My favorite job had always been and to this day a Blockbuster Video store manager. It wasn’t a truly great company, but there was always something about talking to customers who loved movies just as much as I did.
I remember these long talks to regulars about the films they watched, or I did, especially this one kid who was in high school. He was a giant movie geek, who’d run into the store just to talk to me about what he had just seen. While I remember him fondly, I don’t know whatever happened to him.
This is something you don’t get anymore with the invention of streaming.
Nope, we were all kicked to the curb like the video store didn’t matter.
My first job was working at a “mom and pop” video store in Southern California called “Foothill Video.” It was owned by a middle eastern man who had two locations. My grandparents frequented his main location, but there was his other location down the street from my house. They got me the job and for that, I was forever grateful as it changed my life without even knowing it.
I was a 14 year old kid, who really didn’t know about movies. But everyday, I rode my bicycle to work and learned about film — the manager at the time was a film geek who watched Top Gun more than any other film in stock. I can still picture the store. It had rows and rows of VHS tapes. Move than 6000 movies in stock at a time. We even had a backroom for the porn.
It was in 1985 and selling VHS wasn’t really a thing. Renting VHS or Betamax was the only deal in town, and we had one of the biggest stores in the area. Most of the customers were middle aged men, though on the weekend the moms would stop by to get the lastest rom-com or family film.
It wasn’t until many jobs later that I returned the video store atmosphere—getting a part-time job in the evenings at Blockbuster Video. It was wonderful and magical. VHS was on its way out and DVDs were heading into the stores.
While I had always watched movies, now I was an adult. There was a nostalgia to it already, coming back. But it made me appreciate films. I was more experimental in what I watched—taking recommendations from customers just so I could recommend it myself. We got to take movies home before release dates… like I said, it was some of the best times of my life.
With the invention of social media, the movie lovers in my life grew too. Many of them were collectors of dead formats like VHS. I found laserdiscs. These movie geeks were amateur movie critics, some pretentious while others became life long friends. I always thought that someone should create a computer system were you had access to every movie, just scroll and find the movie you wanted to watch and you could enjoy a giant Blockbuster store right from your sofa.
Man, if I had been a little earlier in the patent game… I could have been a millionaire. Streaming platforms became a thing. So did my other idea—an online website were you can easily log your watched movies and it would tally everything for you, and you can post reviews. I was so before my time. Someone created Letterboxd too.
For me, movies have always been an escape from the problems around me. For that two hours, I forget the stresses in my life. It sparks imagination. I can fall in love with characters, actors, and new worlds.
My wife and I can sit down for a weekend and blow through 5-10 movies. We love marathons. Sometimes, we focus on a particular actor or director. Other times, we will do a 7-degrees run where we pick an actor to jump to the next movie he/she is in.
EXAMPLE
Big Top Pee Wee (Benecio Del Toro)
Snatch (Dennis Farina)
Midnight Run (Robert DeNiro)
The Irishman (Anna Paquin)
X-Men (Hugh Jackman)
The Greatest Showman
This type of marathon will force us to watch movies that we might not always be expecting or on our to-be-watched list.
Sadly, streaming service are both a positive and negative. I miss media. I miss the need for video stores, but having so much at your finger tips is great in its own right. But for me, its a determent too. It makes it so difficult to choose what to watch. When I worked at Blockbuster, I would pick movies throughout the night then go home with a handful of oldies and new releases. It was fun!!!!
NOW WHAT?
I’ve been on Letterboxd for years, logging the movies I watch. Sometimes I will give films a star rating, others I will right a small review. Over the years, I dabbled in starting various different blogs, my favorite being “The Popcorn Files.” I even did a little freelance writing about laserdiscs for a now-defunct blog.
There’s something fun about being able to talk movies… I hope this website will an outlet for me to post my watches and where I can talk to others about them.
Here’s to a new 2026 and let’s see if I can keep this up.
