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A Return to the Video Store
Scarecrow Video In this business, there are people you consider friends who you largely only see at film festivals. Curator, producer and filmmaker Jonathan Marlow is one of mine, and over the years I’ve gained much from his observations on cinema and the business. Something of a bellwether, he was an early employee at Amazon, GreenCine and Fandor, among others. Recently, his innate forward-thinking has been connecting shards of the past with the future as his work has encompassed the experimental film streaming platform Paracme and, most recently, the executive directorship of a physical media video store, which he discusses here. — Scott Macaulay
Thirty-three, when written numerically, resembles Double-Happiness, split twice. Once each half is mirrored, it takes its complete form: eighty-eight.
In late-1988, Scarecrow Video came into standalone existence at a small storefront in Seattle. Within a handful of years, that location spawned another adjacent, then those converged on another address a few lengthy strides away on Roosevelt, its home to this very day. Additionally, in 1992, the first issue of Filmmaker was published (featuring Hal Hartley’s sublime Simple Men on its cover). I remember it well. The founders—Karol Martesko-Fenster (an acquaintance of mine from his days at Palm Pictures) and Holly Willis (whose path I later crossed at RES and, more recently, the USC School of Cinematic Arts) and the multitalented producer Scott Macaulay—created a periodical that improbably had an impact then and still, decades later. Three-and-a-third, in fact. Nothing simple about any of that.
My own peculiar Scarecrow involvement began innocently enough as an occasional customer, followed by recruitment as a volunteer during the aforementioned early-’90s move to the present ’crow HQ. In the days thereafter, despite the distractions of my initial year of college, I was offered a role at the now-legendary SV Archive. With all of the space available in this immense University District location, I suggested to Rebecca Latsios (née Ruhl, later Soriano) and her husband (in those years) George the premise of opening a small cinematheque on the second floor. Not only did they embrace this notion, Rebecca helped me build it. When I was lured away to Berlin five years later, no other staffers wanted to immerse themselves in the pesky operations of a microcinema, and it was gradually dismantled. The footprint of the former Sanctuary now displays the comedy and drama collections.
I relocated to the Bay Area after my European sojourn with a re-focus on streaming media rather than physical (with preoccupations in the rent-by-mail/TVOD era of GreenCine and on to the SVOD efforts of Fandor and elsewhere thereafter), yet I regularly visited Scarecrow during my semi-annual visits to the Pacific Northwest to introduce assorted screenings. I witnessed from afar its transition into a nonprofit (in 2014) and watched as its incomparable assortment of discs and tapes continued to expand, now numbering more than 150,000 items, the largest publicly accessible physical media collection in the world (representing roughly 200,000 films and television episodes).
When the board of Scarecrow lured me out of my nonprofit “retirement” to run SV Archive, I had not imagined when I stood in that building a half-year earlier that I’d ever reappear there on a regular basis again. I was certain that the time for any such preoccupations had long since passed. At that particular moment, standing in that citadel of moving images, I’d thought instead of the many churning and turning tides over the decades in between. We are in the midst of a sea change, which Scott Macaulay and Filmmaker has observed, documented and frequently shaped. As behavior is the mirror in which we display our image, we see it reflected in Barry Jenkins, Adele Romanski and their Pastel filmmaking collective producing an array of the most compelling independent films released in the past decade or Eugene Hernandez steering the Sundance Film Festival into its future in Boulder. We see it in you, dear reader, and your actions as well. The world bends toward us if we make it so.
