"Video Business" magazine closes up shop

As if any further indication was needed that the DVD industry is in a tailspin, I sadly note the death this week of the trade publication Video Business, which much to my delight had kept its original name all these years (hey, the “V” in DVD does stand for “video”). In a weird way, the home-entertainment industry has seen nothing but deaths in the past decade or so — most interestingly, the chain that set out to decimate the mom-and-pop store in the Eighties (the dreaded Blockbuster) has now fallen victim to Netflix, a notion that requires the absolute minimum of activity on the part of its customers (ah, the pure American-ness of not having to actually *do* anything, and yet still be a consumer!)

For full disclosure’s sake, I will note that I have been writing for the magazine for approximately nine years as a freelance reviewer and reporter. But I began reading it when I worked at a video store back in the late 1980s and later on, when I worked at the most famous (and still curiously alive… why?) TV listings weekly, I returned to VB as a reader because we were desperately in need of finding someone, *anyone* who actually was watching the crappy straight-to-video features (Shannon Tweed, Don “the Dragon” Wilson, Jeff Fahey, Shannon Whirry, et al) that we couldn’t evaluate because the cable nets showed ’em but were never going to provide screeners of them.

Video Business has filled that void for thirty years, and yes, these days you can indeed find a stray blogger who will review the same material for free and perhaps even in more depth, but it just ain’t the same, since VB often actually panned the freaking things, and their reviewers (I’m talking a decade before I had any participation in it) seemed to be folks who knew their bad films (and, more importantly of course, their good-bad films). Bloggers generally know their topic backward and forward, but they are a tad cautious to pan things they are getting for free from cordial publicists.

In any case, Video Business issued official word on Wednesday that it ceased publication this week with its current issue, December 4th. As a regular reader of the magazine, I think that it’s a major loss, since I notice several movie-news websites simply tossing up DVD label press releases with no fact-checking or follow-up calls involved. VB has been a reputable source of home-entertainment industry news, even as its happy stories about new horizons in technology were turning to revelations about the ways in which its readership — namely, the local video merchant — were being squeezed out of business by the lazyman juggernaut that is Netflix. I’ve heard that the magazine’s website will go offline, which is a major loss since the magazine covered titles that weren’t being reviewed anywhere else.

As a writer for the publication, I extend a personal thanks to editor and good friend Laurence Lerman, who’s done a terrific job of covering the disparate threads of an industry that’s gone in some very strange directions in only two decades: from a glut of “straight to videos” (with titles like Indecent Deadly Bloody Fatal Illusion), to rather luster-less “DVD premieres” (not ANOTHER Dennis the Menace sequel that no one knows exists?), to crystal-clear BluRay restorations of the same films that have been out umpteen times before. Laurence is a class act who has been one of the best editors I’ve had the pleasure to work with. His sweet tooth for kitsch aside (why do you think we’re friends?), he has exhibited a special talent for juggling both the “high” and the “low” in VB’s movie-review section; this aspect made it a very important read for DVD retailers around the country. And yes, there are still some mom-and-pops bravely weathering the slow, strange death of the home-entertainment industry. They deserve your business right now — get up off your asses and forget the Netflix envelopes and *rent* a movie in person, fer chrissake!

And so I raise a glass in toast to Laurence and the other folks who like myself have toiled in any capacity for Video Business. I can’t imagine future news-sources of info about movie “platforms” (Download Business???) ever being as adventurous, or as worth reading.

Lumberjacks No More: The Monty Python reunion in NYC

2009 stands as the 40th anniversary of a whole raft of things, from the moon landing to Woodstock to the Manson murders. Among the many things that began in ’69 was the television series Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which I and many of my confreres became addicted to back when it started appearing on American TV.

Thus, I counted myself lucky that I was among the folk who attended the reunion of the five surviving members at the Ziegfeld Theater — which was oddly foreshadowed by a reunion of four of the members the night before on The Jimmy Fallon Show, and a quick interview of three of them on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, which actually constituted the only time they were asked serious questions, and gave (semi-) serious answers. The event was the official American premiere of the Eagle Rock documentary Monty Python: Almost the Truth, which by this time has aired on IFC, and which I’ve viewed in both versions. The shorter one (a two-hour cut made for British theatrical release, purportedly) is actually the better of the two, unless you are a fan like myself who likes all the sordid details, and who is willing to sit through heaping chunks of the feature films in order to get background info.

I felt the documentary shone when it found the Pythons rhapsodizing about their heroes, who all happen to be folks who should be better known by the American public: Spike Millgan and the Goons; the Beyond the Fringe group, especially the blindingly brilliant Peter Cook; the Bonzo Dog Band (the single most important link between Beatles/’60s and Python/’70s, and many of the participants would agree on that). That Was the Week That Was (which I’ll readily admit is the entry in this list I know very little about); and humor-mag pioneer Harvey Kurtzman. All the lionizing goes on in the first episode of the series (except for a juicy bit about how Spike Milligan beat the Pythons to the punch with his wildly surreal Q series in the second episode). The third episode proved equally compelling, supplying info about the personalities of the six Pythons.

“Disguised as a normal person” (thanks, David Steinberg), I covered the Ziegfeld Theater reunion for the trade magazine Video Business. Here is my account.

Farewell, Mondo Kim's

2008 was a very, very bad year for New York City stores and eateries. The number of places that are shuttering for good is growing literally by the week, but one particular closing evoked sentimental feelings in movie buffs throughout the city, namely the "alternative" vid-emporium Mondo Kim's on St. Marks Place. I considered the store a really invaluable resource for research for interviews and "Deceased Artiste" episodes of the show, and would travel from wherever I lived in this wacky metropolis downtown to rent discs and tapes (yes, tapes, kids!) so I could catch up on various artists' work. The odd thing about my connection with the store is that you couldn't help but have a sort of love/hate relationship with it. The eclectic range of the store's stock was incredibly important, and I'm speaking strictly of the rental department (I have a solid collection of films I've purchased on DVD and VHS, but have remained an in-store movie renter, who prefers "brick and mortar" establishments — as they are now sadly called — to doing the Netflix lazyman approach). Yet the clerks at Kim's were uniformly bored, smug, and in a few cases, openly rude. Being a regular Kim's customer did have its underside.

But let's remember the happier part of the equation, shall we? All those wonderfully rare movies, which have now become part of a fairy tale ending that will surely go down in video store lore. In case, you haven't heard, the rental stock of this Greenwich Village store has now been shipped to a Sicilian town that has a very eager, culture-minded mayor. The initial public "offering" for the rental stock made by the store's owner mentioned the continuation of memberships and other notions that seemed to squarely imply the desire for another retailer or library to purchase the collection: the poster with the offering can be found here. But now a *donation* of the entire collection has been made, so the citizens of a Sicilian town will have at their disposal 55,000 DVDs and tapes. The vast majority of the titles are in English or have only English subtitles. Among the collection is a fascinating assortment of avant-garde films, a fairly sizeable porn library, and yes, a good amount of bootlegged recordings (from imports, broadcast and cable airings) of rare films that couldn't be acquired otherwise. I had to leave the magic "b-----g" word out of the column that I wrote as a homage to Kim's for the trade magazine Video Business, as it was uncertain if the store would be "saved" at the last minute, and I wouldn't want to be the one blowing the whistle on such an important resource. We New Yorkers now envy the cities that still have "alternative" video emporia that have on their shelves the out of print, the outre, and "off-market" film titles.

My homage to Mondo Kim's