Filmworks bids fond farewell to The Movies

By Jim Piper

The Movies is going out of business this month. Fresno is diminished.

The Movies is one of the town's oldest video rental stores and certainly its most congenial. The store is run by Jeff Booth, his wife, Jayne, and in recent months by his children, Allison and Lewis.

Fresno without The Movies is like Fresno without the main county library downtown. It's been an important repository for film art for nearly 25 years.

I started going to The Movies—always located at 1435 Van Ness Avenue in the historic Tower District—in 1983, shortly after VHS tapes became widely available. I rented from Jeff as often as I could and I joined his "club." After that, I never paid more than two bucks for a rental.

I've also rented from Blockbuster and Hollywood Video and Netflix. But I can't talk film with anybody at Blockbuster the way I can talk film with Jeff. No one at Hollywood jumps up and down with glee like Jayne when discussing a film she especially likes.

The first tape I rented from Jeff was Gallipoli, a film set during World War I and directed by Australian Peter Weir. I could not believe that the entire movie was contained inside that four-by-seven-inch, sharp-edged hunk of black plastic that weighed only four ounces. Even less could I believe that I could get it to play back through my television set.

At the time, I taught film studies at Fresno City College. The course was based largely on rented 16mm prints. Very quickly, I glimpsed the future of teaching film study. It resided in video.

In the era B.J., or Before Jeff, the college had to pay the rental company Films Incorporated $120 to rent a 16mm print of Citizen Kane for just a few days. We were supposed to show the film only once, and then rush it back to Films, Inc., via Fed Ex.

Soon, the college bought a VHS version of Citizen Kane for the film program, for about the same amount of money we used to rent it for. Gradually, in the period D.J., or During Jeff, I took the course to video—to VHS, then laser disc, then DVD.

The Movies has also been a ticket outlet for Fresno Filmworks from the beginning, more than five years ago. It's been a symbiotic relationship: People visit The Movies to sort through Jeff's collection of indies and foreign films, and they pick up Filmworks tickets while they are there. Or, people visit The Movies to purchase Filmworks tickets, and while there they rent noteworthy films from Jeff.

Filmworks couldn't have chosen a better store. We've been a community with our love of film—Filmworks patrons, the Filmworks board, The Movies, and Jeff's customers. We run into each other at The Movies or in the Tower lobby, or in the Dollar Tree parking lot. We talk film and we connect.

It's sad that such an important community resource as The Movies will soon be gone.

Jeff didn't sell many of his movies, and we all have been grateful for that. He knew it was up to him to hang on to important films, since there was no proper film library in town. Thus, after a few years, after Jeff's inventory had built up, I stopped renting 16mm prints altogether and used The Movies for assembling units of study for my classes.

With Jeff's library, it was no trouble at all to put together a unit of, for example, "on-the-run" films—Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, Patty Hearst.

Jeff takes pride in having been the best-stocked video store for independent and foreign films in the central San Joaquin Valley. He got phone calls from all over asking about this or that obscure title. He couldn't have made much money by hanging on to those old Fassbinder or Godard films, but he's received much satisfaction from being the area's chief film archivist.

That, in fact, has been Jeff's greatest joy—talking film with knowing customers, helping jog their memories.

As I write this, Jeff is selling all his old movies. "I have no regrets, none at all," Jeff told me recently, neither about breaking up the collection nor about closing.

"I'm closing up because it's just the time," he said. "It feels good to end this chapter of our lives and move on to something else."

It's too bad the city hasn't stepped in, declared The Movies a civic treasure, and kept the enterprise—no, the institution—going by paying Jeff what the head librarian downtown gets, and keeping the hallowed store afloat.

But no. In the coming days, The Great Collection will be scattered to the winds, like the gold dust blowing across the desert at the end of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

For myself, I rescued the superb Italian film Lamerica when I interviewed Jeff for this piece. But I have to tell you: I didn't feel good about it.

November 2007