cover story, The Ryder Magazine
Stephen Volan
April 16, 2009
As I paid bills the other day I met a bill I couldn’t pay I couldn’t pay again today I guess it’s time to go away.
BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA — Many customers were asking why I decided to close the Cinemat. Paraphrasing the famous bit of doggerel from the late Hughes Mearns is the briefest answer I have been able to come up with. Now that the dust has settled and we’re no longer open regular hours, here’s a clearer picture of the state of an industry in decline in 2009.
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The Cinemat was a library-style video store, featuring a “long tail” catalog of all the titles you’d never see at a major chain. We never had more than two copies of any one title; instead we stocked the widest variety of movies possible. Our pride and joy was our foreign and documentary sections and our “Directors’ Wall.”
The Cinemat was also a pair of conjoined twins: a video-rental room and…something else in the other room. We liked the space in the Knights of Columbus Building, though it was too big just for a video store. But we only had a business plan for half the space, taking a page straight from the South Park Underpants Gnomes. (“Room 1: Rent Videos! Room 2: ??? Step 3: Profit!”)
We tried a coffeehouse in the other room first. It didn’t help that I don’t drink coffee, that I didn’t worship the gods of the dark bean. While we put money into the proper equipment for a quality product, we didn’t put much into atmosphere. Eight-foot bare fluorescent lights did not scream “cozy cafe,” and soon we cast about for something else.
The Ryder agreed to show a few films in the cafe, and enough people turned out that we decided to turn the space into a little movie theater in 2004. The Screening Room didn’t work out so well either: turns out that showing films is more complicated, and expensive, than just putting them up on a screen.
Finally in 2007, we started doing what businesses had been doing in that location for at least 10 years before us: presenting live music performances. Mostly rock and roll, but there have been exceptions and unusual events. We were one of the few rooms in town where all ages could attend and yet people over 21 could still have a bottle of beer; even then, the performance space was slow in gaining traction.
There was no one reason for closing. The economy of course has been heading south for more than six months, but we should’ve been able to weather that. Business owners usually have themselves to blame for the failure of their businesses. Could I have made better decisions in marketing? cash flow? long-term planning? Could I have done more? Sure.
But we traded primarily in DVDs. We knew it was a matter of time before it would be easier and cheaper for people to obtain a movie directly through a wire instead of walking or driving to our store. We always wondered when the viability of a bricks-and-mortar video store would become questionable.
I figured we’d last longer, but the technological writing showed up on the wall early this year. A January story in the L.A. Times told of the last distributor of VHS tapes going out of business. That was one clue. Another was the Roku box.
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People have often asked us how we coped with a national competitor like Netflix. We never had trouble competing with them. If the three movies sitting on your coffee table from from the top of your Netflix queue aren’t quite what you are in the mood for tonight, you’re stuck. In contrast, we had 5000 titles in one room. Just looking for “a good movie” tonight? You’d be likely to find something satisfactory.
In fact, when I’d work the counter, I had to come up with a strategy for helping the many customers who came in without an idea of what they wanted to see. All they knew was that they wanted “something good.” Usually they were overwhelmed by the choices available to them. So I began asking them a series of binary questions:
“Do you want to see a foreign film…or a domestic film?”
“…a narrative film…or a documentary?”
“…an old movie…or a new movie?”
“…a drama…or a comedy?”
“…an action film…or a talky film?”
And so on. By about the fourth or fifth question, I’d be able to steer them to a section of shelves that would have “something good” for them. It’s proven to be a useful technique for helping anyone who’s overwhelmed by choices. It certainly proved the value of going to a physical store.
The ultimate question, though, was, “…a movie…or a TV series?” The only metaphor to describe the effect of premium-cable TV series was drug addiction. I felt like I had become the local crack dealer, offering fare like “Six Feet Under,” “The Sopranos,” or “Arrested Development.” Some would rent a disc with three episodes and be back that same night for the next three. I steadfastly refused to begin watching season one of “The Wire” because I saw the effect it had on our customers. I couldn’t afford to wake up Monday morning after a weekend-long “Lost” bender.
Perhaps the worst part of owning a video store was that it made me not want to watch movies.
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So Netflix was there in the distance. YouTube has also been around a few years. But now you can watch complete movies there (albeit uploaded illegally in 10-minute chunks). BitTorrent has, um…changed some people’s habits. The most amusing commercial on this year’s Super Bowl was Alec Baldwin mugging for Hulu, which lets you watch TV show episodes and movies for free, sponsored by commercials.
Then in January, Netflix announced a $100 box made by Roku and available from Best Buy, that lets you stream 15,000 titles instantly to your TV set over your home broadband connection — free with your Netflix subscription. That even we couldn’t compete with. We could see the special effect of all the new technology, a slow wipe from our rentals, which had been dropping slowly but steadily over the last few months, to the next video-consumption scene.
Are local indie stores better than some nameless Website? Of course. But they’re also less immune to business error; when some new technology comes along, the errors become crises too great to overcome.
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For 6 1/2 years The Cinemat served Bloomington movie watchers with a collection of the finest films ever made and released on home video. After choosing the first 500 titles, if I’d had to choose what movies we were going to buy on a sorely limited budget, I would’ve had an anxiety attack every week. So I left the collecting decisions to a series of staff members, especially Colleen Jankovic, Nathan Vollmar, Amy Karr and Brandon Rome. If you’d like to thank anyone for the wonderful breadth and depth of the collection, thank them.
I remember thinking as late as three months ago how unbearable it would be to lose this room full of stories, whose aisles you could pace like Ethan Hawke’s Hamlet considering whether or not to be. But as I watched the long, slow unwinding of the Cinemat collection, I found myself somehow happy to know that all these movies were going to good, local homes. The store had become something of a shelter, for movie lovers and movies alike.
What I’ll truly lament about closing is the loss of another decent Third Place — some place that’s not home and not work — where people could come and entertain themselves beyond just picking out a film to take home. The real value of the place was in bringing people together face-to-face to talk, first about videos over coffee, then about projected movies over popcorn, and finally about live music over beer. Like the Cellar Lounge before us, and the Wild Beet, and the Icehouse, and Rhino’s, I hope what follows us in the Knights of Columbus building will be another good Third Place to socialize.
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Customers also have asked, “What are *you* going to do now?” Rest assured, I’m going to be fine. The store financially was an albatross to the end. (Perhaps it was an omen that a very loud band called “An Albatross” played in our Screening Room in October.) Most proprietors of retail businesses work much harder than I did at The Cinemat, and yet I’m still exhausted. What I’ll do now is take a decent vacation, be less poor, have more free time, and then see what’s next.
Meanwhile, we heartily recommend Plan 9 Video, just two blocks north of us at 213 N Walnut — locally-owned, with a very large catalog — for your future video-rental needs. I’ll probably see you there.
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[Editor’s note: The Cinemat still has more than two thousand titles unsold, and is open only for shows scheduled through May 18 and by appointment. Parties interested in browsing the remaining collection can send email to owner@thecinemat.com.]