By Roy Corbett
After 10 years, the last video rental store in Smithers will be shutting its doors for good.
A video store closing down is nothing new, but of all the video stores to ever hold a going out of business sale, one thing sets this one apart: In the town of Smithers no other video store has lasted as long into the age of streaming video-on-demand as did Gone Hollywood.
Kai Gorbahn, the manager, has been with the store since the very beginning. He sat down to an interview with me in store after closing one day.
“The reason that my parents bought Gone Hollywood is actually because I could never keep a job. I kept getting fired at all these different jobs, so my parents bought Gone Hollywood so that I would have a place to work while I’m in Smithers.”
I ask him if he wanted that off the record.
“No. Include it, man. It’ll be funny,” he tells me. “I was a pretty wild teenager, so they wanted me to have a job that I liked.”
The store used to be located next to Impulse Games on Second Avenue but didn’t come into its own as a social hub for young people until it made the move to its newer, First Avenue location.
“We were there for about a year-and-a-half. When we first moved here was when we got the pool tables, the golf simulator, and the party room. It used to be the most happening place. Teenagers would come in here. We would have so many teenagers just come in and play pool, have popcorn.”
Billiards was a popular part of the place and one of the hardest for the locals to part with, so much so that our interview itself was interrupted twice by people interested in buying the pool tables.
“We used to have dozens of teenagers come in everyday and now we still get people playing on the pool tables,” Kai said, “but these days there’s not a lot of teenagers that come play pool anymore.”
However, according to Kai, it was not these extra entertainments that kept Gone Hollywood in the game for so long. For that, Gorbahn credits a loyal customer base.
“On Fridays and Saturdays we’d still get 500 customers each day, but we used to have more steady customers during the week. And because we lost out on steady customers, that’s what brought it to an end. It wasn’t the entertainment features that enabled us to survive. We survived because we had good customers that steadily rented movies. The money came from the movies and we used to rent out a lot of movies.”
Perusing the shelves with the gang, dickering with friends over what to pick up for movie night, or stumbling across an obscure cult-classic like a pearl-bearing oyster at low tide. Most everyone in Smithers has their own memories of time spent in these aisles. Kai has his own fond memories of the place: Time spent with friends; Co-workers duct-taping themselves to walls; After hours jam-sessions with his buddies, him on guitar.
“We had a lot of fun here. Everybody that worked here loved their jobs.”
Passion for film defined the staff of Gone Hollywood.
“I think a huge thing that made us different was that everybody who worked here loved movies.”
Kai’s own favourite movie is Knight of Cups, a 2015 arthouse film directed by Terrence Malick, starring Christian Bale and Natalie Portman.
“It’s a weird artsy film” Kai tells me. “There’s a little bit of dialogue, but most of it is silent. And I would play it in the video-store all day every day. If you came in here you would always see it playing,” Kai says. “Christian Bale is in it, and he’s a Hollywood screenwriter. It’s basically his journey to find true love.”
As an aspiring writer himself, Kai Gorbahn found the movie relatable. In 2012 Kai self-published his quasi-autobiographical novel How We’d Look on Film. Kai tells me that he used to sell copies of the book out of Gone Hollywood, approximately 500 of them.
“The book ends with me getting a job at Gone Hollywood, so that’s how it ends, yeah. I get my dream job.”
But such things do not last forever.
“Ever since the movie store has died, there has not been that many good movies lately. The quality of films has really gone down and that’s because these movies have not had the chance to make money in a video store.”
Kai fears that the rise of streaming will diminish the “cult film.” That is, films that do poorly when initially released in the theatre, but become well-received by audiences years later, developing “cult-followings” (an example being David Fincher’s 1999 film Fight Club).
“I think that less good movies are going to be made. Over the 10 years that I’ve worked here, [now] it’s just blockbusters and films that nobody wants to watch … And there’s not a good middle-ground anymore. The reason for that is that the money is collected through movie theatres, the studios don’t necessarily care about the film anymore. So I think that it’s just going to be more blockbusters and less interesting films. That’s how I kinda see it.”
But Kai is no luddite with only negative things to say about video-on-demand. He believes that streaming services have given rise to valuable content and praised Netflix for its sponsorship of Judd Apatow’s 2016 romantic-comedy streaming series Love, a series he greatly enjoyed but considered a risky investment for Netflix.
“We’re never going to run out of good movies to watch, but the mainstream who doesn’t search for the really good stuff? They’re just going to be stuck with the new Jurassic World movie. And those movies are good, but that’s all they’re going to see and not that other stuff unless they purposefully make the decision to go and look for it.”
Kai Gorbahn wants the people of Smithers to know the gratitude he feels towards them for their support of Gone Hollywood throughout the years. And while he does not have an exact date of closing at the moment, he expects to have cleared out enough stock to shut the doors sometime in July 2018. After doing so, Kai plans to move to Calgary to start the next chapter in his life, and perhaps write a second book.
“It’s my new adventure.”
