On a sunny August weeknight, Matt Lynch, a clerk at longtime Seattle rental store Scarecrow Video, grabbed a cup of ice from the shop\u2019s relatively new coffee counter. Cutely named VHS-presso, the counter was one of the shop\u2019s many efforts in recent years to spur interest, attract more renters, and get people to walk into a video store once again.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s also the shop\u2019s screening room, opened just over a year ago to host cult and niche movie nights by way of a giant screen, a smattering of speakers, and some comfy chairs. Lynch, among the shop floor\u2019s elder statesmen at 12 years of experience, pulled one of those chairs out to sit and chew on ice while marveling at the room\u2019s walls. The shelves are full of classic VHS tapes. The store prides itself on its vast VHS collection, totaling over 15,000 tapes at this point. But neither that fact, nor the shop\u2019s recent additions, resulted in more rentals or sales as of late.<\/p>\n
Lynch looked at Ars\u2019 digital recorder and commented on \u201cthe angle\u201d that most magazines and blogs have run with when talking about video rental shops like Scarecrow Video: \u201c\u2019This [industry] is dead, these people are struggling to save it.\u2019\u201d He bit down on ice to punctuate that expectation. \u201cThat\u2019s not what I want to see here.\u201d<\/p>\n
His wish won\u2019t come as the result of a guilt trip, a fact Lynch and his Scarecrow cohorts are keenly aware of. \u201cJust being a video store is not enough anymore,\u201d he admitted. \u201cThe for-profit video rental store is clearly no longer sustainable as a business, which is why we\u2019re trying this new thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
What \u201cnew thing\u201d is left in the world of video rentals? Netflix\u2019s answer, after mail-in envelopes, was a focus on digital streaming\u2014setting off an industry-wide tidal wave of similar apps. Redbox\u2019s pervasive kiosks stripped its service down to nothing more than discs. For Scarecrow, the only sensible direction was to run in the opposite direction and find a way to keep the building open in spite of lack of profit. Lack of profit? Non-profit! That’s it!
\nBecoming an archive-library<\/p>\n
On the strength of a Kickstarter campaign that met its $100,000 goal in seven days, Scarecrow Video will convert to a 501(c)(3) non-profit beginning (tentatively) this October. \u201cReally, there isn\u2019t another model [like this] out there, not to our knowledge,\u201d said Scarecrow Project co-founder Kate Barr. \u201cWe\u2019re the first video store that\u2019s becoming an archive-library and going non-profit.\u201d<\/p>\n
What does that mean, exactly? The store\u2019s co-owners, Carl Tostevin and Mickey McDonough, described it as \u201ca community-supported, publicly available, non-profit film library and resource,\u201d which may sound like a high-falutin\u2019 description of a video store already. Certainly, some of the norms of video stores will remain, particularly the rental model, but Scarecrow Project organizers Barr and Joel Fisher, who came to the project as store employees, see the rentals as a way to buoy a greater, brand-new mission of preservation and education.<\/p>\n
The duo began its efforts as a response to the owners\u2019 dismal forecast for the shop late last year: namely, that it wasn\u2019t going to last. A blog post in October, coinciding with International Video Store Day, announced to the world that Scarecrow\u2019s rentals had dropped 40 percent over six years. While the plea helped with a short-term rentals uptick, it too failed to sustain a boost.
\n120,000 movies, six minutes. Ars takes the Scarecrow Video tour.<\/p>\n
Seeing the writing on the wall, the owners considered some sale offers, the most promising of which would have preserved the store\u2019s complete film collection\u2014over 120,000 films\u2014and possibly have kept them in the same building. But the internally developed idea, contingent on a Kickstarter campaign, won out.<\/p>\n
One big point in the Scarecrow Project\u2019s favor, as opposed to any outside sale, was its ability to guarantee the collection would stay in one place instead of possibly being split apart piecemeal. \u201cThat collection in and of itself has an intrinsic value as a whole,\u201d Lynch said. \u201c14 video tapes, that doesn\u2019t mean anything. 120,000 means something, especially when so many are the ones you can\u2019t find on other formats.\u201d<\/p>\n
The campaign\u2019s use of the word \u201cpreservation\u201d doesn\u2019t hint at a giant technological campaign, a request the Scarecrow Project admits it has fielded countless times already. For one, the team doesn\u2019t put faith in ones and zeroes: \u201cDigitizing everything and leaving it on a hard drive doesn\u2019t solve a preservation problem,\u201d Lynch said. \u201cPhysical media is still the best thing. Even if something is filmed digitally, there\u2019s capture stock. Physical media\u2019s not foolproof, either, but with every new format and the ensuing transition, thousands and thousands of titles get dropped by the wayside.\u201d<\/p>\n
In terms of pure VHS maintenance and protection, Lynch said the work is pretty cut-and-dry: take a damaged cassette apart and recase it. For Scarecrow, that’s an issue of manpower, not technology. “As messy as a contact media like that can be, VHS is pretty reliable,” Lynch said. “If you take care of it, it doesn\u2019t fall apart, especially now that so few people are watching them. That\u2019s the sort of thing we will be able to turn our eye to as an archive; instead of just serving customers, we\u2019ll be able to utilize volunteer labor to more acutely maintain these things.”<\/p>\n
The staff has joked about the notion of digitally capturing every film in its 15,000-plus VHS collection, estimating the years and years it\u2019d take even with dozens of computers. But Scarecrow is certainly interested in addressing certain films on a case-by-case basis. The new non-profit\u2019s board could include a committee to weigh the red tape and licensing costs that would come from such transfers. \u201cWhat\u2019s important to us is that it\u2019s all above-board,\u201d Barr said. \u201cWe stay within the letter of the law, and we honor licensing agreements with distributors.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you know where to dig, you can find a lot of the stuff\u2014not everything here\u2014but a lot of the stuff through illegal means online,\u201d Fisher added. \u201cBut that\u2019s not a sustainable infrastructure for perpetuating film and art. When you just put it online for everyone to see, and you\u2019re not taking any care with it, nobody\u2019s making anything [including money] out of it, so no one can continue to make their films or any of that stuff.\u201d Fisher doesn’t mean to dismiss serious efforts to post online-only archives, including the Internet Archive’s non-Internet collection. But he and Scarecrow’s experienced staff are doing their due diligence in figuring out how to connect the licensing, distribution, and revenue dots before doing something similar of their own.
\nA way for brick-and-mortar to lead<\/p>\n
Scarecrow has a far clearer vision about the other major half of its upcoming non-profit efforts. \u201cA huge part of our plans and dreams for Scarecrow is a more robust educational program,\u201d Barr said. \u201cGet kids in here early and expose them to filmmaking, all the way through to adults taking master classes, drilling down films and ripping them apart, looking at them in-depth.\u201d<\/p>\n
That would be an opportunity for the staff\u2019s rabid film buffs and a slew of new volunteers, to expound on the world of film in ways beyond \u201cwhat should I watch tonight?\u201d This portion of the foundation, in particular, will draw a lot of inspiration from Facets, a film foundation in Chicago that has its own robust educational component.<\/p>\n
For established educators in high schools and universities, Scarecrow also plans to launch a long-term loan program, so that even the most underfunded arts institutions can enjoy easy access to the complete works of Kurosawa, or a hundreds-strong collection of cheesy educational shorts, or the kinds of B-movie exploitation films that have been lost in the transition to newer formats.<\/p>\n
Really, so long as the bills are paid, Scarecrow should be able to accomplish its mission of becoming a more accessible home for film curation and preservation, the kind of institution that seeks to marry the balance between widening public access to a film collection, equal parts current and historic, while sustaining its contributing artists with fair pay. A curated, brick-and-mortar response to a seemingly endless glut of online media. That’s the comparison point that Scarecrow wants people to think of when they flip through their favorite streaming services.<\/p>\n
“We\u2019re not sitting here telling you, don\u2019t use Netflix, don\u2019t use Amazon,” Lynch said. “I use them! They\u2019re perfectly good. But a lot of people forget that those streaming services, convenient though they may be, what they offer you is determined by a few gigantic mega-corporations paying each other millions in licensing fees. What we have here doesn\u2019t shrink, doesn\u2019t expire, doesn\u2019t change based on what two giant companies want you to be able to see, and it\u2019s staffed by a bunch of folks who really care.”
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