At Video Americain, Movies Never End

On a recent Friday evening, three employees at Video Americain discuss the trajectory of actor Joe Pesci’s career. Behind them is a sea of clear DVD cases and behind that is a wall of VHS tapes, which are hardly obsolete here, despite the changes in home entertainment technology. 

In the kids section of the store, 6-year-old Bella Tilford clutches a Barbie DVD and timidly retreats to a plastic Little Tikes playground sitting between the shelves. Her sister, Elli, 8, talks about the benefits of having Video Americain right down the street from . She’s a big fan of “Harry Potter,” but she’s been getting into “Spy Kids,” too, she says. 

Bella and Elli’s mom, Monique Tilford, says she takes the girls to the video store weekly, but admittedly doesn’t have time to peruse, say, the cult horror section, with its four-plus versions of “Frankenstein,” or the wall of great directors, filled with movies by Wong Kar-wai and Martin Scorsese. 

“I’m a mom,” she said, chuckling, “and I work.” 

Video Americain is open seven days a week for at least 11 hours a day, and on any given day, the store sees a variety of customers.

A father rents his young daughter “Galaxy Quest.” A cinephile glances through a small selection of Australian films. A family looks for a new movie to watch later that night.  

As disparate as their interests are, everyone is able to find something. 

It doesn’t hurt that the shop is so welcoming. The signs scattered around the store denoting sections, staff picks and rental fees are handwritten or cut out of construction paper.

As aggressively as Video Americain is ridding itself of its massive VHS collection — “There’s no way to justify all this stuff,” said manager John Davis — it’s hard for the store to trash tapes that contain movies impossible to find anywhere else. 

It’s a place that has fit snugly in Takoma Park since it opened in 1996. 

“It’s culture, it’s community,” said Nettie Legters, a Silver Spring resident who comes to the store a few times a month to take her pick from new releases and documentaries. “It’s a lot of what Takoma Park is about.” 

She added: “The folks behind the desk are so knowledgeable.” 

One of those folks is Davis, who has been working at Video Americain on and off for 10 years. As a musician, he’s toured around the world — the U.S., Canada, Europe, Japan — but in his lulls between tours, he always ends up back at the store he co-manages, even if he now only works there once a week. 

Right now, he’s a graduate student in library science at Catholic University. Fittingly, one of his jobs at Video Americain is ordering old movies to pad the store’s stock. 

“I like movies,” he said. “I like curating movies. It’s part of what I do. It’s a way for me to be able to see more stuff — instead of me having to go buy them for myself, I buy them for the store.” 

For Davis, the ability to order these obscure films — and have people actually interested in renting them out — makes Video Americain unique among chain rental stores such as Blockbuster or Hollywood Video. 

“Few people ever really liked going there,” he said of those other stores. “It was ugly and people didn’t know about movies, and they sort of highlighted garbage.” 

So Video Americain fights the impersonal movie rental experience by offering the most personal store possible. It doesn’t necessarily need a slide for kids to play on, witch dolls hanging over the horror section or a staff picks section where each employee explains, at length via sticky labels, why each movie is so good. 

But it has all those things, combining niche with accessibility. According to Davis, that's why the store has been able to thrive for so long. 

“There are still a few utilitarian video stores left around,” Davis said, “but one that’s a specialty store, that’s cool and has good movies and rare stuff? I can’t think of anyone that’s left that does that.”