- The way we watch and discover movies has changed.
We have Netflix, Hulu and just about
everything right at our fingertips.
But like everything online, there's an algorithm
telling us what it thinks we want to watch.
- You know our personalization learns from
what you watch, how long you watch it,
how quickly do you go to the next episode.
- And while that can be helpful, it also us restricts
to watching the same kinds of movies.
But there was a time before the algorithm,
when your movie selection was based on spontaneity,
and word of mouth. And for most of us
that experience came from Blockbusters.
- Nobody has the movie I want.
- In 1994, Viacom acquired Blockbuster for
8.4 billion dollars. And by 2004,
Blockbuster had over 9,000 stores across the world.
Now in the U.S., there's only one.
We went to Bend, Oregon to see what we lost when
algorithms replaced human curation.
And how a small town became home to the last
Blockbuster in America.
(music)
- So we are in Bend, Oregon.
We're going to a big box retailer
to watch the general manager hand-pick DVDs for the store,
so that people can rent them later from Blockbuster.
She has to go to the store because
Blockbuster corporate doesn't exist any more.
There's nobody sending them DVDs.
- So full disclosure, we called the big box store
before shooting here to get a location release.
But out of concern for the Blockbuster manager, Sandy,
the store didn't want to sign, because technically,
what she's doing here goes against the retailer's policy.
- Up, is probably the most popular
one that I bought in here.
We sell that one a lot, and rent it a ton.
Wolf of Wallstreet, very popular.
Leonardo DiCaprio, yes, Lord of the Rings,
- Always
- We sell this one constantly and rent it out all the time.
- Sandy Harding is the general manager of Blockbusters,
where she's been working for the last ten years.
She knows which movies her customer want,
and she can even identify a lot of them
just by their voice when they call the store.
She uses a service in Portland that sends them
about 80 percent of their videos.
And she shop for the rest every Tuesday morning.
- You get the new ones online, it's the classic stuff
that you can't always find, so they come in to see us
because they know they can get it.
- Sandy's basically doing what Netflix does,
knowing what her customers want to rent
and serving that to more people.
I mean, that's business. But in the case of this store,
there's a specific community in mind,
which makes the whole thing more personal.
- Oh shit, there it is.
(laughter) I never thought I'd see that sign again.
(music)
It smells the same.
it absolutely smells the same.
Oh wow, I haven't seen any of these things,
any of these cases, or any of these movies before.
It's been so long since I've been in a DVD rental place
like this is. There's just so much stuff.
- There's a place for both.
There's a place for Netflix and hulu and Amazon.
And there's a place for this.
And I think that we finally found
that comfortable spot, and I think that people are
starting to realize that coming in here, picking up a movie,
walking around, talking about movies. Is something that
people miss.
- It's hard to find spaces where the point is
discovering things, or the point is being around people
who like the same things as you.
The employees of this store care about movies,
and more importantly, they care about sharing them
with people. I mean, just look at this section of
employee picks. It's updated regularly.
- Promethius is a really cool sci-fi movie. It's actually
based on the Alien series.
Another one, Requium for a Dream is great.
- The employee showing me around
the store is Sandy's son, Ryan.
- This is actually, completely edited on a software that
is totally free for anybody, which is Divinci Resolve.
- As we move towards these digital spaces,
we lose the expertise of people like Ryan.
You can walk down the isle and have a movie jump out at you.
Or, you can ask someone for a recommendation.
- You definitely walk in and you will be looking along
the shelf, and the next thing you know you see something
that might catch your eye.
- It's not something that's just right on the screen.
My kids can wander around and a lot of times, their
picking out movies that wouldn't be as popular as others.
- Some times I come in and I just want feel like seeing
a movie and I don't know what it's going to be.
And sometimes I walk out of here with,
like five totally different genres. I was surprised
to learn that we were the last one.
- So while they are the last Blockbuster in the U.S.,
there was a time when they were an independent video store,
before they were consumed by the corporate chain.
- We converted in 2000 to Blockbuster.
They made us an offer we couldn't refuse.
We were in here being Pacific Video, being very happy,
and they came to town and said, "Well, we need more
Blockbusters in this town, and we'd like you to convert, and
if you don't, we're gonna put a couple more
Blockbusters in." So...
- Ken Tischer is the owner of this store, and has been since
it was Pacific Video back in the '90s.
- Bend is a great movie town, always has been.
People were amazed when we had four stores.
The population was only about 50-55,000.
And they said there was no way that town
can support that many stores, and yet it did.
(music)
- Bend is located three-hours outside of Portland.
And it's small, it seems like everything is
five-minutes away. The people here really
care about their art.
Downtown you'll find literally
dozens of shops touting locally made products.
There's a yearly film festival.
And outside of that, there are three
theaters, two of which are independent,
that show features and shorts year-round.
It's a town that takes pride
in it's craft and it's community.
- It's a real interesting town, in that it's
relatively small, but people have such a love for
the art form that all of us, including Bend Film,
are able to do pretty well.
- That's Todd Looby, who runs Bend's film festival.
It's celebrating it's 15th anniversary this October.
- I think the curation aspect is super important,
like, you know, in a lot of Indie movies that say,
came out in the '90s, there'll be the video store guy,
like the Kevin Smith surrogate, who is the guy at the
video store who's telling people what movies to get.
The curating owns sections of the movies they love
and want people to watch. So people are gravitating
towards that experience. Some kind of curations,
someone who they trust to tell them what to see.
- People here really value these face-to-face interactions.
It's the same with Sandy,
the employees of the big box retailers around town know her.
And so they let her buy DVDs from the store,
even though they're really not supposed to.
It's easy to see how this town is home
to the last Blockbuster.
(music)
But most of us don't live in Bend.
And while there are local video stores across the country,
we need new ways to discover
movies that are more accessible.
Because most of us don't live near video stores either.
But there are some companies thinking
about that kind of accessibility.
And they even hand-pick videos you can watch online.
- Where we come from is a place of knowledge and passion,
choosing films that we think are
interesting and vital and important.
Versus data that makes assumptions
about well this is popular, so this should be popular too.
You like this, so maybe you'll like that.
To us that has no human quality at all.
- Daniel Kazman is the director of content at Mubi
a video streaming service that uses human curation
to select it's movie catalog.
- What we may see now, is just an increasing amount
of channels. So Disney is about to launch their
streaming service. Netflix is providing their original
content, Hulu has their original content.
But I think more valuable are the sort of channel idea,
that it's more specialized. When you look at something
like Shudder, which is a channel specifically dedicated
to horror films, it's much more focused in terms of the
programming that it offers. Curation, I feel like
always needs to exist, hand-in-hand with a venue.
Whether you're talking about a physical venue like a
theater cinematek, or an online venue,
like Mubi, Hulu or Netflix.
(music)
- Going forward, I think that technology
can leave us somewhere in the middle.
Somewhere between Netflix and the video store.
But right now, streaming services seem to be more focused
on improving their algorithms than diversifying your
movie pallet. The internet should have made discovery
easier, and maybe it did early on. But over time
the open web has become much more closed,
into Apps and feeds. Admittedly this Blockbuster and
a lot of other video stores, still partly exist
because of nostalgia. And sure, that will bring
Instagrammers, and news teams to cover them as
an oddity, but that nostalgia isn't what's going to
keep this store in business. It's the loyal customer
base that the employees here have cultivated
over the years. This Blockbuster is a product and a part
of the community here in Bend.
And while we currently live in a world driven by algorithms,
maybe we can find a way to bring a little of that
on to the web.
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