Interview: “Kim’s Video”
The late Kim’s Video is perhaps the most famous video store of all time. The beloved New York City video store chain was a favorite of famous actors, directors and movie fans for over 30 years. When the Mondo Kim’s location closed in 2009, the 55,000 tapes & DVDs were donated to the small town of Salemi in Sicily, and then seemingly disappeared… until filmmakers David Redmon & Ashley Sabin decided to investigate, and hopefully bring the collection back to New York. Their documentary KIM’S VIDEO tracks their incredible 6-year odyssey, narrated by David as he thinks back on his lifelong love of movies, and his history with Kim’s Video. The film just had it’s world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, and I was thrilled to talk with them about their filmmaking journey and their hopes for the film’s future.
There is also a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to digitize the Kim’s Video VHS collection.
When Mondo Kim’s closed in 2009, did you immediately plan to make this documentary?
David:
Well, some of these writers who have written about the movie assume the movie started 25 years ago, because that’s what it looks like. <laughs> And that’s what we love about it, because the texture of our movie isn’t what you’re gonna see on Netflix. It’s not high end, it’s not high budget, it’s not thought out in advance. We’re curious, let’s see what’s gonna happen. And so we had that curiosity in 2008, when we heard it was gonna close, but we were halfway around the world making another movie and we couldn’t get to New York. So that curiosity has been with us since that date. I remember finding out about it in September when I was looking up films at the New York Film Festival in particular. And word was spreading about Kim’s Video. And I think we were in Tokyo or Russia, and Ashley said it, we’ve gotta make a movie on this. But we’re just in the middle of this insane project now and we can’t. We shot our first image in late August 2016. That was the first time we turned on the camera. And then of course we used a lot of archive footage, which was shot before then.
David, as the narrator, the film is structured around your personal connections to film and your memories of Kim’s Video. Was that structure always there, or did that come in the editing stage?
David:
That came from Ashley. It’s something I didn’t want to do. <laugh>
Ashley:
He’s a reluctant narrator.
David:
It’s something that a few people insisted be done because we were getting feedback from a variety of different people. And they said, the movie does not come together. It needs a protagonist. You don’t have a protagonist now. Where did all these people come from? Why are they in the movie? How did they appear in the movie? And the answer was, well, it’s because I went to go see ’em. We found them and we bought them together. And they said, then you’re the protagonist. You’ve gotta steer the story and be a character in it. And we tried to do that without voiceover. And then we tried it with a little bit of voiceover. And then we just wrote as we edited and decided to include all those different film clips as the ghosts that sort of accompany David along his journey.
And these are movies that had a deep impact on us as we were making the movie. And these are the same movies that begs the question, are these movies worth saving, as you get to the end of the Citizen Kane clip. Which movies are worth saving? Is it mainstream movies? Is it bizarre movies? Is it movies in the film canon? So you get a variety of these different movies and how they influence the filmmaker, to where he is at that moment, in this journey of discovering what happened to Kim’s.
Not to spoil the experience of watching the film, but the collection has returned to New York as part of the Alamo Drafthouse. As you were making the film, were you ever worried that their wasn’t going to be a happy ending?
Ashley:
I was less believing that we were gonna have a happy ending, just because we hit a wall with negotiations. We had some lawyers from Milan that really rubbed Salemi the wrong way, and so we actually scrapped that entire approach, and went a different way just directly talking to them, and that worked much better. But even that was difficult cause you know, they felt burned in a lot of ways by Vittorio Sgarbi and they had this collection, but they also didn’t know what to do with it. And they were trying to do the right thing, but at the same time they had a lot of things they wanted contractually, to get it where we would get the collection back.
David:
And so did Mr. Kim.
Ashley:
And so did Mr. Kim. And we were in the middle of the negotiations, David doing most of the negotiations. And many times I said that this is gonna be just a depressing ending. It’s gonna rot in Sicily and that’s gonna be it. Because for a long time we were financing the whole project ourselves too. It wasn’t until Freemantle came on board in the last year of the project. So not only were we financing the film production, but we were financing negotiations ourselves, hiring the lawyers and
David:
Flying back and forth, bringing a translator with us and the housing and cars and the food.
Ashley:
It was also like, at a certain point, we’re bleeding money. We’re two small independent filmmakers, we have a family and can’t be keep doing this. So there was also that tied in it. So I would say it was a good year and a half, almost two years of really not knowing if it was gonna happen or not, but hoping it would happen. That would be my opinion.
David:
And what I say is that, I knew the first time I entered the collection that it was gonna leave, because it told me it wanted to leave and I promised the collection I would come back and help it leave. And I just carried those voices with me throughout the making of the movie. So there was never a doubt. I just didn’t know when, and I didn’t know how, and I didn’t know it was gonna be such as strenuous process.
Sadly, I was never able to visit Kim’s Video. What made it so special?
Ashley:
It just was such a diverse collection in the sense that you could go in and find five copies of Titanic, or you could go in and find some bootlegs independent films from Hong Kong or you could go in and find all the Criterion. And this was at a time when that’s how stuff was available.
David:
We couldn’t afford Criterion.
Ashley:
Yeah, we couldn’t afford to buy the Criterion so you could rent the Criterion and check out the inserts that they had and you could touch the artwork and all that stuff. And then in addition to that, we didn’t go to film school, so it was a space for us to sort of convene with other film enthusiasts. So just being in that environment, other than film festivals, which we at that point weren’t a really a part of, it was critical for us to just be around that kind of film loving and hard to find movies. And the vibe of it was just like, you can do it yourself, which is totally the way that we make films. You just find a way. There were handwritten texts on the VHS spines, there were homemade artwork drawings, it was just total DIY.
David:
And that’s sort of what annoys me about some of the, we have thick skin, but we don’t have thick skin for idiots. And I know that sounds awfully pretentious, but some people like to say that, oh, David went to Salemi and he’s so arrogant, he didn’t break a translator. Who’s gonna pay for that translator? Who’s gonna pay for that flight? Who’s gonna pay for the hotel? It’s the arrogance of assuming that one has money. So a lot of these movies that you see that come out nowadays, big time budgets, the majority of them have budgets. They have people, they have a whole team in place to make those movies possible. A lot of ’em are already pre-planned and pre-made and ready to go.
And so this movie, it’s just like Ashley said, it was beyond DIY. It was just like the grit you find in the sidewalk, you know, the gutter. And we started there, and we went with it. We worked with whatever means we had. And the motivating force, to go back to your question for me was, it was also a gathering place, right? I mean, you have a room full of DVDs right now and VHS, and imagine going into the store and there’s 15, 20 people. They also do events. It’s a meeting place, it’s a gathering place, a place to share ideas. And so many of those places don’t exist right now, anywhere in the US. Ashley says it better than I do cause she’s the one who came up with it, but it’s also about the naivete of trying to resurrect the death of these gathering places and recreating culture spaces and that was sort of the foresight, you know, bringing back the ghost of cinema, the ghost of these video stores, the ghost of the gathering places, imagining the future of interacting within these spaces again, these physical spaces again.
Ashley:
Because you could go into the space and you didn’t have to buy anything, whereas like a lot of places that you go now, it’s all about the commodity and commodification of things in the corporate culture. So you go in somewhere and there’s an expectation that you have to either pay like an entry fee or you’re a member, so you have a membership fee. Whereas in Kim’s Video you could go in, walk around, spend a couple hours there and leave and not buy one thing. There was no expectation.
David:
You could watch the movie playing on the television.
Ashley:
That kind of culture I think is important, not only just DIY, but like future generations of filmmakers for creating inspiration.
David:
And they had falafels next door, for how much?
Ashley:
Really cheap, but it was a different New York in a lot of ways, and I don’t wanna be nostalgic, but I think in general, that kind of space where like it’s not commodified in the same way is really important for film culture, art culture, just a culture that promotes storytelling and all that connection.
It’s interesting that video store nostalgia is on the rise, after most of them have closed, and now places like Alamo Drafthouse are renting movies for free in the lobby of their cinemas. Do you think that’s the only way video stores can survive today?
Ashley:
I mean, I think people have to get creative cause it’s not gonna, I mean Tim said it even at the Q&A, he’s like, this is not a money maker for him, you know? In fact he lost money cause he put money into the container and getting it all open. But it’s interesting, because people are like, why do we need a video store? Why do we need that? It probably has to be something that is associated with something else, like a concept store.
Something else that’s gonna fund the actual bringing together of people. I’m not sure it can just be thought of like a library, unless it is a library and that’s a whole nother thing. But I do, especially after making this film, it’s more than the nostalgia. I think it’s a really critical piece that’s missing for future generations because this whole like, find it online, it’s all online argument to me is very moot because it’s like, well, how would I even think up the narratives that do exist in the Kim’s collection to look them up online? Maybe it exists online, but my mind wouldn’t create that kind of narrative. And the diversity of those narratives exists in the collection.
And I think it’s important in a physical way to walk in that space and discover things and discover other people. And the digital realm just does not do it. It doesn’t have the same experience. And I think it’s detrimental for film. I mean, I even question, you know, Sundance does this online component now, and I’m like, is that the snake eating itself? Will there come a point when Sundance makes itself obsolete? I think Sundance and other film festivals are another space like video stores that are critical for culture, but I just do wonder with the whole digital realm, how all that’s gonna pan out in the future.
David:
But you could have both. I mean, the Kim’s video collection can be digitized.
Ashley:
Oh, totally. That’s where it becomes more accessible I think to a bigger crowd than just New York City people, but that costs money.
David:
But right now, you’re right, it’s in the mummified kind of state. It’s sort of half alive. I did this, we did this interview with Robert Greene. He appears in the movie and he gave this funny statement that I’m gonna paraphrase. He said, wait, you mean to tell me you went to Sicily, you found the Kim’s video collection and you want to bring it back to New York? And I said, yeah, sort of. I think that’s what I wanna do. And he said, first that’s not gonna happen. And second, that’s completely absurd because that’s like telling me that, Hey Robert, you went to the funeral for your grandmother, we said our goodbyes, but you know what, she’s really not dead now. She’s coming back and he’s like, what is she gonna look like when she comes back?
And that’s what Ashley said on the along. Imagine the Kim’s video collection from its own point of view, its own subjective point of view. It’s been away from New York for how many years, since January 2009? And now it’s back, in the financial district. It’s on Liberty Street in an enormous building in the bottom of the Alamo, surrounded by movie posters. And it’s probably looking around like, oh, we just left Salemi, but where are we now? What’s outside? What is this new century? What is this new decade? So it is an interesting space, where it sits. But we reached out to 40 different organizations and Tim was the one who was enthusiastic enough to say yes. And Mr. Kim and he talked for a long time to make it happen.
Ashley
Tim just opened the Video Vortex in Chicago this past weekend. So he’s really all for that, you know what I mean? The brand of Alamo is funding his ability to do that, as opposed to the VHS is what’s funding Alamo, because it’s free rentals. There’s late fees, but…
David
He’s also creating a culture of physical gathering, and so we’re completely on board with that.
Ashley
I mean in all of ’em there’s like a bar you can go to the bar and sit and talk to people.
David
They do a Kim’s video screening series once a month as well, and that sells out.
You have several filmmakers interviewed in the film, like Robert Greene and Alex Ross Perry, along with former Kim’s Video employees. Were they all excited to talk about Kim’s?
Ashley:
I would say Robert was the most like okay with, I mean he loves his memories of Kim’s but he also has sort of moved on in a lot of ways. Whereas like Sean and Alex I would say are much more nostalgic and not as willing to let it go. But once we got people talking, it was like, we even met this woman at Sundance who had a film in the midnight section called My Animal. She was a former clerk, and she came to the opening night of the film and like, you can see it in her film, it’s really interesting. It’s a horror film and you can see film references like that. She’s watched certain films and they’re inside of her film. And she said the same thing as everyone has said, that it was the best worst job. They were paid very little, paid cash, but they all say how much they loved working there.
I’m so glad you have archival footage of Kim’s Video in the film, since it’s surprisingly hard to find footage of old businesses, especially places that existed prior to YouTube.
Ashley:
Well that was a weird story. Alex Ross Perry let this woman, Kate Hanzel, film inside of Kim’s. He said he never filmed inside, none of them filmed. We’re are filmmakers, but we didn’t have the impulse to film inside the store.
David:
Cause we thought it was gonna be there forever.
Ashley:
He let her film inside as a student and she shot on 16 millimeter film. And it just so that the reels were in her father’s house. So we drove over to his house, we had to find it and we had to have it digitized. I don’t think she’s even seen that footage since she was a student many years ago. But that was that black and white 16 millimeter stuff. And that stuff is so important cause it spatially gives people a sense of how much was in there. It was hard to find that kind of footage.
There have been a lot of documentaries in the past decade about physical media, from video stores to record stores to comic book shops. Did you watch any of those films, for inspiration or for what to avoid?
David:
I’ve seen them all, and most of those movies have the same format. But this is not only a story about a video store, it’s also a mystery. The Tower Records documentary for example, from beginning to end with mostly talking heads intercut with this kind of archival footage. And I think we had to watch it over the course of three or four days just to finish it because it was so tedious to get through. And we find a lot of movies to be that way. Maybe ours is the same too, and that’s fine. But we definitely knew we wanted a different structure, making this movie.
And we kept bumping up against that same structure, falling back into it. And then that’s when people said, it’s just not working. You need a protagonist. And that’s when I became the protagonist in the movie. And it really opened it up to get away from that standard kind of documentary and it became a search and find search and see what happens. You’re looking for something, but what do you find along the way? And whatever you find becomes interwoven into the texture of the movie. And that’s the way we decided to structure it, and it became a lot more energetic and it also generated curiosity on behalf of the audience. It engaged them to be sort of active participants in, oh, what’s gonna happen? How do we get here? What’s gonna happen next? Those kinds of turning points. So it’s much more narrative narratively structured and edited.
How was the Sundance premiere? What did Youngman Kim think of the film?
David:
Yeah, he was the surprise of the premiere when he stood up. I mean, there was just this tremendous eruption of surprise. And immediately everyone started clapping for him and he sort of swung on stage and started dancing, that tickled everyone. And yeah, they giggled a lot, they laughed, and then he had some really honest responses during the Q&A. He was pretty amazing.
Ashley:
And he brought his whole family, his four kids and his wife. He saw it twice before the premiere, cause we wanted to make sure he wasn’t surprised by anything. And he had given the film its blessing, I guess, as you say. So he wasn’t surprised, but Tim League was also there with Nick Prueher, one of the organizers of the collection, and that was nice. I think Tim and Nick had already seen it as well.
And you brought the masks from the film to the premiere?
Ashley:
Yeah, we put the masks on the seats, and so after the film we asked everyone to put it on to take a shot. That was pretty amazing. It’s funny because, we had this, she’s great, this film publicist, and she was all like, get the big directors, and I didn’t listen to her. I got all kinds of people, so like friends of ours that make films, but it’s a British company called Funky Bunky, and they normally do Stag parties. And I had them put all the names of the directors on the back. So if someone took the mask home with them, they would know who they were wearing. That was important to me.
What are your plans for the film’s release? Will it be screening at Alamo Drafthouse cinemas?
Ashley:
That would be nice. We would like a theatrical release, cause it goes with the film’s energy as far as cinemas and collective spaces.
David:
We would love to do something with Lunchmeat, and we want a little book with it. We have hundred’s of photographs taken along the way of making the movie, these polaroids. That was Ashley’s idea.
Ashley:
We’re excited about thinking about distribution. We used to have our own distribution company, this was many years ago, pre-Netflix streaming, and Netflix would buy units. That was a big chunk of our change. We would also book universities to get educational stipends for filmmakers. It was sort of similar to the spirit of Kim’s video in the sense it was really DIY. You just think about distribution in a different way where it’s fun and unexpected and it’s all about exchanges and connection to the audience. So we’re hoping with whatever distribution deal that comes out of this, that the company is willing to sort of think outside the box. Because I think it goes with the film and I think it’s important. So Yeah.
David:
Can you imagine a Kim’s video game?
And you want to adapt this into a narrative feature film too?
Ashley:
Oh, for sure. We wanna do that, a narrative based on the making of this documentary. We were sort of starting to pitch it at Sundance and there were people that were interested, we had meetings and we had meetings. And that would be an exciting thing I think for David and I, because we’ve never done fiction. So that’s a challenge. But it’s also nice cause this film took six years and it’s like, the next film can’t be a six year project cause it’s just too, you start counting how many six year projects you have left in your life. It’s a little depressing <laugh>.
