I’m not a film buff, however I play one at Scarecrow Video. I stroll via the doorways of the College District store and nod in recognition at a cardboard cutout from 1988’s The Nice Open air—underrated John Sweet basic—and spot Danny DeVito’s face on the quilt of Steven Spielberg’s near-forgotten collection Wonderful Tales. I depend the choices behind the shelf tag for Tajikistan (it’s 4). Scarecrow is a veritable trove of VHS and DVDs; it’s Aladdin’s fabled treasure cavern however for copies of Aladdin. (If I have been an actual cinephile, I’d most likely cite one thing like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.)
When Scarecrow opened in 1988 with simply 600 titles, working at a video retailer was often known as a teen’s gig. However with the rise of chains like Blockbuster, the indie film outpost turned the almost-as-cool cousin of the report retailer, a spot to construct and exhibit style. For the youngsters: Letterboxd, however IRL.
Even because it grew to its two-story Roosevelt Approach dwelling and added laser discs, DVDs, Blu-rays, and a distribution label for indie movies, Scarecrow Video finally confronted the fact of shrinking earnings within the digital period. A set of householders, workers, and pals of the shop helped trend Scarecrow right into a nonprofit in 2014. As we speak, their assortment of greater than 150,000 titles dwarfs something on-line; Scarecrow’s employees, together with advertising and marketing coordinator Matt Lynch, likes to check. “In the event you took Amazon and HBO and Hulu and Netflix and mixed all of their accessible titles, we’d nonetheless have about triple of that quantity,” he says. Right here, sections are by theme, nation, and generally particular pursuits like “Clowns (Evil)” and “Nunsploitation.”
Scarecrow is now a cultural museum and video archive, says outgoing government director Kate Barr, even when it nonetheless appears to be like and acts like a hip video retailer—which is an artifact in itself. “A part of what we’re providing is one thing that has begun to vanish from our cultural panorama,” she says; it’s greater than the sum of its 150,000 elements.
Netflix’s classes are an infinite scroll of only some thousand titles, the identical stuff positioned to look limitless. Scarecrow’s coronary heart lies in its finite however huge stock, like a Japanese-issued laser disc of the late David Lynch’s present On the Air that’s so uncommon renting it requires a $1,500 deposit. In its a number of variations of Anne of Inexperienced Gables, together with a prequel-sequel I’d by no means heard of till I noticed it in Scarecrow (it appears to be like terrible).
Now a 501(c)(3), Scarecrow raises cash via fundraising drives and memberships; the best tiers embody the prospect to curate a particular part. Like every establishment that entails bodily media and customized service, it struggles in an period the place enterprise capital chases automation. However the store is holding on robust, celebrating one million {dollars} raised in 2024, and it has a rent-by-mail program that recollects, sure, the early days of Netflix. The U District store manages to protect a vibe of being too bizarre for the favored youngsters desk, a mishmash of Nineteen Eighties and ’90s counterculture and fandom tradition.
Each time I go to Scarecrow I believe I ought to go to extra typically, since I’m as responsible as anybody of a half-hearted scroll via Netflix earlier than hitting play on my seventh rewatch of Gilmore Ladies. I blame that on the paralysis of alternative, however once I stroll into Scarecrow Video I notice that’s not what’s occurring in any respect. Scarecrow has a mind-boggling variety of choices and but it drives, not stupefies, the art-hungry corners of the mind.
I cease for handwritten suggestions on the cabinets—one warns “Okay, the principle characters might be douchy. BUT….” and I’m already curious. I scan the cabinets of the Noir Across the World particular part and really feel slightly extra subtle. Lynch—the staffer, not the director—likes to level out that at Scarecrow, in contrast to with a web-based algorithm, strategies include “a mind and a coronary heart” at play. Even I get that reference.
