If You Grew Up Renting Movies From Video Stores, Watch This Trailer
There were three local video stores around where I grew up that I spent hours and hours in looking for movies to watch. It was at these video stores that I was introduced to movies I had never seen before. These video stores were my film school, and without them I probably would have never discovered tons of movies as a teenager that I still love today. It's crazy to think that my kids won't have those video store movie discovery experiences. That's something that will never exist again. It's kinda sad.
I have a trailer here for a book called I lost It At The Video Store, and it focuses on these video stores and a generation of filmmakers who grew up with them in their lives:
For a generation, video stores were to filmmakers what bookstores were to writers. They were the salons where many of today’s best directors first learned their craft. The art of discovery that video stores encouraged through the careful curation of clerks was the fertile, if sometimes fetid, soil from which today’s film world sprung. Video stores were also the financial engine without which the indie film movement wouldn’t have existed.
In I Lost it at the Video Store, Tom Roston interviews the filmmakers–including John Sayles, Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Darren Aronofsky, David O. Russell and Allison Anders–who came of age during the reign of video rentals, and constructs a living, personal narrative of an era of cinema history which, though now gone, continues to shape film culture today.
I Lost It At The Video Store will be released in hardcover on September 24th, 2015. What are some of your favorite movies that you discovered in the video store?