A new nonprofit in Northampton, Mass., is hoping you’ll be kind and rewind as it opens its doors downtown.
Sporting a storefront loaded with VHS players, TV sets and an ample movie collection, Visions Video is looking to bring back home an old-school home entertainment option – a video rental store in the heart of Northampton.
Still putting up labels on the rows of DVDs, Blu-rays and video tapes, members of the nonprofit opened Visions’ doors to the public Friday, quickly filling up just after 2 p.m.
Rayla Shawanda is one of the founding members. She tells WAMC the store houses something in the realm of 12,000 movies and TV shows donated from all sorts of places and people.
“It's really ranged from individual donations, people giving a couple DVDs to giving out a whole bunch,” she said. “… libraries donating large selections to film distributors - Ken Burns donated...”
It’s a small space, yet organizers have packed it with films of all kinds, recreating that ’90s nostalgia of browsing rows and rows to see what looks good.
It only took a few minutes for the shop’s first customer, Gabby Squailia, to appear with three DVDs in-hand – “Battle Royale,” “Blade Runner 2049” and “Drunken Master 2.”
Squailia tells WAMC it’s magical to see something like a video rental shop pop up again after seemingly going extinct over the past two decades. She says it’s nice to be able to casually browse a physical collection, rather than have a movie choice dictated by a streaming service’s algorithm.
“There's just really nothing quite like … picking out what you're going to do later that night and having that full experience with other people in your community - there's something to that that I think gets lost,” the shop’s first official renter said. “I personally get really lost when I'm looking through infinite movies that are sort of algorithm-based - I just have a really hard time making those decisions, so it's really nice to have that in a physical sort of form.”
Squailia’s experience is the kind co-founder Daniel James Cashman says the nonprofit is going for.
He tells WAMC that fellow-cofounder George Meyers had the idea for such a shop some time ago, and that the two of them scoped out similar operations, like the We Luv Video nonprofit in Austin, Texas.
In a way, the store is kind of like a co-op version of Blockbuster: becoming a member allows greater access, while making you a part of a sort of film-sharing revival.
“The membership is so that you can take out a certain amount of movies at any given time - the tiers would make it so you could get more movies if you wanted to,” he explained. “Just kind of not doing the old rental store thing with the late fees and each movie costs this much, a new release costs this much… it's just kind of more of a free-for-all of get a membership, take out some movies and bring them back - take out some more…”
Cashman spoke with WAMC as Meyers registered those who were interested and rented movies to the store’s first customers.
All the while, cameras rolled. New Haven, Connecticut-based filmmaker Gorman Bechard was on hand to document the store’s opening.
Bechard tells WAMC he’s been across the country, working on a documentary cataloging other groups opening similar shops, working on it for two years and hoping to share it at film festivals next year.
In the meantime, he says he’s run into plenty of passion in the shops he’s visited. A love of film is one of the big drivers, but so is building a community space.
“I mean, everyone I know at Best Video, which is the one that's closest to me - they are all film fanatics: we can sit there at the end of the night and talk for hours, and so, I think that that's it, but it's also the community,” he says. “Video stores were, from ‘85 to 2005, one of our biggest community centers. It was almost like the old saying, the third space that we have - there's home, there's work and there's the place we hang out. For a lot of people, it was the video store.”
The old chains like Blockbuster might be gone (save for the store still open in Bend, Oregon), but the volunteer-run Visions Video says it plans to grow with the community’s support.
