Taking the Blue (and Khaki): My Year At Blockbuster
Note: Yesterday Dana Stevens of Slate contacted me, asking if I had any memories of Blockbuster I’d want to share for a piece she was working on. (She’d seen a Twitter exchange where I’d mentioned my year of compulsory service at the home-video monster/candy outlet.) I was quoted in the piece, but I thought it’d be fun to share an extended version here.
I worked at Blockbuster Video in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, from 1992-1993. I was in college in the same town, and it seemed more suited for me than the job I had at the time, which was making sandwiches for the lunchtime crowd at another franchise called D’Angelo’s. It’s perhaps important to note that at least D’Angelo’s is still around.
At any rate, I was a film student, so while the opportunity to wear a blue oxford and khakis (vs. someone else’s sandwich-y shirt) was already pretty appealing, the ten free rentals a week was gold. I got a better education in film by working at Blockbuster than I did in my film classes, though I’m told that school’s film program has since become quite good.
The store’s inventory was pretty weird, to say the least. Yes, we got 40 copies of the Addams Family movie when it came out. Yes, we also displayed 40 copies of Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot You when that came out. (Fun fact: we’d get calls all day from people asking if certain titles were in. Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot You may not have busted the box office, but it was easily the most-requested title during the year I worked at Blockbuster.) But while we only had one copy each of things like Miller’s Crossing or The Reflecting Skin, Mystery Train, or School Daze, those were my copies.
I remember a weird spate of road movies — Highway 61, Ruben and Ed, Roadside Prophets — that were all on the direct-to-video wall at the same time, a section I’m sure was called something cute in Blockbuster-speak. (Maybe “Missed It?” or “Off The Beaten Path” or “Because Basic Instinct Is Rented Out”.) I loved those movies and watched each multiple times, until I no longer really loved them at all but saw instead the essential elements that made a road movie. This is what you have to do if you’re going to understand how stories work, and my ten free rentals a week helped me do that.
Even though we were a college town, we weren’t really a college town, if you know what I mean. Fitchburg was a very blue-collar city, and the college had never established a culture there, but rather fit in as best it could amid the working-class family neighborhoods that surrounded it. So while Blockbuster ran great mom & pop stores out of other towns, there was no other store in Fitchburg where you could get even one of those little indie road movies, or something like Wings of Desire. There was one other store in town at the time, but if you went there it was because it had the room with the swinging western doors.
After I’d been at Blockbuster a while, they hired another film student, Steve. We were only allowed to show G-rated movies on the store’s monitor system, a point which drove me insane — I never need to see Ferngully again, nor did I ever need to see it the first time — but which didn’t bother Steve. He’d pull Brigadoon, or Citizen Kane, or some film noir I’d never heard of, and suddenly it wasn’t the worst thing in the world, having to show G-rated movies. The Hustler, as far as anyone there was concerned, was a G-rated movie. It was old, it was in black-and-white, and it said NR on it, so it was safe. The customers never paid attention to the monitors anyway.
But this was Blockbuster, and if Blockbuster is famous for one thing, it’s the fact that it wouldn’t rent anything above an R rating — and even then, there were titles that seemed never to arrive, no matter how many times we requested them. Steve and I used to fill the Customer Request Sheet with titles like Henry & June, The Last Temptation of Christ, Midnight Cowboy (which our store did not carry), Blue Velvet (ditto), and others. We changed the handwriting and the pen color each week, but these videos never arrived. Meanwhile, we’d do inventory every quarter and come away with our heads full of titles with the words “Blood” “Kill” “Horror” and “Death” in them. These were a-okay with Blockbuster! Just no complicated sex!
I worked at Blockbuster a year, during which I was promoted to manager, which meant I got to wear a white shirt, which made me feel immediately, palpably superior to my former fellow employees. It also meant I was suddenly privy to the inner workings, the ordering process, the money. Yet I quickly found I was no closer to the kind of decision-making that kept us bereft of Blue Velvet. We took in thousands of dollars a day, we had no say over what titles could come to the store or how many copies — even though Blockbuster was a franchise operation, everything was run with an unusual degree of control from Corporate — and that was how it worked. Our store was owned and operated by a guy who otherwise ran a chain of Boston restaurants, but as far as I could see his only real role was showing up twice a year for all-hands employee meetings and cheerfully ducking our questions about why we still carried so many Amos ‘n Andy titles. (Seriously.) It was like being in an outpost of Oz, with everything there running just as the Wizard decreed it from wherever central Oz was. (Florida, it turned out.) And no one at that time could imagine the system working any better, or any differently. I honestly thought it’d be there forever.
When college was done, I resigned from Blockbuster and moved to New York City, at the other end of the block from the West Village outpost of Kim’s Video. If you never got to a Kim’s, let me put it this way: Take a tiny room, stock it with every title Blockbuster would refuse to carry, and then fill it with the nastiest film geeks imaginable. In the days when there was no such thing as Twin Peaks on home video, all the Kim’s stores carried it anyway, on (I believe) Japanese-produced VHS tapes. And Kim’s was like a wonderland for me, for about a week. Then my future wife and I decided we might want to watch Moonstruck or Fearless in addition to all the other stuff, so we got a membership at the big indie place on Hudson just south of Christopher Street. (Was it Action Video? Anybody?) And this was a great store with a fantastically broad selection. But I have to say, it was also cluttered and lacked the intuitive flow of my old Blockbuster, a flow that had surely been designed by the same people who figured out to put the dairy and eggs at the very back of any supermarket so that you’d have to walk by all the other potential purchases to get to them.
When I think of Blockbuster now, I think of Store Manager David. When they built the Blockbuster in Fitchburg, they built it fast. As in: One week it was the latest in a long line of (bad) family-style restaurants, the next it was a new concrete-and-glass box. The store manager overseeing the opening was a guy in his late thirties named David, and he was apparently a Type-A personality. I say “apparently” because by the time I got there, about a year after the opening, David was the assistant manager, and he was the sweetest, meekest guy I’d ever met, if a bit scattered. It turned out David had been a pretty ruthless manager who specialized in efficient store openings for Blockbuster franchise owners, kind of like a pirate on Opposite Day.
During the opening of our store, David had woken up one morning next to his wife in their motel bed, unable to move or speak. David had had a stroke. David made a full recovery from his event, and to meet him, you’d never know anything had happened to him. But he’d changed completely. The store had kept him on as assistant manager, he’d stopped his nomadic lifestyle and bought a house in town, and he’d smile all day long, just smiling that smile and shaking his head at us when we asked him why the store would carry Eraserhead and Wild At Heart and all those Maniac Cop movies but not Blue Velvet. “Gosh,” he’d say, “That’s a good question.”
Note: If you want to read a very good, very funny book about working at a video store (but also about much more), check out Ali Davis’ True Porn Clerk Stories.