Author: Andrew Sullivan

Jennifer M. Wood is excited they still exist:

Hop the F train from Kim’s final location to Brooklyn and you’ll find Video Free Brooklyn, a tiny storefront touting the tagline that “Video stores didn’t die, they just had to evolve.” Originally opened in 2002, the space was taken over by the husband-and-wife team of Aaron Hillis and Jennifer Loeber in 2012. While the decision to purchase a video store at the height of streaming’s assault on the traditional rental industry seemed counterintuitive, Hillis calls it “a labor of love that, surprisingly, also made economic sense.” …

Though the store measures just 375 square feet, basement storage allows Hillis—a noted film critic in his own right—to keep approximately 10,000 discs on hand. But rather than compete against the same wide-release films and television series that one can watch with the click of a button and an $8.99 streaming subscription, Hillis is curating a library of hard-to-find fare. “After the floodgates of the Internet opened, we’re now drowning in content and especially mediocrity,” Hillis says. “Video Free Brooklyn’s model is almost a no-brainer: My inventory is heavily curated, but so is my staff, all of whom work in the film industry and have extensive, nerdy knowledge about cinema. Coming into the shop is about nostalgia, the joy of discovery, and getting catered recommendations from passionate cinephiles. It’s a hangout, like the record store in High Fidelity.”

How others are surviving:

[T]alk to any two independent video storeowners in the city and they’ll offer a variety of reasons for their success. The common denominator? A deep understanding of their neighborhoods and customers.

That insight is what has allowed Video Room, an Upper East Side mainstay and Manhattan’s first video store, to keep going for over 35 years, according to its manager, Howard Salen. He has worked there since 1986, and describes the store’s customers as “intelligent Manhattanites” who tend to be older. So they curate to just that: offering a wide array of foreign and classic films, as well as new releases by the Woody Allens and Wes Andersons of the film industry as opposed to the Michael Bays. They also have a secret weapon–a video transfer service. Customers bring in home videos of their families that were filmed on VHS and Video Room converts them to DVDs or other updated digital formats. For Video Room, appealing to a younger clientele is a lost cause. They see video stores as antiques. “Ten years ago they’re everywhere,” said Mr. Salen. “Now they’re from a time capsule.”

Will Malitek, who opened his Greenpoint video store Film Noir about ten years ago, would disagree. His business survives off young customers – those of the artsy Bedford Avenue scene. Mr. Malitek is the type of cinephile who thinks Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu is mainstream, and his collection mirrors that mindset. Though he has the occasional big film–a copy of Cowboys & Aliens, for example–he specializes in cult movies and obscure foreign films. He used to have a new releases section but got rid of it once Netflix arrived. But he doesn’t see Netflix or on-demand as huge competitors since most of the films he offers simply can’t be found elsewhere. “Even if you do find some of them, you’re not going to find all the extras and that’s what my customers want to see,” said Mr. Malitek.

(Photo by Wally Gobetz)

William H. Pritchard offers the context for Selected Letters of Norman Mailer, a newly published volume of the writer’s correspondence that stretches to nearly 900 pages:

Mailer wrote some 45,000 letters, and this selection amounts to less than 2 percent of the whole. For comparative epistolary output from other 20th-century writers, Lennon notes that Willa Cather wrote 2,700, Elizabeth Bishop a few thousand, Hemingway 10,000. When Lennon began work on the project in 2002, he figured it would take a few years; he was soon overwhelmed. By way of accounting for such an extraordinary output, Gay Talese observes that no writer of Mailer’s generation was more accessible: He wrote, by a rough count, to 4,000 individuals, and his typical letter is long rather than short. If letters piled up while he was at work on a book (which was always), then he would answer them in gusts of whirlwind energy. It’s safe to guess that most of those who wrote to Mailer got back at least as much as they put out.

Richard Brody points to one of the persistent themes of Mailer’s letters – the way he measured himself “on the yardstick of the Great American Novel”:

He harbored the thought that his 1965 novel “An American Dream” was “probably the first novel to come along since ‘The Sun Also Rises’ which has anything really new in it.” In 1971, he wrote that “it’s necessary to reestablish the right of the novel to exist in these profoundly unnovelistic times”; that “in a sense one has to invent the idea of the novel all over again”; and that “anyway I’m sick to death of my special brand of journalism.” But he had to keep going, to support his family and to pay back taxes—and he also was uncertain about the novel as a genre, as he wrote, to [J. Michael] Lennon, in 1972:

I have come to a place where I think it is almost impossible to go on with a novel unless one can transcend the domination of actual events—invariably more extraordinary and interesting than fiction. So if this new novel is good enough, it may serve to underline how hard it is to write a novel today and how journalism when it becomes an existential species of non-fiction can generally be superior to the novel, superior even on metaphysical grounds—but this last I don’t dare go near.

The novel in question, which took Mailer ten years to write, was “Ancient Evenings.” In 1975, he wrote to the film director Peter Bogdanovich, “I am set to write the great American novel but keep finding ways to tackle myself on the two-yard line.”

And Dwight Garner notices a particularly compelling letter about the sources of certain writers’ greatness:

In a 1960 letter to Diana Trilling, he argued that many great writers are thus because of their built-in limitations, the way they are hobbled. “Faulkner writes his long sentence because he never really touches what he is about to say and so keeps chasing it; Hemingway writes short because he strangles in a dependent clause; Steinbeck digs into the earth because characters who hold martini glasses make him sweat; Proust spins his wrappings because” a gay man “gets slapped if he says what he thinks.”

Read one of the letters in the volume, from Mailer to Henry Miller, here.