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We do have a lot of VHS,
I would say, we probably still have about, you know, 5,000 pieces at least of VHS titles.
Many of them are duplicates of what we have on tape because they haven’t sold,
but we do have a lot of things that you can’t acquire anywhere else...
whether you can’t get them from Netflix
because they never came out on DVD,
or because the company that made the DVD went out of business before the Netflix era,
so they couldn’t possibly buy them.
There was a store called Mrs. Hudson, on Hudson street, and she specialized in British product.
But she closed down because she didn’t want to get involved in DVDs.
She felt she had spent all this money building up her VHS library.
She was worried if DVDs would be a viable format, and she just closed up at the beginning of the DVD era.
We opened here in November of ‘88.
I had a store in Queens for five years before that, with a partner, and we split up.
The neighborhood at the time was closer to a borderline neighborhood.
It was an interesting place and that’s why we liked it.
It had a mix of townhouses, projects,
a lot of artists, people that worked at home.
It’s one of the nation’s largest gay communities. We had two income families with no kids...
a big middle class housing project, Penn South, which is just across the street.
So we thought in a small area there were a lot of warm bodies.
- DJ, come on buddy, what are you up to?
Originally, I wasn’t thinking about film.
When I was at school I had a part time job at a music store, Sam Goody’s.
There was a chain here in New York.
That became a full time job after I got out of school.
But that led back to movies, because by the end of my stay there…
we were renting films in the 43rd street, 3rd avenue branch.
I was introduced to the family of young man who had a very early video shop in San Francisco,
and he had a chain of stores called “Captain Video”.
He had nine locations by 1983.
So I went out to San Francisco to meet him and learn a bit about the business, about how he rented films,
and it looked like a great way to go...
I don’t know if people remember how much a video was to buy.
Sometimes the list price was $100 for a movie.
I went to a used tape dealer down in Maryland weeks before we opened,
and they gave us a cart,
and it was great to buy the things we knew had been renting in the other store.
So when we opened we opened with about, I think around 2,000 titles, something like that.
We think we have about 40,000 titles at this point, maybe more.
You may have noticed that we have a cat on the sign,
and there is a cat neon in the window.
We’ve had an alley cat, so to speak, here at Alan’s Alley almost since we’ve opened.
One of our customers had a cat, she had taken in a stray.
She had found him with a broken leg.
She had other cats that were being unkind to it.
We put the cat in the office, locked in, so it didn’t have to run away from anybody.
Eventually the cat made a full recovery and stayed here for about 13 years.
That was Denora. We have a customer named Denora, which I found out later,
which is funny, she really loved the cat... spelled differently, but anyway...
Denora was a crazed shepherdess in a Gluck opera and I think that’s where the name came from.
People will come from other places in the city and the suburbs...
to pick something up if they need it, for a job or research.
The neighborhood is very important to us, I mean...
I don’t know how many stores carry four copies of Cabaret. So, you know...
What is that, Brion what is that thing we just picked up yesterday?
Like a Norwegian film about Bigfoot. - Trollhunter Trollhunter!
- Everybody loves it See! It just came in yesterday and it flew out the door!
The staff says something and it has a big impact.
I know, I’m old, I’m 62.
These people are much more in tune with some of the things that are going on now.
We’ve had a lot of really nice people over the years...
There’s Brett, who now is back in Kansas.
Other stores have gone down...
Alan refused to go down.
I keep asking him “go down Alan”. - I have no place to go Bill.
Why does America need so many romantic comedies?
I mean it’s a guy who meets a girl...
he wants to get her in bed, and she doesn’t want to go to bed...
And then ten minutes later she wants to go to bed...
Give me a *** break with this bad ***!
The other thing is that I think what Alan does is connect with the people. He takes the time to listen.
There are a lot of people in the community that benefit from the store because they are home-bound.
Alan will send somebody over to connect the DVD player...
(Betty's voice) I’m calling because I am so sure Alan didn’t talk to you...
about the different people that he touches every week.
I’ve learned a lot about Chelsea just by being in the store.
I didn’t know that there was a women’s prison a block away.
Once a week they send somebody over to pick a film.
There is a halfway house for people with chronic schizophrenia.
Those people really have struggles.
They are able to come to Alan’s store, Alan knows who they are.
He gives them the extra time and attention, the understanding that they need to be functioning in the community.
They take turns coming to Alan’s store to get their movies for the week.
It’s a way of being as high-functioning as possible and as integrated into the community as possible, to have that choice to pick the movie.
I don’t think that would be possible if it wasn’t at a place that they felt comfortable and safe.
No, we had a very nice red and gray counter in formica…
and that looked pretty good for a while.
Very little material comes in these days.
We have ancient stuff on there. It’s kind of like an archaeological dig.
You can see the years of video releases if you cut through it.
- Hello, how are you? - Fine thank you, how are you?
I’m just looking for the cat, there it is!
See? See what I’m talking about? People just coming in to see the cat, go right past me.
Because this is the royal cat here! This is a beautiful cat.
We come to see Alan but we really come to see the cat!
Well I don’t live in this neighborhood, I live on 34th street.
But I’ve been coming to Alan for years and years and years.
And like the Village Light Opera for instance, I used to be a member of...
I used to do a lot of Gilbert and Sullivan stuff.
A lot of that stuff people don’t have, but Alan has it, he has all of that, yes.
And we just love him.
I hope that doesn’t that he is closing down, does it?
Also, may I ask, what newspaper you’re with? I hope it’s the Times!
Somebody will call and they will give you a list of five movies.
They’re asking about out of print things. We just like to let people know...
these, as you probably know, are no longer being made.
We have things like “Looking For Mr. Goodbar”, which has never come out on DVD...
"The Count of Monte Cristo” from the mid-30’s with Robert Donat...
who was in Hitchcock’s “39 Steps”...
Behind the counter it’s generally in alphabetical order
so we can actually find something when somebody asks for it.
When customers ask what kind of order the store is in, I tell them its “hypothetical order”.
So out there its the Alan’s Alley scheme.
In classics it’s usually by the actor or actress,
and sometimes director.
John Ford, Otto Preminger...
Bette Davis is huge in this neighborhood, Joan Crawford is huge.
There are all of these great stars in this one place so you are going to lead into other things.
Strictly alphabetical, it’s not logical for us.
We’d much rather have an interesting category.
“Babes With Guns”
All the people that worked on “Saturday Night Live” are going to have their own sections within that section.
We have a big British section, a large television section,
and a separate British television section...
We do have a section of midnight movies, cult classics.
“Elsa She Wolf of The S.S.”, a classic...
of sorts.
We have a Frank Whaley section.
Now nobody has a Frank Whaley section.
But Frank lives around the thing and he was a little upset...
that he and Ethan Hawke came in one day and Ethan had a section, and Frank didn’t...
he was crestfallen.
Frank’s got like a little shrine over there.
A number of years ago, probably about fifteen years ago, one of our best customers came in with a friend of hers.
The customer worked for an ad agency,
and she said “I’m working on this project and I need a few images of bathrooms.”
When an advertising agency wants to present a concept to their client,
they come to us to create something called a “rip-o-matic.”
A rip-o-matic is something that is assembled from existing footage, usually movies,
put together to show the basic idea or the feel or what a commercial or campaign will be for the client.
One thing that came to me immediately...
was the candlelit bathtub in “McCabe and Mrs. Miller”.
We call up Alan, we’ll give him a bunch of scenarios or scenes that we need.
Right away he’ll have a whole list of movies that will have great moments that we can use.
She took about forty films.
And that’s when it dawned on me that there is a whole new world out there.
I would say more than half of our business this point is corporate.
Before we opened this store, I knew that there would be other formats.
People we already talking about a card system where the information would be on a card.
They weren’t talking about streaming necessarily at that point,
but maybe five years into opening there was that discussion.
There were a couple articles in the Wall St. Journal this past year,
mentioning us, like we’re the dinosaur, the last man standing on the verge of the tar-pit.
Blockbuster had a hundred a copies of the newest release, laid out strictly alphabetically.
This made no sense in how to choose a film.
Netflix is a little more scientific obviously,
but some of the choices become absurd...
because somebody put in a wrong keyword or something like that.
But, I’m not really criticizing, because I think they do a decent job of what they do.
If you are not in this neighborhood, it’s not a bad thing.
- Was it good depressing or just depressing depressing?
- It wasn’t uplifting. - Did you need to be uplifted at the moment?
- What was the thing you just said before? - "Gainsbourg"
- It’s about Serge Gainsbourg? - It’s kind of a semi-doc.
- “Witness For The Prosecution”. - What is that one? - It’s a thriller.
It’s Charles Laughton, he plays an attorney, Tyrone Power comes into his office at the beginning of the movie...
and is about to be indicted for a ***.
- Did you like “Unbreakable”? The last scene is just complete exposition.
- Does that have good dialog in it? - Oh yeah. So if you like that you might like this.
This played at IFC for a while.
- More violent the better.
- This is a model of a village in Switzerland, it cuts to live action.
- Gilliat was the partner of this guy Frank Launder.
And what they did was, they wrote the Hitchcock film “The Lady Vanishes”...
and some other fun films like “Night Train to Munich"...
And in most of their films, trains are involved. Not in this one, because they didn’t write it together.
- A documentary about a woman who bought a Jackson Pollack painting for five dollars. - Oh I heard about that.
- Is it typical *** Allen? - Well you know what it is, its Owen Wilson as being *** Allen.
- Seven Samurais is a humanist manifesto!
- He wrote “Network"... - I love that film. - “Marty”...
- And “The Hospital” which is one of my favorites.
- What is that about? - “The Hospital” is about New York crumbling in the ‘70s.
- Did you see “Shaun Of The Dead”? - No. - Oh actually you should see “Shaun Of The Dead”, it’s really funny.
There’s usually two guys who are on the train who are cricket nuts, and they show up in all of their films.
$14.75 is your grand total...
- It’s grand for me I don’t know how other people feel about it. - It’s pretty grand for me too.
I never really thought about anything else in film.
People ask me all the time, just because we have the store, everybody thinks I should be, you know, ‘oh have you written a book about the movies?’...
I’d just rather interact with the people and talk about movies.
It’s not about me it’s about the films.
Chelsea has become more upscale, more...
it’s become younger, definitely younger.
People die. People move.
It’s more a family neighborhood than it ever was.
There are more hetero couples and gay couples with kids.
So there are kids and dogs.
There always used to be dogs, there never used to be kids.
So the second cat named Smudge was a grey cat, very heavy, elderly.
Very different than our original cat Denora, who was a little feisty sometimes... .
But lots of fun for us. You gotta watch out for her.
People would lay on top of Smudge, kids would pet Smudge, everything was good.
Well, I have no cat in the store for a couple of months, Smudge had passed away.
I said “bring the cat to the store, we’ll see if everything works out.”
DJ, named by our friends family, came to the store, and adapted immediately.
He’s been here about four years. Loves it here, seems to.
That’s the story, this is the third cat.
I’ve got a lot of favorites...
but I would say that my go to film is “I Know Where I’m Going”
It’s from the ‘40s by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, The Archers.
They’re the people that produced and directed “The Red Shoes” and “Black Narcissus".
So they are probably my favorite producing directing team.
Movies are such an American art form,
and it’s a shame there isn’t more film education just as a basic thing.
People would find it very enjoyable. Where this library goes?
I don’t know what’s going to be with this collection. It would be great to keep it intact...
it would be great to have it somewhere, whether it’s in a library or...yeah.
The store is open 365 days a year.
We’re here seven days a week from ten in the morning to ten at night,
and on weekends, Fridays and Saturdays, we're here until eleven.
That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.