LA’s ‘last’ video store is still inspiring Hollywood directors and shunning streaming

An E.T. mannequin sporting a straw Dodgers fedora peers out at Santa Monica Boulevard. Tens of thousands of plastic cases hold now-archaic DVDs and VHS tapes on labeled shelves.

A black sign outside the iconic alien’s home calls it “the last movie store,” right below the place’s true name in orange-and-black type: “CineFile.”

The video store has been a Blockbuster-esque gathering spot for inspired directors, actors, and even music icons since its inception in 1999.

Michael Jackson famously visited the store donning a Hulk mask to conceal his identity, spending hours looking for movies with his friend, director Brett Ratner. Ratner said Jackson even threatened to buy the place when he couldn’t find any of his friend’s movies.

“I’m going to buy this place and make a huge Brett Ratner films section,” Jackson said, according to Ratner.

More recently, ‘Dune’ star Timothée Chalamet stopped in to rent some Stanley Kubrick films. Director Quentin Tarantino and actors Ryan Gosling, Mel Brooks and Robert Pattinson have been spotted there. Pattinson, the store’s owner said, came in to study the films of French director Claire Denis to decide whether to play in her 2018 movie “High Life.”

Behind the star power, the Sawtelle video store has stood for more than two decades despite video rentals being rendered obsolete with the rise of streaming technology.

The store fell on hard times in 2013, when streaming giant Netflix began dominating the media space.

Current owner, 44-year-old Sebastian Mathews, then-owner of a nearby record store, bought the video store to keep it alive. He said the competition in the area combined with the rise of streaming made for a fatal business mix.

“Obviously, streaming was on the uptick, and there were 4 or 5 pretty significant video stores [nearby], and that was just too much competition for anyone to survive,” he said.

The store survived through the media exodus that took down rental giant Blockbuster and many video stores in the movie capital of the world. He credits the local closures of video stores and CineFile’s subscription model for staying afloat. Now, he says they’re the only video store in the city of Los Angeles.

The store’s business model is a nod to old video stores.

Customers can pay $20 a month to rent two movies at a time for no late fees “ever.” For an extra $10 a month, they can rent an additional two movies. Regular customers can rent a movie for $5.50 a title and are required to return most within a week or face the dreaded late fees.

The store had seen a steady demand for movies until COVID-19 came along, Mathews said. The pandemic “shook up” the rental game, leaving the shop with fewer customers — even as its most loyal renters started checking out more titles.

And just as the pandemic began to fade, another threat was already looming: streaming.

The explosion of services including Paramount+, Peacock, HBO Max and Discovery+ fractured the market, forcing movie buffs to juggle a growing pile of subscriptions just to get their hands on everything they wanted to watch, Mathews said.

For the video store, streaming remained a relentless headache.

The irony was hard to miss: In August, a giant billboard advertising HBO Max’s upcoming series “Lanterns” towered over the very video store still selling the old-fashioned way to watch movies.

But there’s a silver lining to the saturated streaming space.

The video store can take advantage of “decision fatigue” that customers can endure while scrolling through several streaming services when they could just go to the video store.

“People are on streaming sites, whether it’s Spotify or video sites, and then they might have a film in mind. They’ve been recommended something. They search for it. It’s not available, and Netflix says you should watch this instead,” he said.

“It’s a distraction. People end up feeling more and more disappointed with the film-watching experience because they’re not seeing the great stuff that’s hard to get a hold of, rights-wise.”

The solution is the huge physical media library the store has. CineFile has an extensive library of more than 60,000 pieces of physical media ranging from silent films to vintage porn, according to the store. More than 500 titles are listed under the store’s “XXX” label.

One customer, Marvin Lemus, told The California Post he came into the store because he was looking for a copy of the 2001 film Monsoon Wedding, famously directed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s mother, Mira Nair.

He couldn’t find it anywhere else.

“It’s not available on streaming,” he said. “It’s not available anywhere. I can’t, I couldn’t find it.”

Another customer, Aidan Goldenson, told The Post he comes to the store to add to his physical media collection and enjoys the atmosphere. Customers can go into the store and enjoy the novel feeling of being completely surrounded by movies.

“I love the store,” he said. “I think they have such a great variety of different genres and films and TV, and I think it’s just so great the amount of like box sets that they have. It’s such a cool environment too, with like posters everywhere and stickers and vinyl.”

The store’s manager, Tara, said most customers who come into the store are either tourists or regulars, who often attend the store’s film screenings or have subscriptions. The tourists, she suggests, sometimes act a bit clueless in the archaic film store.

“They assume everything is for sale, as opposed to rent,” she said.

Mathews said the store has struggled with local natural disasters, the political climate, and homelessness. But for now, he says the influx of new people into the city and the local student population intrigued with the store has kept it going.

He’s hoping nostalgia and social gatherings will drive people in for years to come. Students and others in the CineFile film community often rent movies to watch them with friends or attend the store’s screenings of retro films like Jaws 3-D or Weekend at Bernie’s.

“I think that there can be that excitement around gathering again,” he said.

In a streaming future, CineFile could be at least an “archival resource and a bastion for American culture,” as its website says. It also remains a place for people living in the film capital of the world to exercise their “Cinefile” obsession.

“It’s really a place where you can deepen the interest in film and what’s been forgotten or lost,” he said.

And right now, it’s the last video store and archive in Los Angeles where people can.