Yesterday was the release of the first episode of The Video Archives Podcast featuring Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary. About a decade before they won an Oscar award writing Pulp Fiction, both Tarantino and Avary worked together at the Video Archives store in Manhattan Beach. Tarantino has said before that the years he spent working at the video rental store were his college. A place full of camaraderie with staff and customers as they shared their love for movies in an era when VHS rentals were new. And many years before the internet would be ubiquitous and movies could be streamed on a phone.
To put that in context, I graduated from film school in 1984 and I had never seen a movie on VHS before. There was a war of technology between laserdiscs, Beta decks, and VHS machines. They were all expensive as were movies to buy. You didn’t want to pay $1,000 on a machine that lost that battle. I think it was at the end of ’84 or the beginning of ’85 when the price of a VHS machine dropped to $500 and I bought one. VHS tapes listed for around $69, but when An Officer and a Gentleman had a price drop down to $29 that was the first one I bought.
The summer after I graduated I drove around the country for six glorious weeks without a plan and retuned to Southern California to resume a freelance photography job with a company in Cerritos. I rented a studio apartment in Seal Beach, California and found a place there called One Dollar Video where I rented a movie every night. For a brief time, my routine was wake up, surf, go do a photo shoot somewhere in Southern California, and then watch a movie each night. And I’d breakdown each movie scene by scene on a yellow pad. Once a week I’d take a acting class in Beverly Hills. And I kept in contact with people I went to school with. (One was Peter George who directed the cult film Surf Nazi’s Must Die (1987)—which I hope Tarantino and Avary cover on one of their podcasts as they go through Tarantino’s VHS collection which he bought when Video Archives closed.)
I smile when I think back to the mid-’80s knowing that just 25 miles north west of Seal Beach that Tarantino and Avery were gaining notoriety with their film knowledge working at Video Archives. And they were dreaming of making their own films. I wished that store had of gotten on my radar at that time. In 1987, I landed a 16mm cinematographer/editor job in Burbank and rented a place there. Later I learn that that was around the same time that Tarantino was spending time in Burbank/Glendale. You’d think that like-mined people around the same age would cross paths at some point, but in the age before the internet those connections weren’t made as easily as they are today.
Anyway, Tarantino and Avary have returned to their roots with the Video Archives podcast where they will discuss some of the movies that they recommended when they worked there. The first two movies in the inaugural podcast were two that I was unfamiliar with; Dark Star (1974) and Cocaine Cowboys (the 1979 feature, not the documentary).
Here’s what Tarantino had to say about Dark Star —a movie that started as a USC student film directed by John Carpenter (before directed and co-wrote Halloween), and co-written with (and starring) Dan O’Bannon (before he wrote Alien).
”I’m practically trepidations about how I feel about the movie now. For the simple fact that the thing I don’t want to do on this podcast is throw around the M-word. I want the M-word to mean something. The M-word is masterpiece. I want the M-word to mean something. I don’t want to throw it around. And I don’t want to use the M-word on the very first movie we talk about, but I think actually think it applies to Dark Star. It’s a science fiction masterpiece. It’s a counter-culture, anti-establishment, hippy filmmaking masterpiece. It’s an early 70s masterpiece.”
—Quentin Tarantino
Video Archives podcast
Scott W. Smith is the author of Screenwriting with Brass Knuckles
Screenwriting from Iowa 