to whichever libraries you want." "The MGM library, the Warner Brothers library, the Sony library." "That's where we're headed, we're headed towards... no money on their end, in terms of physical units." "I mean, I imagine it's just all gonna be on access eventually." "Well technically, it already is, but people some people don't wanna admit it." "[Speaking Japanese]" "We're talking about VHS, but I only have video tapes because that's the way that I can find that movie." "And if that came out in a different manner, like, if that was available on a DVD, or only on Blu-Ray," "I'd watch it." "I mean now that I'm a film programmer," "I'm more aware there's films where the filmmaker doesn't have any other materials." "So essentially, until somebody finds a negative, finds a print, the best source in the world is a VHS." "Which is a little scary." "Video preservation is the nightmare in the closet that no one is talking about." "Everybody likes to talk about film preservation." "Martin Scorsese is out there, you know, proclaiming the love of film and all this, but in actual fact, everybody knows that in Scorsese's back closet he's got a lot of videos that are just a hot mess." "I think that most people that really started collecting in the 80's are probably going to see, at least, two out of ten tapes begin now," "30 years on, 20 years on, to really not be playable." "And maybe that's one of the reasons that nostalgia for video is going to be so incredibly poignant," "I think, going forward, is that we're gonna have such a great, great statistic of loss." "It seems like with each iteration in home video technology we lose a chunk of the library of amazing films that are out there." "I don't understand how people can ignore VHS because there's such a huge, huge percentage of movies that never came out any other way." "So if you're even, like, a casual fan of movies at all, you should have a VCR." "You should be actively watching stuff on VHS." "There are hundreds of thousands of thousands of movies that never made the jump to DVD." "Think that the fact that it never jumped to DVD that they were poor quality to begin with." "No matter what genre of film you're interested in, you're going to find things that are only on VHS within that realm of interest." "So if you like silent film, there's gonna be some obscure Russian short that's only on some tape on a back shelf of a video store." "If you like 80's comedies, there's gonna be hundreds and hundreds of just the most ridiculous boner jams that you can only watch on tape." "To select what you love by it's format... cuts you off from something that you might enjoy... more than anything you've ever seen in your entire life." "I think that stuff is the- stands outside of my objections." "That's very important that there is a document of all those countless hours of rare stuff." "In any form whatsoever..." "even VHS." "When it struck us that other people could have fun watching movies that were only on video, we started Video Hate Squad." "And we had our first show, and we got the whole audience there, we have a VCR on the stage so we always put the tape in the VCR in front of the audience so they're all part of that moment." "Even better than that, is that all over the world, there's other people that did the same thing at the same time, 'cause there's this kind of a zeitgeist where people are realizing," ""Hey, there's a lot of value in this stuff that we've been ignoring."" "I mean, for example, a movie like Deadly Prey." "I don't think anyone ever knew it even came out." "It was meant to be this fleeting thing." "Let's just fill these stores with content." "We don't have to worry about if there's theatrical releases or not." "What they didn't realize is that there were so many works of art." "Grrrrrr!" "Aaaaaaah!" "That's an incredible, incredible film, and we played a VHS copy, 'cause it's not available on film or DVD or anything." "No other format." "We had Ted Prior come and we had a talk with him, and it was just incredible to see this movie with a bunch of people, and just realize no one knows what's gonna happen next, this is completely unpredictable." "[Scream]" "I knew that VHS collecting was kind of becoming popular again," "The House of the Devil, you gotta give a lot of due to that, just the fact that a new movie was released on VHS, it started making me think about a lot other films like this." "You know I had a modest VHS collection, but this kinda kick started it for me a lot." ""Okay, well, there's people who have this kind of interest, so let's market to them as well."" "The revolution is still evolving." "Um, I think, I mean you're making a documentary about video tapes right now." "I think that there's a huge VHS resurgence." "For example Mondo putting out all these new video tapes, that are selling through hundreds of copies in a two hour period." "Clearly there's still a market out there for video tapes." "The boom that's going on today with the tapes," "I'm going on 40 now, I'm seeing these tape prices, going for $400." "It makes me regret getting rid of some of the stuff that I had at one time, you know." "I could be putting my kids through college, I don't know." "When LP's had a resurgence in the 90's, what was amazing about that is that it didn't go away." "Like, there's still stores that really just exist to sell records." "But, I don't think that VHS is going to have that same permanent resurgence." "We can make arguments for the quality of a vinyl and why that presents a better experience of the music." "But VHS, it's never going to be a better experience of the raw materials, it's just... the qualities associated around it." "I think that there's a nostalgic need to sort of go back and also re-evaluate." "It was in 2006 when History of Violence came out on VHS and kind of marked the end of everything." "That was the last widely distributed film on VHS." "My friend Zack called me and was like," ""Hey, we're thinking about getting some VHS tattoos, 'cause they just stopped making VHS."" "And I'd never had a tattoo before but it took me less than two seconds to be like," ""Yep, I'm with you guys." "I'm gettin' that right there."" "And we all got ours a little differently, like some got, like "never forget" on it, some got the year that it started and ended." "I just wanted just the video on it's own, just like the cold- just the nice- It looks so strong and great." "And people ask me all the time, they'll be like," ""What is that on your arm?"" "I'll just show it to them and they'll be like, and I'm like, "You forgot, obviously"" "When you find some of these stores that have big box video tapes, you know they're gonna be mutant owners who have been surrounded by these relics for so many years." "And they are part of their life story and I am slowly trying to drain them of them." "And like an archeologist every once in a while you'd pull all these tapes out and at the very bottom, covered in dust, I mean literally, your hands would be just caked in this dust, you pull out a video that's pure gold." "If I see a flea market, a swap meet, an antique store, a Goodwill," "It's getting stopped and it's getting pillaged." "That entails looking in the phone book, looking on the internet." "Literally driving up and down every single street that I see." "I've driven probably a three hour drive radius every direction." "And honestly I think that is what the legacy of the VHS era is, it's made us all much more film savvy." "It's kind of made people much more aware of... other movies beyond the ones that were fed by the richest companies." "[Speaking Japanese]" "The fact that it made accessible, all these generations of films which were utterly gone." "I mean just gone." "No one could see them." "You know the studios kept them in the vaults, sometimes they got rid of the negatives, didn't think it mattered anymore." "You know, home video restored all that for us, you know, and perhaps not always in the greatest looking form." "I mean perhaps not always the way we remembered it, but it was accessible." "I don't think there's any lasting impact." "I think it's been just a passing parade." "It's like, what's the lasting impact of radio?" "Right?" "..." "Eh..." "You know, it got us to the next step, the next step..." "These are not just entertainment, and they're also indications of what life was like, and is like, and is possibly going to be like again." "These movies, by being, in a way the record of our dreams, are a way to look at our culture and say, "Ahhh... that's why that civilization ate itself spectacularly." "That's why it all fell apart." "Hmm."" "Or, "That's what it could have been, that's where the dream could have gone."" "When you look at a tape, and it has the "be kind, rewind" sticker, on it, there's something deeply moving about that." "It's such a call to arms, and a suggestion or an imperative about a way to live your life." "To be kind and rewind." "Go back and like, hang on to these things that are important to you, and not let them disappear, and not let other people take them a way from you." "But find what's important and preserve that and help it to endure."