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Full exposure, listen with that phones. Last year, we ran a series of episodes on the history and cultural significance of video rental stores. In that series, we name drop a number of iconic locations, one of which is the Los Angeles based Vidiots. For decades, Vidiots has been an institution in Southern California's film community. It's also one of the only female owned and operated video stores into country, but due to the same struggles plaguing video stores nationwide,
it shuttered its doors in twenty seventeen. However, the Vidiots team is hard at work planning a rebirth. They're nearly ready to open their new location in Los Angeles along with a restored neighborhood movie theater. So Today producer Trevor Young Ray turns to chronicle the journey of one of the country's most important video stores.
As I mentioned in our series last year, video stores were instrumental in my upbringing. Without those spaces and the people in them, I wouldn't have a fraction of the love or knowledge of film that I have today. And I'm not alone in that experience.
They're fucking fun They're inspiring. Who really truly wants to sit at home and never talk with another person about the thing that you love. I'm Maggie McKay. I'm the executive director of Vidiots Foundation.
Maggie is the main person responsible for reviving Vidiots. She says physical media spaces like vidiots are more important now than ever before.
All you have to do to make people realize they miss something is give them a taste of it. Record stores are a perfect example. New bookstores are cropping up now too. I've been trying to explain to my twelve and nine year old how much fun life was when we were growing up, and we sincerely took it for granted. I'm not a mall kid. I was never a mall kid, but we were not sitting at home on a device. I'm not saying that as an old lady. I'm not doing the like in my day. It was just more fun.
All you have to do is give that back to people in some way, and they gobble it up.
Like me. Maggie says her passion for video stores started when she was very young.
I mean, I grew up in Lower Manhattan in Soho before it turned into a high end shopping mall for the one percent, and when I was growing up was scrappy. It was a little scary down there. We didn't have a ton of freedom. There definitely were limitations, especially after dark. But there was this video store. It opened across the street from my house. The long gone but much beloved Rare Bird video. Of anybody in the world remembers Rare Bird video. I would love somebody to contact me and
reminisce with me. I was also really lucky. I had movie theaters that were not that far away. I could like take a long walk or go a couple subway stops and get to a movie theater. But the video store was really the thing. Because I had agency in
a video store, I could go by myself. My clerks at Rare Bird were not like the most like kid friendly, but they tolerated my bulkkit and I just would hang out for hours on end, and between that and access to movie theaters, I was able to sort of find myself some freedom and a hobby and an interest that obviously led me down a lifelong path and gave me a job. So I came into the videos universe in
twenty sixteen. I was long employed as a film festival programmer and have always been pretty deep into the nonprofit film exhibition space, film festivals and anything I could do to connect an audience to a film and its maker. And I had always known about Vidiots because Vidiots was like a shining star in the history of la and it was one of the first places I sort of pilgrimage too, because I'd always really kind of lived closer
to the East Side. It was exactly the kind of place that made me fall in love with film when I was younger, and a few people knew that I was getting restless in the job I was in and then I wanted to change, and those people connected me to Vidiots. And the first time I walked into Vidiots, which I had not been in there in a long long time, I just was like electrified by how incredible a collection was and how big it was. And when I met our founders Patty and Kathy, I was like
cook Line and Sinker. I didn't know that Vidiots was founded by women, not to mention like third generation Angelino's and two of the coolest people I've ever met in my life, and I just was like enamored. I'm still enamored of Patty and Kathy. I walked away knowing they needed an executive director really badly. They needed someone to fundraise and expand the donor base and figure out what
this sort of year round programming approach would be. And I walked away from that first encounter thinking like, if I don't do this, some shadude in a trucker cap is going to have this job for five minutes, and videots is going to close. No offense to dudes and trucker caps. But I could just see it becoming something that somebody who thought it was cool would do for a minute, find out it was going to be really hard, and then jump ship. And I was like, I'm not
gonna do that. And even under incredibly difficult circumstances up and down, that always gone back to that moment and been like, if I do this, I got to do it all the way.
Maggie says that very quickly Vidiots became a special place.
For her, aside from like how legendary it was and how cool it was that neon and the look of it. I walked in the first time to meet Patty and Kathy, and they had a little office in the back, and the first thing I noticed was I saw the documentary section and I was like, oh, wow, this is really small. I was shocked. I was like, it was seemed to be one wall, and I was like, well, maybe that's something I can work on because I really love docs
and I kind of part of my secret passion. And then I turned around and noticed that I was wrong and that the doc section at Vidiots went all the way around the walls, and that I realized there was an unparalleled commitment to documentary. And when I realized that, I just was like, this is where I want to be. This is where I had always wanted to be. I never really felt a sense of belonging like I did until not first encounter with Patty and Kathy.
Without a doubt, Maggie knows just about everything there is to know about Vidiots, so I asked her to tell us more about the store's history and about the founders, Patti Pollinger and Kathy Towbert.
So Patty and Kathy have been best friends since they were I think three. They've lived in La their whole lives, and I love hearing about their high school stories. They both had jobs. Kathy was in the music industry. She worked for Frank Zappa and had been in the music industry for a while. Patty worked for MGMUA, and they both really kind of got sick of working for other people and wanted to do something on their own independently. They wanted not to work in male dominated industries anymore,
which was everything and remains everything. They looked around and they were like, what can we do? And they noticed that video stores were cropping up, but the video stores that were around them had really limited offerings and certainly not the kind of stuff they were interested in. And they saw that gap and they knew that they could not only fill it, but like do something pretty extraordinary
with it. So they opened with eight hundred tapes in nineteen eighty five in our historical location at three to Zo two Peko in Santa Monica, a couple of blocks from the beach, and within a really short period of time it was booming. But I can tell you that it wasn't easy for them. When they went to get their first bank loan, one of the loan officers told them, why didn't you go ask your dads for the money. So they sort of opened videots in spite of real
gender bias and disparity, and they made it work. And I think about that a lot as we're making progress against a lot of odds.
Patty and Kathy always wanted the store to be a unique and exciting place.
They didn't just want to do something transactional. They wanted to have a spot to party. They wanted to hang out, wanted to meet dudes. They wanted to create something that people would come to on a Friday night and hang out at. And that is precisely what they did. And one of the unique things that they did was they designed the space to really be hospitable to a party.
One of the things that they did that we will absolutely replicate in the new space is that everything was on rolling racks, so you could move the collection around. And it was very much meant to be a place that you knew you could go down on a Friday night and there would be a party at Vidiots, a party with really interesting, open minded, inclusive people. They did it. They made a space that people wanted to be at.
I'm perpetually amazed at how many people in La out of LA internationally know about Vidiots, remember it and revere it and love it. That's always a really good thing for me when I'm in the mire of fundraising and buried under her pandemic shipping supply issues and how are we going to make the next one hundred thousand dollars? When I hear that, I'm bullied by it.
Vidiots also made a point of amassing one of the most comprehensive video collections in the country.
When they started, they were going after the really hard to find stuff, a lot of experimental film, a lot of music video, which is some of my favorite stuff in the collection. They didn't go black market. They were sensible and they were thoughtful about their curation, but they were going after things that they knew nobody else was going to have, and stuff they wanted to see, honestly,
and filmmakers they wanted to support. They knew that, especially with their positioning in Los Angeles, they could be really instrumental in helping emerging filmmakers get their work to audiences. And so they became really known as a place where if you'd made something, or you'd captured some kind of crazy footage, footage of the ninety two uprising, we've got that at Vidiots. Because people had this stuff and they didn't always know what to do with it, and some
of those people have become really well known filmmakers. So the collection holds a lot of history in the VHS, and the VHS preservation is something that's really important to us. I really wish there was more of a preservation focused on VHS because there are so many people who simply were excluded from making work on film, and so when VHS came along, when tape came along, they turned to that and they were able to make work on that format. If we don't preserve it, that work is going to
go away. So it's important to the history of LA for sure.
Throughout the nineteen nineties, chain stores like Blockbuster and Hollywood Video started to dominate the market, but Maggie says that wasn't much of a problem for Vidiots.
I mean, Patty and Kathy are brilliant businesswan. They understood their community so innately, and actually the late nineties and early two thousands were fantastic for Vidiots. They were cranking, enormously successful. I think two thousand and three was their peak year. And let me tell you, they made a lot of money, a lot of employees. It was booming.
I think a police like Vidiots was naturally set up to actually, in some weird way benefit from chain stores, because as soon as those chains started to really take over, people knew what they were missing, and they knew that Vidiots was the place to go for that. So at that time, I mean, we had people driving down from Santa Barbara on a regular basis because they knew that they couldn't find what they wanted because chain stores had
put so many independent stores out of business. But it was their curation, it was what Patty and Kathy were putting on the shelves. They had like resisted a lot of populist stuff that they sort of like didn't think was up to their artistic standards. And the Olsen Twins were the moment. I don't see why we just can't tell them the truth. You mean that were the witness protection program. Oh, that's a big trend for guys. Hey want to go see a movie.
Oh and by the way, we'll want to get here alive.
And at a certain point, like they started having kids, their customers started having kids, and they were like, well, yeah, of course we have to have the Olsen Twin videos, and they stocked them and they rented. You'd be surprised who was renting some of that stuff. So you take home something really mainstream like that. But then you also get to introduce your kid to something. You know, Miyazaki. I really love it here, but people don't seem to like. Which is in this.
Town depends on the people.
Now take me for instance.
I just met you, and I know I like you.
I do think that younger audiences are sort of an afterthought right now, certainly for streaming, because streaming is really hard for little kids, and it's so easy to get them hooked. So big streaming services are like, give them one show and then have the next episode just automatically roll. It's so algorithmic. It's such a marketing thing that is really challenging to get younger people to discover anything new. That's where physical media comes in. I use Moonstruck as
an example. I mean, you waited for the right man the first time.
Why didn't you wait for the right man again?
Because he didn't come. I'm here you'll like Moonstruck was not marketed to me when it came out in the eighties. I was a kid. I liked the box art of the VHS and so I took it home and watched it, and it became instantly one of my favorite movies and led me down this really interesting path something wild. I saw really really young, the Jonathan Dummy movie because I liked the box art, and it made me a much more interesting viewer because I was watching that was not made for me.
Maggie says that when DVD rolled around in the early two thousands, Vidiots was very smart about transitioning from tape to disc.
If they knew that they wanted to bring DVD in and they knew that it was going to have a solid shelf life, they could move the VHS off. What they did that was really smart was that they hung on to vhs that didn't get a digital release, and they also hung on to a lot of what I think initially they thought was like crappy stuff that they just didn't want to buy a DVD of it. They didn't think it was a very good movie or a
good show, and they weren't gonna rent it much. Now, some of that stuff is really interesting and really valuable for us to have in the VHS archive because it's out of print. That actually stands for some really popular stuff too. I mean, recent news about Bruce willis everybody went nuts about Moonlighting, while we've got every episode of Moonlighting on physical media and go ahead and google how expensive Season four of Moonlighting is if you can even get it anymore. And that's a good show.
My goodness, mister Presto.
We're looking a little pale today, aren't we?
And who have we here?
I don't know now now no reason to be Shylott's.
See a little confidence, a little charisma, a little dale kange, remember less than one. Imagine your entire audience is completely naked.
Boggles the mind, doesn't it.
Another thing Patty and Kathy were really well known for was I mean, they had it in print on all their materials. If you can't find something, tell us we have a friend who is friends with this incredible queer scholar. And they were saying that Vidiots was instrumental to their graduate work because Vidiots was the only place they could go and say, I can't find this thing? Can you
find it for me? And it was like a point of pride for our clerks to be able to hunt something down, find it and give it to the person who needed it, whether it was for someone really well known whether it was for someone academic or whether it was just a fan, they were going to find it. And we're still like that. I will spend an inordinate amount of time trying to find an obscure movie for anybody who asks.
But when streaming started to take off in the twenty tenths, vidiots prepared for disaster.
We knew was going to go south pretty quick. Community that loved us. Many of those people were still there, but a lot of them were not. So many of those people had migrated off of the West Side because it became unaffordable. And that's not to say that we didn't still have a very devoted Santa Monica fan base, but it wasn't enough to sustain. Yeah, it was really hard. It was really really difficult. At one point, Alejandro and Yuriito came in, I believe, with his.
Son real quick. For anyone who doesn't know, Alejandro Inyori too is an Oscar winning director famous for films like The Revenant and Birdman. Those happened to be two of my favorite films. So I really love this story.
They were browsing. I like, went in the office. I said, Patty, go talk to him. You got to go talk to him, go talk to him. She went out and started talking to him. He was asking how it was going, and she was like, yeah, it's really hard. Like I'm not
gonna pretend that it's easy. And he gave us this amazing pep talk about how you have to suffer for anything that's worthwhile, and like, all I can think of is like Leonardo DiCaprio in the woods fighting a bear, and us like Haulling eleven thousand VHS tapes and fifty thousand titles up Mountain. I returned to that image a lot. Yeah, it was really hard, and it's still really hard, but it's worth it.
In twenty seventeen, Vidiots closed its iconic location in Santa Monica. However, they always knew that this wasn't the end of Vidiots.
So we shuttered the brick and mortar in seventeen. We put everything into storage. I don't know if anybody else thought it was visible, but I was hellbent on not closing unless we did it with the intention of reopening. So everything went into safe storage. We gave up the brick and mortar. We continued programming. We're doing stuff at the Ace Hotel. During the pandemic, we were doing virtual stuff.
I actually think that the future of film are spaces like Vidiots and partnerships like the one that we have with Movie, with streamers and distributors that understand how amazing and on lucrative it will be to forge relationships with brick and mortar spaces. I can tell you our partners
at Movie are down with it. They get it, and I think that companies that don't get it are gonna be sincerely disappointed when they don't have a future generation of film lovers, because I really think these younger generations are the ones you need to look at. If you're worried about the state of film economically, creatively, but especially economically, better start paying attention to how these kids are being invited into this art form, because they are not being invited in right now.
Maggie largely laments the rise of streaming. She says, well, it's not all bad. We've lost something very important in physical media.
The word everything is the problem. Right. We have incredible relationships with some of the best streaming services out there, Movie Criterion, we love Nightflight. We don't inherently have an issue with streaming services. It's a great way to expand access. The problem is big corporate entities have blocked access not just for physical media, but for theatrical as well. When one point of access eradicates another, that's just bad for audiences,
it's bad for filmmakers. And the word everything is a myth. I mean everything is not digitized, everything is not available on a streaming service, and just inherently the way streaming services are set up, everything can't stay on a streaming service. And more importantly, everyone can't afford all of those streaming services.
And so what streaming, maybe not intentionally has done, especially with the quote streaming wars, it becomes about bottom line, and when it becomes about what one company has over another, the people who lose out are audiences. And the people who really lose out are audiences that don't have the resources, or the time or the inclination to know. Oh, if I want full access to a multitude of films, I've got to have sixteen seventeen now streaming services. It's insane
and it's unaffordable. The other thing is like the human interaction. Yes, when you take a home video home with you, you're watching it and you know it's a different experience than the theatrical experience when you're with a group of people, but you still have a point of connection to another human being while you're doing that. And some of the most fascinating conversations I've had, some of the most inspiring, have been in a video store with another clerk or
another customer, or I've overheard conversations between customers. So even with physical media that you take home and watch, you still have a point of connection to another person. Strangers talking to each other about something they have commonality around is how we prevent the world from syncing into oblivion.
I mean, maybe I'm a crazy person, but I think this socio economic cultural divide we're looking at right now is not unrelated to the fact that access to the most popular art form for the last one hundred plus years has become really diminished. And I think that about record stores, and I think that about radio stations and non cable TV. I mean, it's all connected. When two people who seem to have nothing in common like the
same thing, a lot of progress can be made. And when you take those points of access away, it's a shut storm. You have so much more in common with someone you don't know. If you know they like something that you like, or they introduce you to something they like you didn't know about. That's how it works. Bookstores, record stores, that's what they're designed to do. Help you find something you're going to love or hate, but one way or the other, you're going to talk to another person about it.
Luckily, Vidiots has been hard at work at making a triumphant return, and they're planning for a major comeback. After Vidiots closed in twenty seventeen, Maggie says they immediately started looking for another location, and in twenty nineteen, Vidiots revealed that they had finally found a new home.
Well, I came together because a lot, a lot a lot of people said yes when I asked them for help. The first thing we did was shutter. The next thing we did was we knew we had to come up with a new business plan, like on paper or with research. We did a year and a half of market research to figure out what the best path forward would be. We innately knew it needed to move towards the east Side.
We did some walk arounds of neighborhoods on the east Side and Patty and Kathy were like, yeah, this feels like Santa Monica in the eighties. This is right, this is where it needs to be. And once we sort of solidified that, we knew that there were not enough screening spaces on the East side of Los Angeles. I mean now post COVID, it's like the entire city is
a movie theater desert right now. On the other hand, there's been a great revival of Rep Cinema, which I think is amazing, but it doesn't counterbalance what we've lost. And there was a lot of work put into bringing together an advisory council and building up the board of directors, going to everybody I knew who had some level of
expertise who could offer a point of view. We rewrote a business plan with our friend Jenny Jacobe, who was going through her master's program at UT Austin and had a ton a ton of experience with draft House, where she'd been for a long time. We were friends with Tim League. We went to Tim. He was our first funder. When we started to put money together for the relaunch. We thought we would do like black box theaters, We'd
go into something like a warehouse. I was very fixated on auto body shops because they have high ceilings and then the Eagle over an Eagle Rock, which is a movie theater that opened in nineteen twenty nine and ran until the year two thousand that I had driven past every day for the last ten years of my life, had a fur least sign on it. And I went straight to jeff Or Walter, who is really our partner on everything Vidiots and is renovating the building with us,
and said, I think it's this. I think it's this, or it's nothing. And then we went in the building. I was like, Yep, it's this or nothing. Jeff is a former Vidiots customer, are architects, former Vidiots customers, landlords, former Vidiots customers, So that all really beautifully fowl into place was sprinklings of magic. We are definitely a phoenix.
Maggie says. They are hard at work at creating an all new experience in the Eco Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles. The space will be a hybrid including a large theater and a video store.
We have these two things that seem obsolete right now, and they shouldn't seem obsolete, but circumstances are such that they seem antiquated. You've got this old single screen movie theater that's been dark for twenty years, and you've got a revered but long shuttered video store, and you put them together and you get this incredible new, soon to be thriving hub for the film capital of the world. Two hundred and fifty seat state of the art movie
Theater thirty five I DCP A big lobby. That was the thing that we knew the Eagle had to offer. The Eagle had operated as an eight hundred to nine hundred seat movie theater for most of its life, so it's really really big space. It doesn't have the decorative elements of the Vista. It's not something like a movie palace. It has that feeling of scale that something like the Vista has. It's really big, and it's very hard to tell from the outside of the building how big it is.
And we knew that the scale would allow us to make some subtle but really meaningful changes, which mostly involved expanding the lobby. When we took over the building, the lobby was basically a hallway. I can't even imagine how it operated. I've heard amazing stories about people trying to find their friends and trying to go to the bathroom because there was only one bathroom downstairs. It was not remotely what you would call accessible. It was not functional
at all by today's standards. I'm not sure it was functional by yesterday's standards. But we knew that if we moved back wall of the theater and we would still retain the feeling of scale in the theater, but it would also give us a hangout space, and that's something that LA severely lacks in its even wonderful and existing theatrical spaces. You watch a movie and instantly you're out on the sidewalk trying to figure out how to keep
talking about the movie with your friends. And you know, if you have to move people from one location to another in LA, that's pretty much the end of the conversation. So we knew that we needed a gathering space. We didn't want to like squeeze fifty thousand titles into like a hallway and then suddenly lose the entire thrust of our mission, which was to create access and maintain access and grow our library. I mean, I'm telling you, it
was magical. The Eagle has a massive storefront attached to it on one of the most busy commercial corridors in Northeast Los Angeles that deeply needs revitalizing. Eagle Rock Boulevard was once a really thrive having sort of economic hub
for North Esela, and it is not anymore. And we feel very strongly that Vidiots will be an anchor for the neighborhood, help revitalize the existing businesses, help bring in new businesses into spaces that have been shuttered for a really long time, and we have the community around us
to do it. So beer and wine too. We knew that beer, wine and food is pivotal, and then also having a space for the community to come together, having a place where kids know we've got a high school, we've got a middle school, we've got several elementary schools. We knew we wanted our space to be a place where those people could come and feel they belonged and feel they had a creative outlet and candy and popcorn and a hanging space, and the storefront allows us to
do that. We're building a flexible community space in microcinema in the other part of the storefront, and we've made everything ada accessible and all connected and related, and the sound is all integrated so you can have a full scale event in there. You can have three separate events happening at the same time for three different groups of people. It is sort of the dream scenario when you're trying
to revitalize film. It's not feasible for all of us to haul across town for that, and we deserve it. We were completely entitled to having a thriving film culture in our neighborhoods, and again one that speaks to a much broader community of people. I want my children and their peers, especially their peers who are have fewer advantages than my kids do, to have a place to go that I had that feeling, that buzz of walking into a place you know that you're wanted, a place that's fun.
It doesn't feel like homework. You're not being dragged there. You want to go there. You jump on your skateboard, you roll down own and you might bump into your crush. You might have fifteen cents in your pocket that you can hang out in the video store as long as you want and get that interaction and get that feeling of inclusion and it's you know, it's a party.
Maggie admits that the construction process has been pretty tough. Funding such a major project is no easy feat, especially for a small independent film outlet. And despite knowing this, I asked Maggie when she expects the new videots to open.
Yeah, we know better than to try to predict anything in this world anymore. So certainly the plan is opening in twenty two. We need to open in twenty two for, if anything, for my own personal sanity. But the building is coming together beautifully. We have definitely been impacted financially by the pandemic. We've been impacted by shipping in supply chain issues and all the things that every he hears
about by inflation. So we are still very much in our capital campaign, which is almost entirely run during the pandemic, and we do have a lot of money to raise. We're doing great. Our community has really rallied around us, but we need to expand that community, and we do need everybody who says that they care about theatrical, who
says that they care about physical media. You know, some of the loudest voices in the fight for theatrical and in the fight for independent cinema still don't seem to know what we're doing at Videots, and I think that has everything to do with the limitations of launching something like this in a pandemic, and so we need to radically shift that. We need to see support from our
more resourced brothers and sisters in the industry distributors. We have so many amazing companies that have come in to support us, and we need to see more follow suit. Seventy one percent of our funding from individuals, and we're talking little gifts up to our founding member level, which is five thousand and above, people joining as founding members
in groups and crowdsourcing their founding membership. Some founding members doubling down and making gifts annually since we started this campaign in twenty nineteen, and that's how we're doing it. Very very very sadly, public funding for specifically film exhibition spaces is almost non existent. I mean, we've really struggled on that front. And it's not because we're not good at what we do, and it's not because we don't
have a compelling project. It's just not there. So much of the funding has shifted to filmmaker centric programming, which is great and it will certainly help shift tides to make a more inclusive and a more representative creative slate. The the question is where will those movies reach audiences, so us reaching new individuals is something that's really important
to us. I do hope Los Angeles and public funding sources wake up to the fact that without theatrical spaces, all of the new filmmakers they're supporting are going to have a really hard time.
However, Maggie is hopeful that Vidiots will come to Fruition sooner than later, and when it does finally open, she knows it will be incredibly successful.
There's no question in my mind that people want to go to movie theaters. They want to go to brick and mortar spaces to access everything from art to skateboards to whatever. They want to go to brick and mortar. It got taken away from them, and sometimes it got prematurely taken away. Small businesses are hard to maintain and operate,
but they're worth it. And I think in a weird way, you're going back into the past to create something new, and that's something new creates a path forward, and that's exactly what we're doing with Vidiots. We're taking these two things that once existed and making something totally new with them. And you know, you put in beer and wine and good food, and that helps too.
Since the store could always use the help. I'll let Maggie finish by telling you how you can support vidiots.
So you can learn more about vidiots, you can support, you can get involved. We're on socials at vidiots and we're at Vidiotsfoundation dot org. We've got a whole bunch of stuff coming up. I can't tease anything, but yes, as we get closer and closer to opening, it won't just be a movie that opens us up. It will be several months worth of welcome back to the video store and welcome back to the movie theater, fun for all ages. So exciting, Yay.
This episode of Ephemeral was written and produced by Trevor Young with producers Max and Alex Williams. Maggie McKay is the executive director of Vidiots Foundation. Big thanks to Maggie for a tour of the new Vidiots space. We wish them the very best with their renovations. Music this episode from the artist Monteplazier. Learn more at loyaltyfreakmusic dot com. And we want to hear from you. What do you love about video stories? Do you want more spaces like Vidiots?
Let us know on social media. We're at Ephemeral Show and for more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.