Pickford Film Center offers DVD rentals from creatively curated 22,000-title collection
In 1997, Karl Freske and Emily Marston were employees at a Bellingham video rental store.
They both loved film, but were consistently frustrated by the lack of cinematic diversity most movie rental businesses offered.
“They might get six copies of the straight-to-video Steven Seagal movie, but they wouldn’t get any copies at all of the movie that was [Oscar-] nominated for best foreign language film,” Freske recalled. “We wanted to have more of an outlet for arthouse films and stuff like that.”
They decided to do something about it, and that fall opened their own video store. It was called Film is Truth: 24 Times a Second, after a quote attributed to French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard. The full quote from Godard is actually longer, but Freske said it wouldn’t fit on the store’s awning.
“I just thought it was a cool phrase that didn’t sound like the name of a store,” he said.
For 25 years, Film is Truth was Bellingham’s most eclectic video store, renting everything from obscure short film collections to classic film noir and more mainstream fare. The store frequently moved throughout downtown Bellingham, but its collection never stopped growing; curated by Freske, Marston and their other volunteers, it ballooned to over 20,000 titles.
“It was the [most fun] job I ever had,” said Marston. “It spoke to my love to organize, and put systems and processes in place, but also, I could stand behind the counter and just talk about movies all day. It really was always about the access, and having that resource in Bellingham.”
Decline and renewal
But as Netflix DVDs began filling mailboxes in the mid-2000s, paving the path to modern-day streaming services, Film is Truth began its slow business decline. It became a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization in 2015, and outlasted the closure of Bellingham’s Hollywood Video and Blockbuster locations.
It even outlasted Crazy Mike’s Video, a popular and locally owned store that closed in 2018. But it could not escape changing cultural norms. When it finally closed in April 2022, it was Bellingham’s last video rental store.
Many wondered what would happen to its immense collection of films and TV shows. Those questions were finally answered last Wednesday, when the Pickford Film Center made all 22,000 DVD and Blu-Ray titles in the Film is Truth collection available for rental through its website and in-person rental kiosk.
Gray Gordon, the Pickford’s marketing manager, said much of the initial enthusiasm about the rental announcement is informed by Film is Truth’s longtime local history.
“People are excited because something they thought was lost is not lost,” he said. “So many of their reactions are just … talking about their memories with Film is Truth and, by extension, memories of going to the video store.”
The old and the new
Adding physical media rentals to an operating movie theater isn’t unique to the Pickford, Gordon said.
Other West Coast theaters have similar models. Portland’s Hollywood Theatre operates Movie Madness, a 90,000-title video rental store, and several Los Angeles movie houses have also offered rentals, Gordon added. Seattle’s Scarecrow Video, while not connected to a theater, features over 149,000 rentable movie titles.
While some might consider physical media rentals to be moot in the streaming age, the Pickford’s Ben Owens doesn’t see it that way.
Owens, a former manager of Film is Truth, feels there’s space for both media to be part of people’s movie-consuming habits.
“In a lot of ways, it’s very critical that both of them exist,” he said. “A normal DVD only has anywhere between 200 and 300 plays on it. So, those things break down over time. Simultaneously, streaming service as it is built right now, is very much a corporatized model that is not user-friendly. If you buy something from Amazon — a digital copy of something — you don’t actually own the rights to that copy. You just own a temporary digital access to it, and they can take that away from you at any time.”
Corporate decision-making and economics — including licensing agreements — often drive the available options in streaming catalogs, Owens adds. The result is an often unsatisfying ebb-and-flow of what people are able to watch. A curated collection like Film is Truth can provide options not available on streaming — or anywhere else.
Physical media also offer cinematic democratization, Owens points out. For people who lack high-speed internet or the money for streaming services, options for movie watching are more limited. Many who fall into these categories are seniors or other low-income residents.
“Those people deserve art and entertainment just as much as anybody,” he said. “And that’s really what Film is Truth can offer to those people, in addition to having stuff that maybe streaming services don’t have.”
Freske, who now works as the program director for Mount Vernon’s Lincoln Theatre, said that the loss of video stores took away the serendipity of wandering aisles until an interesting film caught your eye. Today, algorithms replace face-to-face conversations about what to watch. While the algorithms can be nice, Freske said it’s not necessarily better.
“I don’t think algorithms are replacements for somebody actually listening to what your tastes are and recommending things,” he said.
How it works
The immense Film is Truth collection is housed in the basement of the Pickford Film Center.
Once a potential customer reads and signs the theater’s online rental agreement, they can browse either an online catalog or search through the catalog at the theater’s lobby kiosk. Once armed with cinematic desires, filling out a rental request form will get them their materials between one and three days later.
Each rental lasts seven days, with pricing consisting of several tiers. Nonmembers of the Pickford can rent films at $6 apiece, while basic Pickford members get $2 rentals and one free rental per month. The theater’s premiere membership holders have a golden ticket: free unlimited rentals.
Cataloging and organizing the immense collection took time, Gordon said, and was made possible by Pickford staff who wanted to work on the project. The library has a little bit of everything, from documentaries you’ve never heard of to some of the biggest films ever made.
“It really is, I think, a really good representation of what movie culture has been for the last several decades and beyond,” he said.
The melding of Film is Truth and the Pickford was years in the making, though in a different form than originally hoped for. Owens said the video store inquired about moving into the Pickford’s Bay Street location when it was being constructed over 10 years ago, but costs and building code prevented the move from happening.
When Film is Truth closed, the hope was that some entity could house the collection and eventually turn it into a library-style model with an online database, Owens added. The Pickford was a natural choice.
So far, things are going well.
“People have been very enthusiastic and very engaged with what we’re offering,” he said.
For Freske and Marston, there is relief that the collection they began building a quarter-century ago is again a community resource for local film lovers.
“I’m really glad that they persisted over the last several years,” Freske said of the Pickford’s work. “They saw it through.”
By Matt Benoit
Also read in Salish Current: “A matter of taste: pushing boundaries at the Lincoln,” June 20, 2024