Video Store Interview: Salzer’s Video

Salzer’s Video in Ventura, CA has been around for over 40 years, right across the street from it’s sister store, Salzer’s Records. Sadly, last month was the end for the video store, another victim of COVID. This was especially painful since the store’s founder, Jim Salzer, passed away in 2020 right before COVID hit. His son Brandon has been helping run both stores for years, and was gracious enough to talk with me about his love of video stores, working with his parents, and the tough decision to close.

Were you always interested in movies growing up, since your parent’s owned a video store?

Oh, for sure. I’m a huge movie buff. I’ve watched thousands and thousands of movies. It’s kind of like having your own personal video store. I just walked in and could take whatever I wanted for free starting at the age of five.

What were some of your favorites?

Oh, I mean, it’s evolved over the years from when I was a kid to like Amazon Woman on the Moon and Kentucky Fried Movie to, you know, Breathless and Seven Samurai, Kurosawa and Truffaut. I love the concept of video, being able to view at your own time. I mean, before the advent of the video tape, if you missed a show or a movie that aired on television, you’ve had to wait for her to come back around at some point. It really made it possible to educate yourself, look at Quentin Tarantino, you know, fully self-educated.

Your father Jim first created Salzer’s Records in Ventura, and then opened Salzer’s Video. What was his inspiration?

Well, he had a small record store in like a little strip mall a town over and as that did well, he started to promote concerts. He brought the doors, Jimi Hendrix, grateful dead, Led Zeplin to Santa Barbara and Ventura and put on a slew of shows for a span of like three or four years in the late sixties. He kind of became disenchanted with that and decided he was going to put all of his effort and resources towards the record store side of things. So he bought some land in Ventura, built the record store, which at the time was, was called Salzer’s Mercantile, which was a number of different vendors. So it was like kind of like a big barn with like a barbershop, a diner, a candle making area, and they were all different vendors paying him rent, which he then used to pay the mortgage. And over the years, he kind of phased out all the tenants and took over the store. And then there’s, you know, it’s been remodeled three or four times and what’s unfortunate at the time. It always looks outdated, but when you remodel it, it feels updated. And then people always say, I wish it looked like a look 20 years ago, you know, cause things come back around. Across the street from the record store was an abandoned gas station that he bought in 1979, I think, and opened the video store there in 1980. And at the time, like he could sell memberships. You had to pay a membership fee, so he was just raking it in. I mean, a lifetime membership was a hundred dollars, a yearly was like 50. He would sell VCRs, which were like a grand back then. It was a brand new concept, a video rental store, and it did great. He bought another piece of property that’s across the street from the record store, on the corner of the main street and built this two-story building that you see there.

Having a video store in the 1980s really made him one of the pioneers, before the chain stores took over.

Yeah, for sure, definitely one of the first and one of the last. In the eighties, he was part of VSDA, I think it’s called the Video software dealers association and they really fought to maintain a window between when it would go to pay-per-view or go to HBO. It was really important to have that buffer so that there was time for it to do well on video before it got released to other places. And the studios would go all out for these conventions, spending millions on presentations for these video software dealers. I don’t know why they call it a software dealer, but that’s what the video rental association was called. And he was a big part of that and really shaping how the video kind of timeframe was scheduled.

Were there any other video stores in the Ventura area?

I think he was around the first, I mean, I wasn’t really looking to competition when I was five, but I do think we were among the first. I remember they’d pop up here and there and then of course once blockbuster and Hollywood came in, they were everywhere, but we still had a niche because they were purely new release driven. And while we’ve always done the new release thing, we had adult, we had cult, we’ve had alternative lifestyles sections, travel sections. We had, the height of the number of titles, I think we had 40,000 titles, not units, but titles. Over the years that dwindled down to something like 25,000, I think, or 20,000. But when it was really banging, we had a really robust inventory. I mean, you couldn’t see a video about Tuscany without renting one. You couldn’t go to YouTube, or you couldn’t see music videos without watching MTV and waiting for your music video to roll around, other than, you know, you could rent one. And that was it.

So what do look for in an employee when you’re hiring at a video store?

Well, they’ve gotta loved movies. When I walk in the store and ask them, what’s good? I want to hear an answer. I want to know what they’re excited about. Yeah, I’m not into hiring people aren’t film buffs or film nerds. That’s gotta be the first priority. Gotta love movies, you know, you gotta be excited about it. You have to be able to kind of refer people. And before there was IMDb, you really had to know your stuff. We’d have giant glossaries and books and indexes for customers to check it out and try to, if they liked this, they could check out that or films by this director or cinematographer, you know, there was no internet to guide you. You had to kind of do a little bit of research with something called books.

Did you have any famous customers?

We had a few. My dad would know more about than I would, I think Steve McQueen used to rent at the gas station. George Kennedy was a lifelong customer. I used to see him all the time. Cool hand Luke, The Naked Gun. I’m kind of blanking, but yeah, there’s been a few that have lived in around town, more so at the record store. We had the advantage of being right off the freeway in between LA and Santa Barbara. So it’s the spot a lot of people hit when they pass through.

How was it running a video store with your parents?

I loved it, because I went to boarding school at 13, so I moved out at 13 and then went straight to work for the record industry when I got out of college. I went to college on the east coast. So it was nice to kind of return and help them because my sister, I have a sister who has no interest in anything relating to any of this and lives in New York. So it occurred to me there was no one really to keep it going once my parents wanted to retire. So I figured I would do it. And it’s been tricky. We’ve had our share of challenges over the years, but I love working with my folks. I get along great with them. They’re my partners, great friends. And I cherish that I got to spend as much time as I did with my dad.

You father Jim passed away in early 2020, right before COVID hit. I’m so sorry.

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, it’s tough. He was a good friend and dad and business partner and everything, you know, and it was unexpected, so it was heavy. But, um, it’s funny. People assumed that I just decided to shut the store down, but this is something we’ve been talking about for years even when my dad was here, just because it has slowed so drastically. We saw a bump once Hollywood and Blockbuster went away, but you know, as streaming has kind of expanded it’s, it’s definitely impacted the store. And then with, uh, you know, streaming didn’t kill the video store, COVID certainly did because what COVID did is it shut down all the movies coming through the pipeline, theaters, and nothing hits video stores. And then any art house movies now go straight to Netflix or Hulu, they’re picked up by those streaming services. So that niche we used to have bringing in those strange indie movies really wasn’t, the advantage wasn’t there anymore.

How did the COVID shutdown affect the store?

Obviously, stores were both shut down for two months, a week after my dad died. And then once we reopened, there was nothing coming out. The theaters shut down as well, so nothing was being released to theaters. There was nothing coming in, and over those two months, people figured out how to stream if they hadn’t already. Their kids showed them, this is what you do, you plug a $30 Roku into the back of the TV and you can watch all these movies. So it really just diverted the holdouts that were still into physical media. I mean, there still are some, but it cut the numbers in half. So we shut down to three days a week, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and that just didn’t do it either.

Its been so sad to see so many video store across the country close in the past year.

I know. I’m on a video store owners group on Facebook. And it’s just, it’s so sad just to read all the stories, you know. It’s one after another, every day, and people just, it’s heartbreaking, it’s like losing a family member. These people have put in, a lot of them, 30 to 40 years into their stores.

Even in a city like New York, there’s only video store left. It’s crazy.

I know. We had the Thomas fire as a couple of years ago, a massive fire that came through our town and knocked out all cellular communications for about one day and all internet in our town. So nobody could watch anything. The video store did like quadruple the numbers it normally does. It was like it was the 1980s all over again. The lot was full, people were panicked, and it was like, oh yeah, this is what happened before the internet. And people had to come to rent a video to watch something else other than, well, actually people can’t even watch TV now without the internet, right?

It’s fascinating that record stores are having this resurgence right now, but video stores are struggling more than ever.

No, it’s definitely, video stores never had the vinyl record, you know. Record stores have vinyl. The resurgence in vinyl, a vinyl record will always sound better than a digital format simply because the sound wave is analog. It’s a continuous motion versus jagged edged data bits where the high and low frequencies are cutoff and it reduces the palpability of the sound. So that said, that has given record stores the comparative advantage over streaming or downloading or whatever. Video never had that, that special something that you can just get in the store, you know?

We do have Vidiots reopening next year, with a movie theater attached. Do you think there’s a future for video stores like that?

I hope so. I love Vidiots and they’re friends, the ladies who started it are friends. They’ve come down and I got them started on how to sell stuff on Amazon as a third party seller. They had no idea how to do it. So we spent the day with them and showed them our operation here. And I think they used it, but the advantage that Vidiots has is, they’re a nonprofit, they have a lot of support from the community, financial support. And obviously it’s where the film industry is based, it’s the backyard of those folks. So they have a place in their heart for Vidiots. It’s too bad they couldn’t save the ArcLight theater. I think that’s a real shame. It’s one of the best theaters in the country.

Do you have any other memorable moments from the store over the years?

One was when The Hunt for Red October came out. We were given this gigantic billboard with a giant black submarine shooting out of the building. I remember hanging that with a giant crane and taking it down. A lot of people thought it look like a giant black phallus and were offended, even though it’s a submarine, like it clearly says. So we had complaints on that, which was kind of amusing. The video industry really put a lot into releases. I mean, that was when VHS cassettes were a hundred bucks a shot, so if you ordered 30 of them, you invested $3000 to one title.

Do you remember what were some of the biggest hits at the store? Things that were rented a lot?

Yes, Idiocracy for sure. One of our all-time biggest hits. Rocky Horror Picture Show, that took a long time to release that when it finally did get released, people were crazy for it. And when dad would like a movie, he’d put a heart with a Jim’s pick printed on it, put it on a movie that always helped bump a movie up in terms of its performance.

Looking back now, you still have the record store, but with the video store specifically, what do you think you’ll miss the most about it?

Honestly, I’ll miss having access to thousands of movies. I just would walk in there and take stacks home every other night or weekend. And yeah, I’ll miss that. I’ll miss the customers. I feel like I’m letting the customers down, but I really don’t know, I mean, without the support that we needed, we couldn’t keep it going. And you know, it’s the eighties, it’s nostalgia. It’s letting go of a lot of your childhood, for a lot of folks. So I think that’s what it was so popular about trying to take a piece of the store with them as, it represented something, a different time. Everyone remembers going with the family down the video store and fighting over what you’re gonna rent and committing to something. Like if you rented three movies, those are your choices, no matter what. So you would watch them even if they were bad because that’s what you had. I mean, we’re just flooded now with so many choices, and if the show doesn’t grab you or a movie doesn’t grab you in the first 10 minutes, you’re onto the next, or you spend an hour searching for something with a group of people that still can’t agree on what to watch.