Tunnelled unassumingly beneath the pavement of Richmond Hill Terrace in Clifton is a 30-year-old Bristol institution. A cave-like space crammed to the rafters with DVDs, 20th Century Flicks has quietly weathered the rise of online piracy and the demise of its own business model. Its competitors have long since closed. Bar a few Bollywood rental shops, Flicks is now the city’s last video rental store.
You’d assume that nobody rents movies on physical media any more, and largely you’d be right. The UK landscape is hostile to video shops. In recent years Oxford, Blackheath, Exeter and Edinburgh have lost Videosyncratic, Prime Time, Brazil and Alphabet. Last month, Espressa in Brighton finally declared the rental model “no longer viable”, and now only sells.
It’s not rocket science to figure out the problem. Netflix boasts 3 million UK subscribers, claiming 14% of the home entertainment market. Amazon Prime is up by 70% in the UK since its rebrand from LoveFilm. Even the unloved Ultraviolet had 1.2m registered UK accounts at the end of 2013. Digital sales and rentals rose 33% rise in the first half of this year, compared with a 13% decline in sales of physical discs.
Flicks is a bricks-and-mortar holdout, yet it’s not entirely alone. The Film Shop has a couple of outlets in London; there’s also Movieworld in Droylsden, The Video Store in Broadstairs, Vogue Video in Edinburgh and a few others. And while Flicks isn’t exactly doing a roaring trade – the sole customer during my recent two-hour visit in the early afternoon was an elderly lady returning a copy of Io Non ho Paura – it has a bold and controversial plan for the future. Faced with falling profits and doggedly immobile rents, Flicks is attempting to crowdfund a move to a new location in Bristol’s artisanal (and rent-controlled) Christmas Steps community, and experimenting with online streaming, coffee – even a small cinema.
“A very small percentage of people have been quite angry,” says co-director Dave Taylor, a 35-year-old with ripped jeans who once cycled from Bristol to Syria. “We’ll actually be nearer to three-quarters of our customers, which is reassuring. But it does still feel slightly kamikaze.”
The shop was never what you’d call high street, sandwiched as it was between Bristol University’s monstrous student’s union and the Clifton Wine Bar, but was always somewhere Bristolians were willing to travel to. In the 1990s there may have been a Blockbuster in every district, but if you wanted to rent Fitzcarraldo, Flicks was your only option. The shop’s all-time greatest hit is Withnail and I, and the current top of its chart is Calvary. Its policy of not disposing of titles when rentals slowed has resulted in an enviable off-site archive for requests – including a core of VHS movies that were never released on DVD and are still regularly taken out.
The shop has barely changed in its lifetime, although the queues are shorter now. But Flicks’ total lifetime membership numbers 92,000, with current active memberships at a couple of thousand and actual regular customers still in the hundreds. Walking round Clifton with Taylor is like being in The Truman Show: everybody knows him. One passer-by, learning of Flicks’ plans for screening nights, suggests they show Abel Gance’s six-hour Napoleon, offering that he knows a bloke who owns two reels of it.
Taylor does not find this unusually eccentric. He recalls one customer who lived in a hotel, watched the shop’s entire VHS stock over a three-year period, exactly in the order they were purchased, and then was never seen again. “I sometimes wonder if he was real or a spirit,” Taylor says. Celebrity patrons have included Ken Russell, Paul McGann and Edgar Wright. Simon Pegg still owes a £4.50 late fee for a VHS copy of Crimes and Misdemeanours.
McGann has long been a fan. “20th Century has long been as much a fixture of the neighbourhood as any bar or cafe,” he says. “I remember I once had cause to hire the VHS copy of Withnail myself, and then promptly went away for months and forgot to return it. When eventually I did their fine was almost as much as my salary had been to shoot the picture.”
The community spirit of the local indie video shop may prove its salvation. Recent research indicates city centres are beginning to re-embrace more idiosyncratic commercial outlets. Indeed, compare it to the book trade and there are glimmers of hope. Corporate chains (for books and video alike) must chase growth in the service of shareholder profits, prize volume over selection and overprioritise digital. Indies don’t need to do any of that: they answer to no market demands outside their immediate communities. Sales at US indie bookshops are up 8% over the year. They can’t compete with Amazon, but they can offer a more pleasurable social experience.
The flip side is that owning an indie book or video shop becomes essentially a lifestyle choice. It certainly won’t make you rich. Having taken on 20th Century Flicks’ debts two years ago, Taylor and his partners Adam Hart and Dave White now operate as a co-operative, initially financed by family and credit cards. “There’s no way a bank would have invested in this business,” Taylor says. “It was all very much a personal risk. We weren’t sure if we were going to have jobs in three months’ time.” Two years later they’ve managed claw the shop back into the black. “We all exist within our means, which helps,” he adds.
Their crowdfunding venture is characteristic: in the 1980s Flicks had one of the very first searchable computer databases, strongly rumoured to have been a formative influence on adopted Bristolian Col Needham, who went on to found IMDb. The core business of renting out physical discs will continue – Taylor says it’s easy to underestimate how many people of all ages refuse to shop online or download – but Flicks will launch its own online streaming platform as well. They’re also digitising their rare tape collection. “They’re beautiful,” Taylor says of the VHS tapes in the archive. “They’ve got that fizz, and the occasional roll while the tracking adjusts. That will probably be our initial start, which is very niche, that you’ll be able to stream rare VHS.”
The screening room will be modest, perhaps 20 seats, and there will be “cool hand-made film merchandise”, a courier service (in conjunction with a nearby cycle cafe) and Taylor thinks they can handle making a few coffees. The archive will be browsable by subgenre in wooden wine boxes cadged from the nearby Averys. It’s not exactly the classic video shop celebrated by Clerks, Adjust Your Tracking or Be Kind Rewind, and a leap of faith: none of Flicks’ peers has tried anything similar.
“It’s almost like therapy, talking about it like this,” Taylor says. “It helps make it more manageable in my head: this is what I’m doing; this is what the shop is. I didn’t decide to move a 30-year business on a whim. It’s got to be really good. I don’t want to be the guy that killed Flicks.”
Six reasons video shops are better than Netflix
- Force you to leave the house.
- Human interaction.
- Unlikely to steer you towards Cowboys & Aliens just because you enjoyed Robot & Frank.
- Curated collections, and less disposal of titles when their popularity drops.
- More titles from leftfield and overseas.
- That record shop pleasure of flicking through physical sleeves.
