A beloved NYC video rental store is back up and running in the lobby of a movie theatre

Story Transcript

If you're tired of binging whatever's available on Netflix, a new video store in New York City is offering up some gems you won't find anywhere else.

Kim's Video, a seminal New York video rental chain that's been closed since 2009, is up and running again in the lobby of an Alamo Drafthouse Cinema movie theatre. 

It features thousands of items from the original Kim's collection of cult, foreign, student, homemade and otherwise esoteric films, all on DVD and VHS. The movies are free to borrow, and customers can rent a DVD player or VCR for a fee.

Nick Prueher, the co-founder of the Found Footage Festival, spearheaded the restoration and curation of the Kim's collection for Alamo. Some of the treasures he unearthed include an initiation video for the '90s cult Heaven's Gate, the controversial horror-comedy I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle, and a VHS copy of actress Alyssa Milano's Teen Steam workout video.

"This was the job I was born to do," Prueher told As It Happens guest host Dave Seglins. "It was like an archeological dig. You know, you'd open up a box and, just, you couldn't wait to see what was inside."

A haven for cinephiles, filmmakers and artists

The original Kim's Video & Music franchise holds a special place in the hearts of film buffs and New Yorkers — especially Mondo Kim's, its flagship store in the East Village.

"These bright yellow, sort of gaudy shelves were just walls and walls of DVDs and VHS tapes in hyper-specific categories," Prueher said. "There'd be a director you'd never heard of and there would be an entire wall of their movies. You could just have a film education there over the course of a few months."

You gained a lot of convenience with Netflix and streaming and YouTube. But you lost a lot of these movies that slipped through the cracks.- Nick Prueher, co-founder of the Found Footage Festival 

Several now-famous filmmakers and artists either worked at, or frequented, Mondo's.

"There's a famous story about [director] Quentin Tarantino showing up and the clerks at Kim's being so snobby that he couldn't remember his membership numbers, so they wouldn't allow him to rent," Prueher said. "That's the kind of place Kim's video was."

The store belonged Yongman Kim, an immigrant from South Korea, who first started renting Korean videos in the '80s out of his dry-cleaning store in Manhattan. 

It soon became a haven for film buffs and other creative types, who would recommend new films for Kim to track down. As his collection grew, he expanded to several locations across the city.

In 2009, with digital streaming services on the rise, Kim gave into what he calls "brutal digital capitalism" and closed his stores.

He donated a huge chunk of his videos to universities. But he was especially picky about where to send his Mondo Kim's collection, insisting any bidder guarantee adequate storage space and promise to update the collection and make it available to the public.

He thought he'd struck gold when he got an offer from the town of Salemi in Sicily, which met all three criteria. Then-mayor Vittorio Sgarbi, himself a curator of Italian art, seemed passionate about the project.

But Sgarbi was ousted in 2012 amid a Mafia scandal, and the new administration, Kim says, was less enthusiastic. His collection ended up sitting in storage for more than a decade. 

In 2017, with the help of documentary filmmaker David Redmon, Kim began the long, bureaucratic process of bringing the collection back in New York — and eventually, to Alamo Drafthouse.

Kim described the new store's grand opening last week as the culmination of a long odyssey.

"Kim's Video is not just a rental place. Kim's Video was a gathering place [where people] can share their ideas. And oftentimes, they inspire each other to create or recreate something else. It could be in a film format or music format or some other art," Kim told As It Happens.

He says it's his "personal wish" that the new shop will recapture that feeling.

Why open a video store in 2022?

While getting into the video rental market may seem like a bizarre strategy in the era of digital streaming, Alamo Drafthouse founder Tim League says that by opening shop inside an existing theatre space, there's very little in the way of overhead.

"For us, it's more about the brand and more about providing a service to our guests," League said. "It's fun and unique and speaks to our passion for movies."

This isn't Alamo's first foray into the video rental market. The company opened its first video store in Raleigh, N.C., in 2017, and League says they rent between 1,500 and 1,600 videos a month. 

It's since opened shops in its theatres in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Brooklyn. But League says opening Kim's Video was particularly special.

"That had a deep collection," he said. "It was a cinephile's dream."

Preserving the past 

Prueher says he's found a lot of hidden gems and surprises while sorting through the collection — including, he says, "a lot of spider eggs" nestled inside the covers. 

"One thing that I loved is, you know, whenever a cover would go missing, the employees had a lot of downtime and would draw their own covers," he said.

"So I found the DVD cover for the cover of Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries — you know, a very serious drama. But the clerk just decided to draw a bunch of wild strawberries with mohawks and puking and, you know, drinking liquor."

It's exactly the kind of thing he's passionate about preserving.

"You gained a lot of convenience with Netflix and streaming and YouTube. But you lost a lot of these movies that slipped through the cracks," he said.

"Those are the obscure ones that I think more and more people are seeking out. Now that everything's available at your fingertips, the things that aren't are even more sought-after."

Written by Sheena Goodyear. Interview with Nick Prueher produced by Kate McGillivray.