MIDAMERICA—Ever work in an adult video store—or any video store, really? Ever suspect that those who did might have some interesting stories to tell about the experience? Author/journalist Tom Roston did, and his upcoming study, I Lost It At The Video Store, has some of today's more influential and/or interesting filmmakers reflecting on their time behind the counter, and if the book's Facebook page is an indication, perhaps a few words on "50 of the Greatest Remaining Video Stores."
"There was porn at RST," recalled Kevin Smith, auteur of Clerks and many other top hits, of the video store where he once worked, in this excerpt from the book sneak-previewed by Entertainment Weekly. "And it was stocked, son. Blockbuster never did porn, and so the mom-and-pops stayed in business with their porn rooms. Watching people interact with the porn room was awesome. Once you get comfortable with people, they wouldn’t do this dance, 'Oh, what’s in the kids’ section? Ah, this looks good.' Pick up a drama. And then saunter back to the porn room and reach for the filthiest thing on the planet and then have to bring it up to the counter with Turner & Hooch. It was one of the particular joys of the video store.
"There was one lady, a married mom. She had to be maybe 45. She would rent the action movie, the kids' movie, and a hardcore flick. She just got down to, 'Just give me what’s new.' Once you’re comfortable with someone renting porn, you can have conversations with him or her. Having a frank conversation with someone about his or her sex life informed my work a great deal," added the director of Zack and Miri Make a Porno.
Others who dug deep into their video store clerking days included Quentin Tarantino ("The store was my Village Voice and I was the [film critic] Andrew Sarris. At a certain point I got to know everyone’s taste"); John Sayles; Darren Aronofsky; "mumblecore pioneer" Joe Swanberg (" We were ordering fifteen films a day for the store, and the manager didn’t care. ... [It] had a massive foreign film section. It had a massive documentary section."); Allison "The Missing Ingredient" Anders; indie filmmaker Nicole Holofcener ("It’s very personal renting videos to people. For the porn section, it’s like, 'Okay, you are into taboo sex. You keep renting the Taboo series.' I would say, 'Yeah, I heard this one is really good. You’re going to like it. Tell me how it came out.'"); David O. Russell and more.
The author, Tom Roston, is hardly a stranger to film. Besides being a former senior editor for Premiere magazine and authoring a blog on documentaries for PBS's POV website, his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Spin, The Los Angeles Times and The Hollywood Reporter, among other publications.
The book has two "coming out" parties scheduled: One on September 24 at BookCourt in Brooklyn, NY, and one on September 26 at Vidiots in Los Angeles that will include a signing, and who knows? Maybe some famous filmmaker will drop by one or the other.
Of course, Roston's work isn't the first to chronicle life in an adult bookstore. We were also quite impressed with Ali Davis's True Porn Clerk Stories, which started out as a blog where Davis posted frequent updates of her day-to-day experiences in the adult bookstore where she worked, and which she collected in book form in 2009—and just last year released an audio version as well. It's an in-depth look into life in the Chicago video store that's the background for the "study": its customers, especially the "regulars," the management and even has a few stocking tips. Or as one commenter on Amazon.com described it, "She's the Matt Taibbi of minimum wage. The Margaret Mead of the maligned male. She's got a BA in Anthropology from William and Mary, and she knows how to use it."
And it's not just literature; people have actually made movies about making porn—and we're not talking documentaries. Our favorite is Finding Bliss, directed by Julie Davis, apparently drawing on her own experiences as a recently-graduated film editing student. The story has that recent graduate, played by Leelee Sobieski, looking for film editing work and winding up at the offices of a small porn producer, where besides being intrigued by the idea of editing porn, she's got the hots for director Jeff Drake (Matthew Davis). Others in the cast include Jamie Kennedy and Denise Richards as porn stars, plus appearances by real porn stars Stormy Daniels and Mr. Marcus. Sadly, the movie isn't available on DVD, but can be watched on Amazon.com—or its occasional appearance on cable TV. In our opinion, it's an excellent production—and it even has a surprise AVN-related ending!
