Maya Hawke narrating Videoheaven Part eulogy for a bygone commercial space, part rigorous investigation of its origins and subsequent representation in popular culture, Alex Ross Perry’s Videoheaven leaves virtually no stone unturned during its nearly three hour runtime. Composed entirely of clips that take place in or otherwise center video stores—from Body Double to Seinfeld to Stranger Things—the essayistic documentary features droll narration from Maya Hawke (who stars in the latter) waxing poetic about their rise and fall, both physically and on screen, in six chapters. The role of pornography, corporate chains and the front-facing employees within these spaces is exhaustively charted; notably, Perry worked at a location of exalted Manhattan retailer Kim’s Video as a young adult, making it no surprise that the chapter on video store clerks comprises roughly a third of the film’s overall narrative.
During the end of our conversation, Perry notes that the few video stores that still exist—or even recently opened—seem to be populated by 20somethings. As a 30-year-old myself, I vividly remember when the Blockbuster down the street from my childhood home shuttered in 2013. In my mad dash to scoop up as many discounted DVDs as I could during the final half hour of its existence, I must have only had time to peruse titles beginning with M; copies of The Midnight Meat Train, Mulholland Drive and Mysterious Skin still sit on the bookshelf in my old bedroom. I recall hoping that the cashier would comment on what I was sure was my impeccably esoteric taste amid a sea of populist slop. Instead, they just took my five bucks and locked the door as I left, probably happy that the last customer on the last day of their shitty retail gig had finally fucked off. Despite this harsh reality, consumers still seem eager to chase the promise of cinephilic connection that can feel infinitely possible at the local movie rental joint—even if the films lining the shelves possess more potential for this than the reality ever could.
While these places will likely never reach the cultural peak they once did during the heyday of Blockbuster, the colorful carpets and fluorescent lights are practically tactile in Videoheaven. Below, Perry details the handful of essential collaborators, hundreds of Blu-ray rips and encyclopedic knowledge of Troma titles that made this film possible. Videoheaven opens today at the IFC Center.
Filmmaker: Your editor, Clyde Folley, is considered an expert on ’80s and ’90s horror films. Obviously, a huge focus of Videoheaven is the association of video stores with genre fare. Was his knowledge instrumental in selecting certain clips?
Perry: Everybody says about the movie, “Where’d you find all these clips?” And I’m like, “You’ll have to be more specific. Tell me a movie and I’ll tell you how we found it.” Easily 20 to 30 movies were just a Clyde thing. Over the five or six years of Clyde[’s involvement] and my 10 years, if there’s a really weird choice, it’s just that one of us watched it and texted the other. There’s not more to it than that. We were never like, “All right, here’s 100 films you need to look through.” It’s more just Clyde saying, “Hey, do you know The Cure, the movie where Joseph Mazzello from Jurassic Park is a boy with AIDS? Well, there’s a video store visible in the grocery store in it.” And I was like, “Great, didn’t know.” So it’s less genre-deep, because I feel like a lot of that ’80s stuff was pretty locked in just because people have had more time to savor those clips. It’s more the oddball ’90s movies that Clyde or I would sort of stumble upon.
Filmmaker: So were you both still stumbling upon clips during the cut?
Perry: Infinitely, yeah, up until this point last year. We were never actively searching for things. That period of research ended when Dan Herbert’s research assistants at University of Michigan ceased being on his…not payroll, but academic program. To the Clyde question, the crown jewel of his contribution, top down, is Troma. Our film focuses hugely on Troma films and other than knowing that The Toxic Avenger Part III: The Last Temptation of Toxie featured a video store, Clyde—who had worked at Troma early in his days in New York— had the ability [to identify] within clips we already had that there’s an out of focus Tromeo and Juliet poster in the background, or there’s a poster for Redneck Zombies Must Die over there, or an Evil Clutch poster in Last Action Hero. Not a single other person on the face of the earth could have done that, much less the volume that he contributed to eagle-eyed Troma scholarship. Which is funny, because the more it emerged for us, the more it became an insightful silo of scholarship about what it means to be in this space in a movie and how strange it is that Dawson’s Creek would throw up a Troma poster without commentary, and that most people’s eyes would glaze over that and just think video stores have wacky, strange, esoteric, dark cult films that we don’t know about—and that is true, but Clyde’s eagle eye really trained us to know nine times out of 10 that it represented something with Troma that the average viewer just thinks looks like a weird cult movie. And the Clyde viewer thinks, “I wonder why they picked Femme Fontaine: Killer Babe for the C.I.A. to be in Dawson’s Creek.”
Filmmaker: Yeah, the Troma observations in the film are something I had never thought about.
Perry: I’d never, either. And Dan Herbert, who wrote this book and spent years researching it as a professor of media studies, he’s like, “I don’t really know about Troma.” We then created an entire new mode of looking at this that the author of our source material had never known or thought about. But the way we frame it, I think, is sort of inarguable that disreputable, cheap thrills, as represented by Troma, become a stand-in for the shorthand of video stores [as spaces that] are wacky and weird and colorful. I wouldn’t have spotted that, Dan didn’t spot it. Only Clyde could have done that.
Filmmaker: Similarly, did your so-called “source wizard” face any challenges in finding the best quality version of certain films?
Perry: Yeah, that was Drew Tobia, a well-known New York figure whose job that was. There was nothing he couldn’t find. It was 2020 through 2023 when he was doing dozens of these a week for us. I don’t know how he did it. There was some stuff that he was like, “There’s a Blu-ray of this, but it’s only available in Australia. If you can give me permission, I’ll buy it and rip it.” But most stuff he was able to torrent and he was sending us eight gigabyte Blu-ray 4K files of the most horrible looking movies imaginable. Again, everybody involved in this was a total loser who has these references in their back pocket. And Drew came through with the Beverly Hills, 90210 video store scene where Tori Spelling is flirting with a guy in the porno section. Some of things are just outside of the purview of everyone else, and you need one person involved in the food chain to raise their hand.
Filmmaker: Yeah, while watching it, there was nothing that came to my mind where I was like, “Oh, where’s this or that clip?”
Perry: People say that. Of course, in the handful of screenings we’ve had, there’s always someone saying, “Oh, the whole time I was watching I was wondering if they were going to get to this, and you did.”
Filmmaker: That was me with every Seinfeld clip until you finally got to Vincent’s picks.
Perry: It really speaks to the breadth of that show, how many moments they can build out of something and how we use it. If you are paying close attention or watching again and again—and we call this out in the narration—every one of the Seinfeld clips is kind of weirdly anomalous in its own way. I think I use the word “anomalous” twice in describing Seinfeld. It’s fairly quotidian when you look at it in passing and fits in with other must-see TV—Friends, Mad About You, Frasier—but the actual core of those Seinfeld clips, like we say with Vincent’s picks, is that every single other clip about a clerk and a customer is that the clerk’s tastes are way out there and the customer’s tastes are way down there. This is the only clip, really, of the customer being so in sync with the taste of the employee. We have no other clip of that. Every other clip is clerks who are out of touch from what the customers actually want—except for Vincent. It’s just very strange.
Filmmaker: The opening chapters focus quite heavily on the statistics and findings in Daniel Herbert’s non-fiction Videoland. As you’ve said, the rest of the film “became slanted toward [your] own thesis and interpretation.” How did you decide on the other vital chapters that are integral to understanding the video store?
Perry: Initially, I don’t think the approach was strictly chapter-based. I know people are always kind of jaded about doing tons of Zoom interviews, but one benefit of me doing it is that I can just look in my files while we’re talking and bring this up. If I look at my earliest stuff here, I have a phone call with Daniel from 2018 and it says, “Part One: Prologue, dialogue between past or future. Part Two: ’80s earliest representations. Part Three: Normalization of video stories as common spaces. Part Four: Clerks. Part Five: Routine and repetition. Part Six: End point.” Now, obviously, this is not what we did. Routine and repetition became the heyday chapter, which is largely based around normalization and romance. This is the earliest version of this movie’s outline. You’ll see that over time, the preponderance of adult titles, porn sections and porn scenes became worthy of its own chapter. That’s not in there. You’ll also notice that maybe my favorite chapter—and for my money, not my masterstroke but a big breakthrough—was “Part Six: The Decline and Death of the Video Store.” All of those clips originally were just in other chapters for seven years. All of these scenes from the late 2000s and early 2010s were just kind of dragging down other sections because they were so different than clips from ’90s content. Then really late, late, late in the game—I want to say 2022, like post-pandemic—Clyde and I were just sitting there and I was like, “The story has changed.” Starting this in 2014 and talking to Dan in ’15, ’16 and so on, we’re now far enough away from these films for me to say these late aughts and early 2010s examples now prove an entirely additional point that we have to buttress into our conclusion by illuminating my theory that when these depictions migrated from 40 million viewers on Seinfeld to threadbare indies that played film festivals and never were released, that is the story. That is not an evolution of these depictions. It is so clearly part and parcel with the fact that by the 2000s and the 2010s, depictions were following the same downward trajectory as video stores. Having to build out that entire new chapter on my own with no input from Dan is, you know, academic, where it’s like, “I’m going to write a paper about this movie that a thousand people have written about, but my conclusion is this.” This was just me being like, “Look, I’m not saying this is a fact. I’m saying I’ve sat with these clips for almost a decade.”
When I was in NYU, I was a film production major with a minor in cinema studies and worked in a video store at the same time. This film sits in between that triangle of my identity starting in 2003. Being able to draw my own analytical conclusion from 20 of the crappiest movies you’ve ever seen was really fun. And that is academic interpretation. That is “making meaning,” as we were all taught when we read David Bordwell in Intro to Film Studies. Like, there is no meaning in one of these films. You could not write a paper on one of these films. Pulling five minutes out of two dozen of them became, to me, this grand concluding thought prior to our epilogue. When we started this a decade ago in 2014, we were still pretty close to the end of these things. Stores were still dwindling. But by the time I was extracting all of these further examples in 2022, this was now ancient history, and I was able to see in hindsight what I could not see at the time.
Filmmaker: Michael Koresky, a wonderfully talented critic and editor, handled writing duties for the narration. Tell me about how you came to collaborate and how he specifically shaped the textual voice of this project.
Perry: Yeah, he did the editing. I was like, “Michael, can you please take these five paragraphs and turn them into two for me?,” because I’m incapable. And he would suggest sweeping rewrites that I would accept to the letter because that’s what he was there for. Anything he wrote, he wrote by saying, “Here is a better version of your nine sentences that I made into two.” But essentially, the text—to give the briefest 10-year journey—started as extracts and just wholesale copy-and-paste from a deleted chapter in Dan’s book about the depictions of video stores in movies and TV.
Filmmaker: It was intended to be just one chapter?
Perry: Yes. He had deleted it at his editor’s behest. I’m looking at it here. He sent it to me with footnotes and citations. It is 21 pages and it’s not finished. His editor said, “In half of these 21 pages, you’re describing what’s happening in the scene. You’re just describing the framing, the shots, the characters.” So, this was the seed that we planted in the ground 10 years ago. From there, I would talk to him and say, “We have this hard drive with 20 other movies that you don’t talk about. Let’s just look at these clips and free-associate. What are we seeing? What do you see? What do these say to you?” As I was typing it up, it got longer and longer. Dan eventually was working on his book about New Line Cinema, and he has a couple of kids and a full-time professor job. He was like, “Look, I love this project. But there’s no end in sight”—this is like 2019, five years in—”I want you to just kind of run with it and think of me more as an advisor than a co-partner.” So, I would just write and write, extrapolate and build. I don’t trust myself as an academic writer, which I’m not. I don’t trust myself to not be edited at all. So, I said to Jake Perlin, the film’s producer and a well-known New York film figure, “I need someone who’s a critic, an academic or a critical editor to pre-edit this text before we record it, because it’s going to be too long, it’s going to be repetitive. I’ve been working on it inconsistently for years.” Someone who’s not me will say, “You make this exact same point twice.” I just need that careful set of eyes. He was like, “Michael Koresky would be good for that.” We asked and he said yes. We promised it would never be urgent, never be a full-time job. It would always be at your leisure. Let’s just chip away at it. We never worked in person. I think this started peak-pandemic. Even though at the time we lived very near each other, there was no face-to-face interaction at all. It was really just him on a Google doc suggesting edits and being, you know, just a good editor. “I think we’re done with statistics, I think statistics all need to live upfront; consider removing this part; you make this point in another chapter.” I took every [edit], because yes, the film is long and the text is long, but just because it’s long doesn’t mean it can be bloated. I wanted the most lean, diamond-cut, properly edited version of something that we always knew was going to be whatever length we felt like making it.
Filmmaker: Was Maya Hawke watching a cut of the film while narrating or was that all recorded separately?
Perry: It was done to picture as though it was ADR, because we had, at that point, been editing forever with temp ADR that Clyde had recorded. Obviously, we just needed that. We couldn’t edit to nothing and Clyde recorded the whole thing. We spent three years, 2020 to 2023—maybe even longer, maybe we started in 2019—editing off of his scratch track so that we could nail the timing, because there’s no way to edit 60 seconds of the movie without having the spoken words. There’s no need for Maya to study that for performance, just for timing. There’s really no need for her to even watch the picture at all, because it’s not like she’s recording ADR. Clyde said, “We will adjust the editing. Don’t feel locked into the speed, but this is roughly how long this must be. If you come in two seconds shorter or three seconds longer, we’ll edit it.” I remember the first day we went in with her, we had the whole thing up and were like, “Let’s just play it.” And after about an hour, both she and I were like, “This serves no purpose. It’s just slowing us down.” It’s not like it’s a complex thing like doing a voice in an animated film, where you can go in a hundred directions. Once she found the rhythms of reading it, she was like, “I don’t think we need to keep pressing play,” because the way she wanted to do it was just like, “I’m just going to do this sentence five times in a row. Give me five tries at it and then we’ll move on.”
Filmmaker: Obviously, the section on clerks is all about their interactions with customers. Is there anything you reflected on that felt like, “Oh, yeah, this echoes my own experience”?
Perry: The funny thing is that there is no version of reality in those scenes. With very few exceptions, these are single scenes in bigger films that need to distill a series of points about the character into a moment, whereas I’m working eight hours a day, and on any given day, six of those hours are truly unremarkable. The honest movie about a video clerk would look more like Jeanne Dielman than Clerks. Every single day you’re just doing the exact same thing, standing at the exact same spot, interacting with different versions of the exact same customer. Then, of course, like in a movie or show, there might be five very entertaining minutes per day.
Filmmaker: You make a point of that in the film, going into the monotony and the routine of it.
Perry: Yeah, that is a part of it. Can I honestly say that I never had a moment like in Walking and Talking, where you’re hiding from someone you met in the store? No, I cannot. I remember one very specific example where I was avoiding someone who was like, “I know where you work.” That’s very relatable to me because that happened. There’s so many things that have just a kernel of truth. Randall in Clerks screaming, “You’re not allowed to rent here anymore!”—we had plenty of interactions that ended with an argument. Or the Joshua Jackson, Giovanni Ribisi movie I Love Your Work, where someone you recognize in some artistic field comes in and you have to try to play it cool. That happened with everybody from Winona Ryder to Helen Mirren to Rob Zombie to Eli Roth at Kim’s. Just having Wes Anderson and so many people that we liked come in that we would want to treat special and impress. Parker Posey was in about once a week. You know, you have to play it cool with those people. So that’s relatable, but it’s funny. That’s the only example that we have of a scene where a celebrity comes into a store in the context of the movie. It’s all very nebulous, but I worked there for many years. I had many different experiences.
Filmmaker: I’m sure you’ve heard of the phenomenon of video stores popping back up. Night Owl Video recently opened in Williamsburg, and I know it’s not a rental spot, but seeing how rabid cinephiles have been getting about the Criterion Mobile Closet definitely shows that there’s a real-time nostalgia and fetishism associated with physical media. How does this feel different from the culture of video stores that you’re reflecting on here? Do you think that environment can find its way back into our lives?
Perry: I’m very intrigued by all of this. Obviously we have a runner in the film, which half of our examples are from since we started making the movie, of period pieces—including Maya’s appearance in Stranger Things, which when we started the film didn’t even exist.
Filmmaker: I also love seeing her and Joe Keery in that scene together, considering they’re both in projects you’ve released this year, the other being Pavements.
Perry: It’s very serendipitous. I can’t even tell you how many times I heard of something new in the six days in between my weekly sessions with Clyde: “Oh, apparently they did some video store thing on Yellowjackets this week. Drew, can you get us this week’s episode of Yellowjackets?” And of course, what’s the movie they’re referencing? The Watermelon Woman, one of Dan’s original 20 films [from his deleted chapter]. So, the world has come back around. The new preponderance of these spaces is encouraging and it’s very exciting for me. It’s also just part and parcel with everything old is new again. People who missed out on anything are likely to want to get in on that in some capacity. Obviously, with limited exceptions. People say, “Oh, there’s a great video store near me.” And I’m like, “Right, but my point is you could not, on just a contemporary sitcom, show characters going to that store and just shooting the breeze and not have viewers be like, ‘Why is this scene acting like this is normal?’” Of course, it’s a good thing. But fundamentally, it’s born out of necessity. Aside from Night Owl—which I’ve yet to go to—there has not been a physical space in New York City to purchase a Blu-ray other than Barnes & Noble or Forbidden Planet for, like, eight years. Obviously, some record stores will have a used selection, but there has not been a physical space to do that for almost a decade. This is very ridiculous to me, and clearly to others as well. What I like is the idea that people just value that experience. You know, Metrograph, Roxy, Vidiots. Like, the [vibe that the] movie theater has a bar in it, I go there all the time and everybody I know is there and I run into people. People really now value the theater as a social space. I think that the extension of that is the social space devoted to movies that has no theater. There’s no other reason to go there, except all these places have little pop-up screens, which is fun. But I think it’s just obvious that things are cyclical. And if this movie does anything, it’s showing people who maybe don’t have a Night Owl or a Vidiots or a WHAMMY! near them that no, you really missed out. I was in CineFile in Los Angeles about a month ago on a Friday night when I was doing Pavements Q&As at the New Art Theater next door. I was there for 45 minutes and was the oldest person there. Every single customer was easily under the age of 30. I just think that there’s something legitimate there that’s more sociological that I’m keyed into talking about in a qualified way. Because all I can really say is like, “Yeah, it makes sense to me. I’m for it.”