From Betamax to Blockbuster: Video Stores and the Invention of Movies on Video

by Joshua M. Greenberg
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008
216 pp illus 15 b/w. Trade, $24.95
ISBN: 978-0-262-07290-8.

Reviewed by Mike Leggett
Creativity & Cognition Studios
University of Technology Sydney

legart@ozemail.com.au

Video Stores and the Invention of Movies on Video is a study of the entrepreneur as cultural amplifier rather than inventor. It is research continuing the “sociology of technology” project launched by McCluhan, Banham, and Norman et al. The “consumption junction,” as Ruth Cowan described it, the location of colliding desires - technologists developing their skills, businessmen generating bucks and a populace looking for distraction. Until 30 years ago, screening your own movies on tape or film required a medium-sized business or education budget to acquire both the screening technology and a copy of the movie. So when Sony released the Betamax in 1975, hobbyists initially embraced its ability to grab their very own copies of favoured films off the ether. It is hard to believe that corporate planning had not anticipated such a move. Sony and the other manufacturers blindly competing were intent on delivering a convenience––“time-shifting”––to ensure that maximum benefit was extracted from the free-to-air television channels in Japan and the USA. (The content of such channels was memorably summarised by Groucho Marx who remarked that he had always thought the long prose poem by T.S.Eliot, The Waste Land (1922), was a history of American television).

Greenberg is well placed as Director of Digital Strategy and Scholarship at the New York Public Library to extract this focused and heavily referenced study. Our attention is taken to the sudden shifts in popular usage in those early days, occasioned by the hobbyist and the “mom and dad” family business that innocently realised a whole culture beyond the tyranny of broadcast schedules. The follow through to the current culture of DVD and video games in this account is muted, though features of contemporary cultures resonate with those of the VCR. “Hackers” of the restriction devices built into early VCR machines––engineers extending their agency and social networks developing around initially, videophile hobbyist movie collectors, later, entrepreneurs from myriad backgrounds gathering customers into comfortably domestic business settings.

The elevation of the entrepreneur in this study, from retail space to cultural space, begins with the domestic technologies of white goods for kitchen and bathroom, followed by brown goods for living and home/office. The 1930s home entertainment of music––records and the gramophones to play them––like pianos and sheet music, were sold in the same place. The bifurcation of retail operations arrived in the late 1970s as the potential of program content, both sound and image-based, were made complex by the late arrival of the Hollywood studios in the scene. Logically, the studios tried renting and selling through theatres but quickly realized it was the home and the shop rather than the downtown cinema that had the affinities necessary to launch a new social pastime––the video evening.

More than a simple indulgence, the technology delivered agency to viewers over the celebrities on and behind the silver screen. Interactive control enabled the experience of the motion picture to be altered as never before––speed the actors up, slow them down, re-run that scene time and again. Before long, teens were word-perfect as participants within the melodrama of their favourite titles.

But this is territory that Greenberg only hints toward as his focus remains steadfastly on the minutia of retail trade and its role in the development of Oldenburg’s “third place,” between home and work, a site of discourse informing the dispersal of leisure time. Pornography, the genre long associated with the liberation of motion picture distribution, receives passing coy reference. Duplication factories, an essential and wholly novel component of the whole cavalcade, remain concealed. Motion picture viewing habits are those of the North Americas, so the differing government regulation frameworks in Europe and the rest of the world in shaping public behaviours remain for other scholars to explore. Likewise, reference to the economics and aesthetics of “straight-to-video” movies.

Artists’ responses to the new media of post-industrial television, the emergence of video art and political agitprop video, with alternative distribution and screening systems preceding the arrival of the VCR, (a fourth place?), are invisible. The archiving tendencies of many VCR owners, the family histories––why re-record that tape and not this one, etc, are not a part of this study. The analysis of the entrepreneurial dollar slog highlights the inexorable means by which quite fundamental changes affect our contemporary use of the motion picture phenomena. No longer tied exclusively to the special occasion visit to the cinema, opportunities now abound for us to have agency over “the flicks.” But today these phenomena are specifically designed for our consumption. Corporate futurists, industrial designers and engineers work closely with marketers to invent the needs and exploit the nuances of consumer response. If the culture of innovation has replaced the consumption junction, lab and market testing has also replaced the culture of the entrepreneur that this study successfully describes.

The book has spawned a website: videostoreproject.com. It has no bibliography but copious footnotes often pointing to other sources and publications.