There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in “Lethal Weapon 3,” a tracking shot, that isn’t meant to draw any kind of attention to itself. But it did draw the eye of director Alex Ross Perry and appears as part of his essay film, “Videoheaven” because in the background of the shot, there are not one, but two video stores.
Perry and editor Clyde Folley have watched movies and television shows for a decade now, hunting out depictions of video stores in cinema. “Videoheaven” isn’t just charting their rise and fall across the American commercial landscape, but the ways in which the cultural reception of video stores in films and TV shows allowed cinema to speak to and about itself, and to position us as viewers and consumers in a moment in history.
The resulting documentary – narrated by Maya Hawke from a script Perry wrote with deep fondness whether she’s talking about her father’s work in “Hamlet,” the significance of Troma posters, her own throwback video store scenes in “Stranger Things,” the social peril of picking out tables as demonstrated in multiple episodes of “Seinfeld,” or the soft power of the video store clerk — is a beautiful balance of films and shows that tackle the video store as a setting head-on and those that simply reflect what it was like to live in a now-vanished world where they existed. Creating it required, simply, the time to watch a lot of movies.
“I’m confident no one has ever noticed that [shot from ‘Lethal Weapon III’] except for me,” the writer/director behind “Pavements” and “Her Smell” told IndieWire. “Between 2014 and November of last year when we were conceivably finishing ‘Videoheaven,’ either I watched this movie, Clyde watched this movie and texted me, a friend of ours watched it and said, ‘I got one for you,’ I saw a clip of it on Instagram… everything came piecemeal, which is the benefit of doing something for so long.”
“Videoheaven” has about 200 sources from films, TV shows, commercials, news reports, and related media. But acquiring that material is not the same time as creating a narrative and every single clip was up to Perry’s and Folley’s discretion about where, how, and why it should be used in visually demonstrating the message of the documentary. Perry knew from early on that he wanted to start with the clip of the “To Be Or Not To Be” soliloquy in Michael Almereyda’s 2000 version of “Hamlet,” which takes place as Hamlet (Ethan Hawke) experiences choice paralysis in the aisles of a Blockbuster. But beyond that, there was no roadmap.
“We don’t know what the next thing you see is. It could be literally one of 200 things. And the challenge for us is looking at every single clip and saying, ‘What visual goes hand in hand with what our narration is saying right here.’ But also, what do you show people at minute three that they know there’s 160 more minutes? Because it could be anything, but it has to be something that is the exact right clip,” Perry said.
The process of building and swapping out clips happened slowly, in Folley’s and Perry’s spare time as they worked on other projects, but Folley told IndieWire that ended up being a benefit to their work. “Something that’s really unique about this project is that, ostensibly, we didn’t have deadlines for a very long time. We didn’t have producers breathing down our necks. We didn’t have money people to answer to. It’s just one of those things where it took as long as it took and then it just started feeling, at some point, more like a movie,” Folley told IndieWire.
The project started as a hard-drive of around 60 notable examples of video stores in film, given to the “Videoheaven” team by film scholar Daniel Herbert, and a script idea. Folley spent a couple of years, in moments of free time, putting together rough assemblies and guessing at what clips might work well against his scratch VO track of Perry’s script. Two or three years into the process, the team started to watch the latest four hour assemblies in Folley’s apartment and use weekly edit sessions to refine it. “We would just huddle around my desk and work on this. It really felt a lot like chiseling away at this larger stone before it becomes the statue,” Folley said.
Films like “Be Kind, Rewind,” and “Watching The Detectives,” which are set in video stories, required lots of time and effort to find the essential clips, both video-only and audio-included, that would fit inside of “Videoheaven.” But sometimes the process of chiseling away at the statue could be incredibly streamlined. “Literally mid-stride between last week’s session and next week’s session, I see online [that] they went to a video store in last night’s episode of ‘Yellowjackets,’ here are the tapes they talked about. I send it to Clyde and to Drew, our downloader… and that episode was in our timeline probably within 10 days of it airing,” Perry said.
Perry and Folley’s refining work wasn’t just at the level of clip selection, of course. The team needed to make sure that the film said absolutely what it needed to say in the right tonal mix between academic interest and pop history. “‘Los Angeles Plays Itself’ has like one and a half feet in the academic and ‘Room 237’ has two feet in the pop. And I wanted to straddle the difference,” Perry said.
Once “Videoheaven” went from having temp narration to Hawke’s voiceover, it started to feel even more like the bones were in place. A festival acceptance at Rotterdam gave it a helpful deadline to meet. It’s a mark of the finished film’s success that Folley observed that he keeps referencing points the film itself is making when talking about the making of it. “The movie says so much,” Folley said. “I feel like there’s not a lot that’s just left on the table.”
Even so, Perry told IndieWire there’s an alternate world where they’re still working on “Videoheaven,” because the act of making it was such a pleasure. “I just can’t overstate the joy of working on something with no pressure, no external necessity, no money on the line, no deadlines, no anxious producers, and no reason to finish it other than because we think it’s the best version it could be, and that purity is entirely — I mean, you can’t do that at a profession level. That’s called a passion project. That’s called being an artist.”
“Videoheaven” is now playing at the IFC Center in New York City.
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