Another cultural loss for Claremont: its video store
Video stores are past the point of being an endangered species and closer to being utterly extinct. Late July saw news stories about two novelties, the last remaining full-service rental stores in San Francisco (Video Wave) and New York City (Film Noir Cinema).
Claremont until recently had such a store too. Video Paradiso was a gem. It’s gone now, with a kind of afterlife that I’ll explain.
When a video store near Upland, Turpentine Cat, folded in the mid-1990s, Rhino Records owner and film fan Chuck Oken Jr. snapped up its stock, then wondered how best to use it. This was in the heyday of big rental chains as well as smaller family-run opera- tions.
“How the hell am I supposed to compete with Blockbuster?” wondered Oken, recounting his quandary in a recent conversation. He opted to focus on foreign and art films, which Turpentine Cat had stocked and which he’d always loved.
Named in honor of “Cinema Paradiso,” the 1988 Italian film about a small-town theater and the friendship between its projectionist and a movie-loving boy, Video Paradiso opened in 1997.
“Our grand opening was ‘Big Night’-themed for the Stanley Tucci movie,” Oken said, “and we had Chef
Henry, then of Wolfe’s Marketplace, cater and feed the town in our parking lot.”
Rhino was in the main part of the former Bentley’s market at Bonita and Yale avenues. Paradiso was in 1,700 square feet at the rear, in a space that had been the market’s loading docks, storage and meat locker, with an entry facing Bonita.
At the start, you had to buy a membership. I signed up. I still have my card.
The store was a marvel. At its height, it had around 8,000 DVDs, arranged into categories, some quite specialized, like silent films and film noir. American and international directors of renown — from Woody Allen to Franco Zeffirelli — had their own well-stocked sections.
The first movie I checked out was “The Bicycle Thief,” the dour, postwar Italian realist drama that was pretty much the ultimate Video Paradiso movie. Over the next 15 years or so, I rented dozens of movies. Not hundreds — I was an intermittent borrower — but dozens.
Where else but Video Paradiso might you rent “The Line King,” the documentary about cartoonist Al Hirschfeld? Or, for that matter, “Cinema Paradiso” itself?
Missing the pleasures of revival-house screenings, for a long stretch I rented a classic movie every weekend, curating a sort of bachelor revival-house in my living room. “A Clockwork Orange,” “All Quiet on the Western Front,” “The Candidate,” “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “Shampoo,” “The Rules of the Game,” “The French Connection,” “The Apartment,” it was great fun.
The directors section helped me track down every Clint Eastwood western and see every Alfred Hitchcock film, even early curiosities like “The Manxman” and “The Farmer’s Wife.”
I rented a few silents, among them “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” “The Crowd” and “The Birth of a Nation” (boring, racist), as well as the first sound film, “The Jazz Singer” (better).
Yet I merely scratched the surface of a store that had an entire shelf devoted to film noir and every available title by titans of American and world cinema.
When the Laemmle Claremont 5 opened in 2007, bringing arthouse fare to the college town, optimism was high. Those at Video Paradiso, though, suspected the venture might not go well. What the store’s customers rented most were
mainstream movies like “Batman” and “Star Wars,” not “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.”
“They want the idea of art, but they don’t want to support it,” Oken said of Claremonters. “That’s what the Laemmle found.” The Claremont 5, which now plays a lot of family and superhero films, is nevertheless likely to close later this year.
Some deeply appreciated Video Paradiso, of course. “David Foster Wallace, the author, was an incredible renter from that store,” Oken said. “He was voracious.”
Toward the end, Video Paradiso virtually eliminated rentals and expanded its sale section. On one of the last days, I bought a new Blu-ray of W.C. Fields’ “The Bank Dick” and chatted with Ed Montoya, the clerk who’d been a fixture since 2005.
We reminisced about a store that is unlikely ever to be duplicated. Montoya said college students exiting restaurants on Bonita would see the Video Paradiso sign, wander in, ask what it was and struggle to grasp the concept of renting a video.
Rhino has moved to Montclair (5458 Moreno St.) after 48 years in Claremont. It opens Friday. A week ago at the new Rhino, as I got a sneak peek, Montoya was filling the DVD and Blu-ray bins with videos for sale.
The area will be of special interest “to Video Paradiso loyalists,” Montoya said.
Oken intends to put a sign with the Video Paradiso name out front. Clerks are answering the phone by saying “Rhino Records, Video Paradiso.”
“We’ll still be buying DVDs. Ed was a mainstay of the store, and he’s still here,” Oken said. “There’s just no rental.”
Oken said streaming services have their drawbacks. Not every film is available on demand, unlike when you have access to a physical copy. He has some foreign films held back from sale for now. They’re in boxes in his office.
“I don’t want to deal with it yet,” Oken admitted. “It was a lot of work getting all these movies!”
On the last day in Claremont, June 26, the final Video Paradiso customers were not cranky old movie nerds. They were two women in their 20s, both regulars, who entered 15 minutes before closing.
“One was in tears. They were consoling each other. They wanted to soak it up one last time,” Montoya told me.
One bought a copy of “La Strada,” the 1954 Fellini film. In an automatic reaction, Montoya quietly complimented her taste. “One thing they’d liked was recommendations,” Montoya told me. “So when I said ‘Great choice,’ that set them off again,” crying. He choked up too.
“It was a really nice way to close up the shop,” Montoya reflected. “That’s how important and meaningful that shop was to some. Even to the young, despite preconceptions.”