Lost Weekend Video replaced by Video Vortex
The bad news: San Francisco, which has lost more than a hundred video stores in the past decade, has seen one of its three remaining stores close.
The good news: A new one has taken its place.
Video Vortex opened on Nov. 7 in the lobby of Alamo Drafthouse’s Mission Street theater, said store manager Kat Shuchter. The theater’s marquee now advertises the videorental store.
The store, one of three locations operated
by Alamo Drafthouse Cinema of Austin, replaces Lost Weekend Video, which had operated out of the theater’s lobby since 2016. Lost Weekend obliquely hinted at plans to close up shop in an Instagram post in September.
The rise of streaming services, while a boon to Hollywood, devastated video stores already reeling from DVD-by-mail competition. The few that remain in cities like San Francisco are generally labors of love, maintained by owners who see the stores more as linchpins of their local communities than profit sources.
Christy Colcord, one of the co-owners of Lost Weekend, confirmed she and partners Dave Hawkins and Adam Pfahler sold their 30,000-title collection to Alamo.
Colcord said Lost Weekend’s contract with Alamo gave the theater operator “an option to buy us out if we wanted to stop.” Alamo is now paying the partners installments under a threeyear contract. She noted that Alamo can operate the video-rental business with its own staff, where previously the two ran separately.
“We still wanted to make sure that San Francisco still had one major film library,” Colcord said. “Moving into Alamo was part of that.”
Alamo was also involved in rescuing the 100,000 title video archive of Le Video, an Inner Sunset store that closed in 2015. Shuchter, who previously worked at Le Video, said Alamo had planned to host its collection in its lobby, but when Lost Weekend Video lost its lease on Valencia Street, plans changed to help preserve that store instead.
Le Video’s collection went into storage until Alamo decided to open a video store in Raleigh, N.C., a city that no longer had any video stores. There, a bar offers free video rentals as a lure to customers.
The San Francisco Video Vortex, unlike the Raleigh operation, is charging for video rentals: $2.99 a disc, with members of Alamo’s Victory loyalty program getting two-for-one rentals. A third location in Brooklyn is also charging for videos.
“I think that the Raleigh store proved that it was too much labor in order to do it for free,” Shuchter said.
Colin Hutton, owner of Video Wave, and Justin Lawrence, co-owner of Fayes, the city’s other two remaining video stores, said they had heard about Video Vortex and were concerned about competition from free video rentals.
After being told of Video Vortex’s $2.99 price, Hutton said, “That’s cheaper than I can afford to do it, but that’s better than free.” Hutton said he did not plan to refer customers to the Alamo location, as he previously did for Lost Weekend, when he did not have a title a customer sought.
Lawrence of Fayes was reassured by Alamo’s hiring of Shuchter, a veteran of San Francisco video stores. “That makes me really happy,” he said.
Alamo may next open a Video Vortex in Los Angeles, Shuchter said, though plans are not firm. The chain is opening a theater in downtown Los Angeles next year.