Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
I come not to bury Dave Lucas, but to praise him.
When I moved to Los Angeles in 1990, I took two jobs in a row that put me in a position that directly impacted who I became. First up, I was an assistant manager at a theater in Sherman Oaks, and as a result, I got a crash course in the test screening process and the National Research Group and Joe Farrell, an education that came in handy when I started my initial spy reportage for AICN back in 1996. That theater job also put me face to face with a hell of a lot of familiar faces... actors, directors, musicians... famous people came to see films there every day and every night, and I’ll be the first to admit it... I still got flabbergasted by people at times. When Robert Zemeckis came through the lobby one day, I lost my cool completely. Woody Allen came in for a screening of SCENES FROM A MALL, and then asked to sit upstairs in the manager’s office instead of downstairs in the theater, so I got to lead him up. I sat next to Clint Eastwood for a screening of THE ROOKIE. I saw Gene Hackman every Friday morning for almost six months. It was a remarkable sort of full-immersion shock therapy regarding celebrity.
My writing partner and roommate, Scott Swan, found a couple of jobs in a row, and ended up at a place called Dave’s Video, a laserdisc store. His reasoning at the time: “We’ll get free rentals.” Sounded good to us. We had invested in laserdisc in the spring of 1989 because we read there was a letterboxed version of STAR WARS available. It was that simple a decision for two confirmed Original Trilogy junkies, desperate to see the film again the way we remembered it as children. Every videotape release up that point, remember, was panned-and-scanned, and letterboxed prints of anything were pretty rare in home video. It just didn’t make sense to letterbox. There was no market for it. The consumer didn’t want it. That’s what was hammered home to me when I managed a video store in Tampa, Florida. So when we first started reading about laserdisc, it seemed impossible, a film lover’s dream.
The technology was still just starting to get a foothold when we moved to LA, and the idea of a laserdisc-only store seemed improbable to me. Still, Scott found this place and said it was great, with a dense rental library, and if we could rent movies for free, that meant we could work our way through and see everything eventually, even if it wasn’t ours to own. I liked that idea a lot, and I decided to check out this place where Scott said he was going to work.
Before I left the store, I put in an application of my own. I knew I wasn’t going to be a manager, and I might not get paid the same, but I also knew that Dave’s was cooler than any video store I’d ever been in before, and I wanted to work there.
And so it was that both Scott and I found ourselves at what we eventually came to know as Ground Zero. Everything that happened for us in the years afterwards had to do with our stay at that place, and everything that happened there was directly due to the vision of one person: Dave.
Dave’s a big guy. Not quite Harry Knowles big, but imposing, and with a particular gait, a sort of rolling shuffle. His hair was still dark in 1990, and he wore a permanent scowl that was only split on rare occasion with a quick stab of a smile that would vanish again immediately. When I met him, I was instantly intimidated by him, and that never went away... not the entire time I worked there, and not in the years since. I’m fairly sure Dave never liked me, not even in the beginning. I’m not even sure how I got the job. See, I made the cardinal mistake. I admitted to him that I wanted to make films. He rolled his eyes when I said it, and I could tell instantly that I had made a mistake.
”Let me explain something to you about this store,” he said, and he sounded tired and exasperated when he said it, like he had been through this before, many times. “Most of our customers work in the film industry. They come here for a couple of reasons. They come to buy their own work, and the work of their friends. They come to see their work displayed and see how it’s doing. And they come because they know this is a place where they won’t be bothered. They know that while they’re at Dave’s, no one is going to hassle them about anything. And that includes the staff. ESPECIALLY the staff.”
And he was right. In the two years or so that I was at that store, I saw an incredible cross-section of the entertainment industry represented. I met directors of all types. I met actors from the A-list, the B-list, and the Z-list. I saw incredible displays of ego close-up, and I was surprised by how often I saw people drop their guard and reveal themselves to surprising degree. It’s where I became friends with some great people like Frank Darabont and Mick Garris and the guy who directed my first play, Jerry Levine. It was because of Dave’s that I read the RESERVOIR DOGS screenplay before it had shot a frame of film. It was because of Dave’s that I got to wander unchecked on the HOOK sets and the BATMAN RETURNS sets. I have a Dave’s Story for every day of the week, and if I wanted to, I could have one for every hour of every day. And through it all, I did my best to do exactly what Dave wanted and keep my ambitions and my aspirations outside the store.
Instead of trying to push my work on people, or the notion of myself as a screenwriter, I determined early on that I was just going to do my best to be valuable at the store. And I got lucky. I had a niche. There were a lot of good people working at the store in those early days, including some guys who had been with Dave since the very start, but none of them could approach me in sheer breadth of film knowledge. Nine times out of ten, when someone walked through the door with a difficult film question, the other clerks and the managers would all point at me and say, “I don’t know. Ask Drew. He’ll know.” The conversations that resulted from that were remarkable, and led me to meet guys I am still friends with today.
And those other staff members, the ones who had been there from the start, they would tell us all the legend of Dave. They would tell us how he had started out working in a hardware store, where he had pushed the owners to open up a small video rental section, which had rapidly become a larger video rental section, and how he had recognized early on that laserdisc had a future. When he tried to get the store to take the plunge into this new home video format, they had balked, and he decided to go it alone... put his money where his mouth was, so to speak. And with the help of his wife Linda (as adept a handler of celebrities as one could have hoped for, and as big a part of the store’s early success as her husband), he had created something that had become truly indespensible to a large section of the filmmaking community. There were other stores, places like Lazer Blazer or The Laser’s Edge, that tried to compete, but Dave’s was the center of the universe at that particular point in time, it felt like.
Even when things fell apart between me and Dave over a misunderstanding (he thought I’d asked a customer for a job, when nothing could have been further from the truth), I left respecting him as a businessman. He had just moved to a new store, a bigger store right near the corner of Laurel Canyon and Ventura, incredibly prime Valley real estate. Laserdiscs were getting better and better, and so was his store, and I left there admiring him, having to get a rental membership of my own just so I would have an excuse to go back. I also left many friends at that store, some of whom are still there, still employed by Dave.
I understand that sort of loyalty to a job. Dave was the embodiment to me of the perfect small business owner. He ran the place personally. He was always there, even once he moved to Simi Valley, even once he moved his family north to Marin. Dave maintained a personal interest in his staff. I remember one incident where all the clerks and the managers were at each others’ throats over stupid little petty things, and Dave knew why... we had just gone through a harrowing holiday retail season, and the stress had been enormous. His solution was to close the store for a day and, out of his own pocket, take every employee plus a guest of their choice to Disneyland for the day. He treated us like family, not like hired help. He and Linda were the Mom and Pop of Mom and Pop stores.
I heard rumors about the demise of Dave’s when I was at Butt-Numb-A-Thon, of all places. I had to go to Texas to hear gossip about Studio City. Go figure. I thought it was a mistake of some sort. How could Dave’s ever go out of business? I remember the sort of profit margin he had going in the old days, the glory days. And it just seemed impossible to me. I thought it had to be a mistake. When I got back to LA, I started making calls. The rumors were remarkable. It seemed that there was a lot of smoke, but I couldn’t quite get a glimpse of the fire. Then, last Friday, I got an e-mail from Paul Prischman telling me that, indeed, Dave’s had closed their doors that day.
He offered some reasons in his e-mail, and he offered others in a release he sent to sites like The Digital Bits that I’ll reprint here, the last message from Dave and Linda to their customers:
To Our Dear Customers,
After nearly twenty years of business, Dave's Video, The Laser Place is forced to close its doors. Here at Dave's, we have always taken pride in providing you with the best selection, fair prices, and above all, the best service in town. This industry has changed drastically over the past couple of years, but what has changed the most is profit margin. We have tried very hard to adjust to the poor profit margin that has taken over this market, but we have come to realize that it would be impossible for us to continue to serve you in the manner in which you have expected, you deserve, and we have been proud to give. This is certainly a sad time for all of us, and please know we are deeply sorry for any inconvenience this may cause you. We truly appreciate your loyalty over the years and wish you and your families good health and much happiness.
Dave’s was important to fans of laserdiscs first, and they worked hard to accommodate DVD when it arrived. Studio Day was one of Dave’s great inventions, an annual event where anyone could come in and meet the reps from each of the major software distributors, each studio, and ask them questions about titles, offer feedback, and generally get a chance to help steer where the industry would go in the future. Dave’s also held charity events and signings and other events. Dave’s was, simply put, one of the best stores of any type that I’ve ever been into.
So it alarms me that it is closing. It alarms me because of conversations I’ve had with several of the employees that are leaving there this week, a bit dazed by it all, and because of what I think this says about the future of DVD sales.
I don’t think there’s room for the little guy in this business. I don’t think there will be many Mom & Pop stores in the future. This is a bad thing, even a terrible thing. It means that your DVD choices are going to be mandated by a corporate mentality more and more often. Virgin Megastore. Best Buy. Tower Records. Barnes & Noble. These are the people who will decide what to order, thereby deciding what’s available for you to buy. Dave’s Video ordered at least five of everything. Any title that was available, you could find it at Dave’s.
There’s no guarantee you’ll have that sort of access to available titles as these major companies take over the entire business. There’s no guarantee that anyone is going to pick up the gauntlet and encourage the sort of rapport between consumer and producer that Dave’s did. There’s every indication that this and recent decisions like the firing of Warner Home Video’s Warren Lieberfarb (the man responsible for the DVD format’s acceptance by Hollywood, in large part) indicate a turn in the way DVD is going to be offered to us, and I’m not sure I like it.
Anyway... it’s late... and I’m not sure this is going to mean a lot to most of you. Unless you lived here in Los Angeles, chances are you never visited Dave’s Video. The sad part is, now you’ll never have that chance. I sincerely wish Dave and Linda and their family well, and hope that they take nothing but fond memories with them into whatever they do next, and I hope that the incredible staff that has been there this whole time all ends up moving on to other even better things. Mainly, though, I hope this isn’t the end of an era, and that there’s still room for the personal touch in the retail end of DVD. I love the format, but I don’t want to see it turn films into something you get out of a vending machine, mere bubblegum cards. I hope there will always be room for a business like Dave’s, a business run by someone who knows the value of taking care of a customer, and who always goes the extra distance to make sure that the customer is able to find what they want, when they want, and how they want.
And if you ever run into me and you’re curious, ask me about the Michael Jackson/McCauley Culkin story. It’s a doozy.
"Moriarty" out.
