A Woman In Brooklyn Is Somehow Managing To Run An Old-Style Video Shop Without Losing Literally All Her Money

We’ve teamed up with Heineken to introduce you to some men and women who have chosen to go beyond their borders, challenge the status quo, say ‘why not?’ instead of ‘it can’t be done’ — and as a result have made the world a more interesting place for the rest of us. For more people worth watching, head here.

–

Consider, if you will, a video store that’s also a cinema, which is also a bar, and is sometimes even a kids’ birthday venue. It sounds ridiculous or even unfathomable, but for Videology, sitting on the corner of Bedford Avenue and South 1^st Street in Brooklyn’s ultra-cool suburb of Williamsburg, this one-of-a-kind venue has brought the once dying movie rental business into the retro-future through tenacity and hard work, simultaneously becoming a movie-lover’s mecca that sends locals and international tourists alike into wide-eyed wonder.

Owned and operated by Wendy Chamberlain – she lives above the bar with her co-owner husband and their three-year-old child – the business has sought to buck the trend of modern metropolises where the shop-fronts can change as quickly as the ever-escalating rent prices. Injecting new life into the old Blockbuster Video business model, Videology not only rents out DVDs and videos from their 16,000+ collection of titles – they screen classic movies in their separate screening room, host private events, weekly TV-fandom bingo nights and live TV screenings, hold book launches, comedy nights, local filmmaker showcases of short films and work-in-progress features, and even have specialty nights where guests can watch Clue (1985) while playing the board game. Oh, and there’s also the bar, with its walls of liquor sitting side-by-side with walls of DVDs.

It’s a story of rejuvenation and business ingenuity that should inspire everyone to take that leap of faith into the great unknown. “How often do businesses get a second chance?” Chamberlain asks. “I don’t know. We’ve been given one. I think we’re very, very lucky.”

–

Adventures in Video

When she was laid off from her job designing and administering relational databases at the age of 28, Chamberlain decided to go out on a limb with an unexpected career change. Despite having “never worked in a video store before,” but also having “a lot of opinions on what made a good [one],” opening the business was a leap of faith. “I definitely did not have any sort of ‘life-plan’,” she says. “Opening a video store sounded like an adventure… I felt confident that I could make it successful.”

Chamberlain opened her store because of her now old-fashioned love of video renting. “I began renting VHS tapes at video stores way back in 1984.” It spawned Videology, an otherwise unassuming video rental store that opened in the then-transforming Williamsburg – now best known as part of the sprawling playground of TV series like Girls and Broad City – in 2003. However, after several years of strong operation, the fact was her business was in an “inevitable and unstoppable decline.”

It began as a business that was primarily made by and for Brooklynites, but has since swelled in popularity and at various moments of its existence has even counted celebrities like Olivia Wilde as members.

“Our unofficial motto has always been ‘helping movie lovers find movies to love.’ We’ve always prided ourselves on being egalitarian. I like to tell new video rental employees that, whether the customer’s a fan of Bay or Bergman, it’s their job to give them equal attention and respect, because in the end, we are all just lovers of movies trying to find some movies to love.”

–

A New Phase

Three years into its new life, Videology has become a local institution that gets hailed by local and nationwide publications like TimeOut and even mentioned on the New York Times. As video rental businesses go, it’s now become the highest profile one in the city with the demise of Quentin Tarantino’s beloved Kim’s Video. In the face of Netflix and torrenting, Videology’s people-fronted service is just part of the charm.

“It’s never easy taking the leap into a new business. So much time and money is invested that I’ve often felt panicked that perhaps this was the biggest and costliest mistake of my life,” she says.

Taking that plunge has nonetheless given Chamberlain and her cinephile patrons an experience that cannot be replicated. There’s something altogether special about submerging yourself in a world like this where you can enter at any given time and enjoy a beer while anything from the entire seven-film Harry Potter series, or weird 1920s silent sci-fi flicks, play on the big screen. They have even reached a point of visibility where they can host American premieres of movies like Beyond Clueless (2015) and the weekly movie trivia nights, hosted by comedian Maggie Ross, are now standing-room-only with people fighting to test their knowledge of Kubrick, Kieslowski, and Kaurismäki. It’s a remarkable turnaround in an industry that has been labeled a “dying business” as recently as last year.

–

There’s Always Money in the Banana Stand!

 

What could people – Australians included – learn from Videology? That there’s always money in the banana stand!

By that, I mean there is nothing wrong with the classics; going back to these ideas that have worked in the past, giving people what they want, but with a modern twist. Even Chamberlain admits her words of wisdom may sound “kind of corny”, but still says that “I gambled and it paid off… you can’t be afraid to fail, or you’ll never succeed.”

Despite the fierce debate that happens between us from time to time, movie-lovers are a community. Most of us spent our teen years being that weird kid who’d rather risk getting caught watching the bare flesh on an SBS late movie than having the parents catch us drinking or smoking underage. Places like Videology foster this community and it’s actually inspiring to know that something so out of the box can work for an industry that is constantly looking to fix its problems by destroying its history.

For Wendy Chamberlain, Videology is about fostering that community and infusing it with an old fashioned good time. It’s just about trying to make her customers happy. “That’s all we’ve ever done, and I believe that’s the key to success in any business.”

–

Glenn Dunks is a freelance writer from Melbourne who is currently based in New York City. He also works as an editor and a film festival programmer while tweeting too much @glenndunks.

–

Feature image via Videology.