End of an era: Videomatica, Vancouver's renowned video store, to close
Legendary shop a victim of technology, owners say
By John Mackie, Vancouver Sun May 6, 2011
VANCOUVER -- Graham Peat vividly remembers his first customer, a friend he cajoled into coming down to his new video store, Videomatica.
“I phoned him up and said ‘We’re open, and no one is coming in,’” he recounts with a laugh. “‘Come down and rent a movie. Just stand outside the door for awhile, to make us look busy.’”
He only had to recruit customers once, because word soon got out about the video store on Fourth Avenue. Videomatica was the place where you could find the stuff nobody else had: foreign, classic and independent films.
And it thrived. The store started off with 400 titles in a 1,000-square-foot space; four years later it moved up the block into a 3,000-square-foot store at 1855 West Fourth, where its stock now includes 30,000 DVDs, 1,000 Blu-Ray discs and 5,000 VHS tapes.
But not for much longer. Downloading and pay-per-view have cut drastically into the movie rental business, and Videomatica will be closing its doors by the end of the summer after 28 years in business.
“We saw a decline starting in August of 2008,” explains co-owner Brian Bosworth.
“A serious, consistent decline that showed up in the way of every month being less than it was a year before. We’ve seen that now for almost three years.
“Nothing we did turned it around, it kept declining. Kept declining month on month. And after a number of months and years of that, you go ‘This is not turning around, there’s a paradigm shift here.’”
Still, Videomatica had a good run. It wasn’t only a local institution, it was renowned across Canada – the store’s DVD rental wing sent movies all the way to Newfoundland.
Movie stars loved it, too. In 1987 Jodie Foster remarked that Videomatica had a better selection of foreign films than she’d seen in New York or L.A. In 1999 Terence Stamp phoned the store asking about the “Alternative Oscar” he’d won in a Videomatica contest for his performance in The Limey.
“He said ‘My crew keeps telling me there’s some award here for me to pick up,’” recalls Peat, who ran the Alternative Oscars for a dozen years.
“And we went ‘Oh my God, we don’t actually have an award. What do we do?’ So we made up this award, and said ‘We’ll meet you at your hotel.’
“He used to come into the store and buy things. He was very very nice to the staff. We helped him find one of his rarest films, Meetings With Remarkable Men.”
That’s the kind of service you could get at Videomatica, which was a movie buff’s dream.
Take the “K” section of the “Auteurs” department. Most people have heard of Stanley Kubrick, who has several films available. But the K’s also included Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai, Poland’s Krzysztof Kieslowski, Japan’s Takeshi Kitano and Japan’s Akira Kurosawa.
Peat and Bosworth both studied film at the University of British Columbia, although they didn’t meet until they worked on cable TV newsmagazine shows and documentaries.
In 1983 video stores “were starting to happen,” and Peat told Bosworth he was thinking of opening one.
“I said ‘Why?’” said Bosworth. “‘Well, I can’t get any of the movies I want to watch. The stores don’t carry them.’ I said ‘Can you get them?’ ‘Yeah, they’re available, but no stores want to carry them. They don’t know these old films, these classics.’”
Bosworth signed on, and Videomatica was born.
“We picked the best 400 movies that we would want to watch, that nobody else carried, and opened up the store,” said Bosworth. “So we immediately had a niche that nobody else was in.”
“We advertised it as classic, foreign and music at first,” said Peat. “Those were the main categories, before there were independent films, or documentaries were big.”
“People used to come from the North Shore,” said Bosworth. “At that time, people would drive over the Lion’s Gate Bridge to get a movie from us. After awhile, traffic got so bad people weren’t prepared to make that kind of a trip anymore.
“That’s how the city has changed, people thought nothing of driving from the North Shore to get a movie on Fourth Avenue. Drive home, drive back the next day, no big deal.”
Peat smiles at how they operated in the early days.
“In those days nothing was on computer, it was all in a book,” said the 59-year-old Victoria native.
“You had to write everyone’s information in a book, and you got a card on a movie, like the library. So every card had to be filed every night, instead of [entered into a computer], and then put back on the video when it came back.”
There have been about 150 staffers over the years. Several went on to bigger and better things, including comedian Gavin Crawford (This Hour Has 22 Minutes), actress Rachel Cronin (Ed), and director Raul Inglis (The Company Men).
“[Artist] Tiko Kerr did the [store’s faux marble] columns,” said Peat.
“They’re probably worth about $250,000 apiece now, aren’t they?” laughs Bosworth.
“Isn’t Tiko now a well-known artist? We needed it painted, and he said he was a painter. The funny thing was, I kept criticizing his work. I kept saying I’m not that happy, I want a little more colour here. He just looked at me and said ‘Don’t tell an artist what to paint.’”
The golden era of Videomatica was the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, but there was another surge of popularity when DVDs came out in 1997.
“DVDs were a phenomenal boost to us, because at the time they came out, VHS movies cost over a hundred bucks [to purchase] for rental – they were getting up to $120 per unit,” said Bosworth.
“Then DVD came out at a sell-through price point, $30. Suddenly our costs went down by 75 per cent. Same movie, more convenient, less fragile. And it spawned a whole [trend]. If people took 10 VHS movies home they could barely carry them. Ten DVDs, no problem. You’d rent it and slip it in a pocket. It was a nice, shiny technology, and people liked it.”
When the store celebrated its 25th birthday they compiled a list of Videomatica’s top rentals. Number one was the British comedy Withnail and I.
“It captured a kind of hedonistic lifestyle with a strange British comedy aspect to it that people really liked,” said Bosworth. “It was just a well-written, well-produced script about a couple of bums, unemployed actors.”
The top 10 was rounded out by Wings of Desire, Down By Law, Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Betty Blue, Blood Simple, The Decameron and Baraka. The top rentals in recent years are 8 ½, City of God and The Lives of Others.
People don’t rent movies the way they used to, though.
“The Internet has raised expectations among people that you don’t have to pay for anything,” said Bosworth, 58, who was born in Alberta and lived all over Canada before moving to Vancouver to attend UBC.
“That everything is free, or near free, and everything is on demand, and you should be able to get what you want when you want to get it. It’s totally changed what people are prepared to do to get the things they want.
“If I rent a DVD and I’ve got to go to a store and I have to take the movie back, it’s an unbelievably inconvenient thing for me to do. If I can get it by video on demand online for about the same price, well, I’m going to do that.”
The wide range of free stuff you get on the Internet (Bosworth calls it “FaceTwitterTube”) also means you don’t have to look to movies for entertainment anymore.
“It’s not just video stores that are suffering,” said Peat. “Theatrical is having its challenges. Every means of distributing content to the screen is changing, and nobody knows where it’s going to go.”
“Theatrical is down 20 per cent over last year,” adds Bosworth. “Movie revenue is down 20 per cent.”
It was a hard decision to pull the plug on Videomatica, but the lease was up, they looked at the trends and knew it was time to close. They hope to keep the collection together at a cultural agency or educational institution, with the help of local philanthropist Yosef Wosk.
Videomatica’s closure is part of an ongoing shift in retailers on Fourth Avenue. When Videomatica opened, Fourth was brimming with funky independent shops, like the one run by the hairy hippie who used to sell used clothing outside his store because the inside was packed to the rafters.
The hippie clothier left in the mid-90s, and Fourth Avenue is now a street of trendy clothing outlets, yoga stores and high-end bike shops. Many independents have been displaced by chains.
“I feel the vision for Fourth Avenue should have been modeled on a place like San Francisco: Keep all the old funky houses and put new bunker stores behind them, and at least keep some character and some interest on the street, even if you are a chain store,” said Peat.
“Instead, we have the concrete boxes, like Granville and Robson. [The street] loses all its charm. Look what we’ve got now: There’s almost no character left. Soon it will all be wireless stores and baby booties.”
