Blockbuster nights: The glory days of Long Island's home video stores

 It’s a Friday night in March 1987 at your local video store. After a wait of many months, the previous year's big movie,“Top Gun,” has finally come out on VHS and the place is packed. But you’re in luck — there’s one copy left behind the display box, and you snag it just before your neighbor does.

That scene and others like it played out all over Long Island during the 1980s — indeed, all the way up through the 2000s — when the local video store stood at the center of your entertainment universe.

There’s no telling how many of Long Island’s video stores — dozens? hundreds? — have since disappeared, pushed out by the juggernaut of Blockbuster Video, which itself succumbed to a wave of streaming services like Netflix and Prime Video. But nostalgia for the days of membership cards and clunky tapes is beginning to resurface. Kevin Smith recently released “Clerks III,” a sequel to his 1994 comedy, “Clerks,” about slackers working in a video store, and a new sitcom, “Blockbuster,” is set in the video chain’s last remaining outpost. (Ironically, the show is on Netflix). And believe it or not, there really is a last Blockbuster, still going strong in Bend, Oregon.

“It was just a feeling that you can’t explain,” Cory Poccia of Melville, a onetime Blockbuster clerk who now teaches film production, said of the rental experience. “It’s something that you don’t get from just hitting Netflix and seeing the movie you want to see. It’s not the same.”

Here’s our be-kind-rewind back to the golden age of Long Island’s video stores.

BEFORE BLOCKBUSTER: THE BOOM

The very concept of the video rental might never have existed if Hollywood’s major studios had their way. In 1976, Disney and Universal sued Sony over its new videocassette recorders (then priced at roughly $3,000) and its boxy Betamax tapes, arguing in essence that recording television shows and duplicating movies amounted to copyright infringement. The case made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1984 ruled 5-4 in favor of Sony.

By then, though, the horse was already out of the barn. The VCR had become more affordable — maybe $300 on average — and was becoming almost as common as the television set. Betamax tapes were on their way out, supplanted by the VHS format, and rental stores were popping up all over America. By one estimate in 1985, there were roughly 1,000 on Long Island (including Brooklyn and Queens). Consumers clearly loved the convenience of browsing for a movie, paying a couple of dollars per night to watch it, then dropping it back off a day or two later.

Long Islanders could rent videos just about anywhere, from the Power Test gas station on Route 111 in Central Islip to the Mid-Island movie theater on Hempstead Turnpike in Bethpage. At one point there were four video rental shops on a 1.4-mile stretch of Willis Avenue running from Roslyn to Williston Park. And by 1986, a video store owner named Richard Colossi, of Colossi’s Video Ventures in Franklin Square, was complaining that he had 11 competitors within a 2-mile radius.

“It’s too crowded now,” Colossi told Newsday at the time. “There’s definitely going to be a shakeout soon.”

He was right. A little place called Blockbuster, which opened in Dallas in 1985, quickly grew into the country’s dominant video chain, buying up competitors — including its close rival Hollywood Video — and forcing many a mom-and-pop shop to close. At its peak in 2004, Blockbuster had more than 9,000 locations and more than 80,000 employees.

LI POL'S BLOCKBUSTER MEMORIES

“I’m telling you, everybody was there,” Bruce Nyman, a former Long Beach supervisor, said of a typical Friday night at his local Blockbuster during the 1990s. “I used to love to go. It was basically a campaign stop.”

The routine, Nyman said, was to show up on Friday nights, as Blockbuster allowed customers to keep videos all the way through Sunday. Competition for new titles could be fierce: “You hoarded the videos until you got to the cashier,” Nyman said, “and then people would actually wait by the cashier to see if you’d discard one or two that you didn’t want.” Some desperate types even waited by the drop-off box, he recalled, in the hopes that a hot movie would be returned at just that moment.

“It was a phenomenon that millennials can’t understand,” Nyman, 71, said. Some tapes were so coveted that customers kept them — something to which Nyman now pleads guilty. “I lied to Blockbuster,” he said. “I got ‘The Little Mermaid,’ and then said I lost it.” (For the record, Nyman said he paid the replacement fee of roughly $40.)

Gerry Ferretti, a Lindenhurst filmmaker and musician, found more than just a movie at his favorite video store, Copiague’s Video Plus. One March afternoon in 1990, Ferretti recalled, he stopped by the store to drop off an overdue Billy Joel concert film. “There was a woman at the counter, and I looked over at her and smiled,” Ferretti said. The two wound up stopped at the same traffic light down the street, so Ferretti gave her his number. A year later, they were married. And while the marriage didn’t last, it did produce two daughters, both now grown.

“My two children,” Ferretti said, “are the result of an overdue video.”

BLOCKBUSTER CLERK TELLS ALL

Though never the most lucrative career, working as a video clerk did have a certain cultural cachet in the 1990s. Before Quentin Tarantino became the decade’s hottest director, he beefed up on movie history while clerking at Video Archives in Los Angeles County. Kevin Smith’s days behind the counter of RST Video in New Jersey helped inspire his breakout hit “Clerks,” which was shot partially in the store.

Poccia, the former Blockbuster clerk in East Meadow, said the place served as his first film school. “I’d go to Blockbuster to figure out what I wanted to study that night,” he said, adding that he gravitated toward action films like Michael Mann’s “Heat” and John Woo’s “Face/Off.” Working there while attending Adelphi University — he majored in communications and moving image arts — had the added perk of allowing him to wipe out any existing late fees, he said.

After college, Poccia said, he started a film-production company, worked for the producer Scott Rudin and for World Wrestling Entertainment, then began teaching film production at Adelphi, where he still works today. Last year, Poccia opened Arcadia Retro Eats, a combination restaurant and vintage video arcade, in Levittown. As a tribute to his roots, he tossed a Blockbuster keepsake — a vintage World Championship Wrestling videotape — into the claw machine as a prize. “Nobody’s won it yet,” he said.

For Lori King, working at Mr. Video in Bayport — her uncle co-owned the business — was just a fun way to make a little cash as a teenager in the early ‘90s. “It was definitely one of the better high school jobs you could have,” said King, now a librarian at the Huntington Public Library.

Her regular Sunday morning shift wasn’t too strenuous: She manned the cash register, ensured that customers rewound their returned videos and refiled them. Friends might stop by, her father sometimes brought her lunch and she got to know many customers by name.

“But if you worked a weekend shift it could get very busy,” King said. “There would be a line of people. It was pretty wild when you think about it. I don’t know too many places now where I would wait in a line like that.”

THE LAST BLOCKBUSTER

Believe it or not, you can still rent videos in the New York metro area. Kim’s Video and Music, a small but legendary chain based in Manhattan’s East Village, closed its last location in 2014 but recently found a new life in the Alamo Drafthouse theater in the Financial District. Redbox, the company that rents DVDs through self-serve kiosks, still has a few outposts on Long Island; there’s one at a 7-Eleven in Deer Park and another at a CVS Pharmacy in West Babylon, according to the company’s website.

For the full-on 1990s video experience, however, you’ll have to travel to Bend, Oregon, home of the world’s last and only Blockbuster.

Originally known as Pacific Video, the store became a Blockbuster franchise location in 2000, according to Sandi Harding, who has managed the location since the 1990s. Since it wasn’t owned by the corporation itself, the store survived the wave of Blockbuster closures during the 2010s. After Blockbuster was purchased by Dish Networks, the store continued licensing the name and kept the still-famous blue-and-yellow logo. By March 2019, the Bend Blockbuster was the last one standing.

“I was a customer when it was Pacific Video. My husband and I came in here on one of our first dates,” Harding, 50, said. “This store was always destined to be in our lives.”

Harding said the business survives partly on sales of merchandise to passing tourists. Items include T-shirts, trucker hats, hoodies, coffee mugs, refrigerator magnets, sunglasses, even socks. (Yes, you can buy them online.) A 2020 documentary, “The Last Blockbuster,” gave the store added national exposure. And while Harding said she doesn't know how many members the store currently has, she said the rental business continues to thrive.

As for the COVID-19 pandemic that shuttered many a local business, Harding said, it may have only increased the public’s appetite for all things nostalgic.

“It’s our generation that used to go to Blockbuster and the music store and hang out with our friends, before we had cellphones. And I think we all remembered how much we appreciated that,” Harding said. She added: “I think people are just yearning for a time in their lives when things were a little more simple.”

By Rafer Guzmán

rafer.guzman@newsday.com@raferguzman