Seattle’s Scarecrow Video fights for its future, and the future of film

Scarecrow Video, which has operated as a member-supported nonprofit since 2014, sent out an SOS – “ Save Our Scarecrow ” in June. They said efforts to keep the renowned Seattle video store alive had stalled, and outlined their goal to raise $1.8 million by the end of the year.

The SOS said this amount will allow Scarecrow Video to keep the doors open, provide staff a living wage, and hire more experienced leadership to stabilize their financial situation.

The store has faced familiar dual issues in recent years: rising costs and sinking revenues, particularly in the wake of COVID. The uncertain future threatens not only the staff and storefront but also public access to Scarecrow’s collection of over 148,000 unique titles.

“It’s not about just digging us out of a hole,” said Kate Barr, Scarecrow Video’s current executive director. “What we’re talking about is building a future for Scarecrow.”

The streaming era: Here today, gone whenever

In an era when seemingly every major entertainment company has its own streaming shingle, and following a worldwide pandemic that essentially reduced the populace to involuntary homebodies for over a year, how does an entity like Scarecrow compete?

Barr had quite a few things to say about a video store’s de facto competition in the 2020s.

“The one thing that Netflix has done very well is sell the idea – not the reality – the idea that everything is available online,” she said. “We just think everything is there, and it’s not .”

This idea may have started with Netflix, the godfather of streaming, but it has been kept afloat by Amazon Prime Video, YouTube and a slew of other streaming platforms, each offering a seemingly unlimited number of movies and TV shows. Barr put it bluntly: “That’s a myth that needs to get busted, on a cultural level.”

Barr explained that, though you may think you “own” media on certain platforms, the concept of ownership is shifting in the era of streaming and cloud-based services.

“Think of the physical media equivalent to that, that would be like if you bought a Blu-ray of something, and someone came to your door and said, ‘I’m going to take that back now.’”

Kathy Fennessy, president of the Seattle Film Critics Society, echoed this contrast between public perception and digital reality.

“[Scarecrow’s] collection is invaluable, and serves as a reminder that, no matter what the streaming giants insist, a large number of films aren't available to stream, and never will be for a variety of reasons, including music rights, studio bankruptcies, and a host of others,” she said.

Barr said that when consumers pay for streaming services, instead of inexhaustible libraries of endless content, what they are getting is much more banal: “What we’re paying for is convenience.”

In a culture where consumers assume that everything online will be accessible forever, it’s important to realize how often this simply isn’t the case. Digital media is an inherently unstable form of content delivery, subject to whims far outside creators’ control.

Last month, MTV’s parent company Paramount deleted decades worth of written and video content, eliciting strong reactions from the music and entertainment communities. The same fate befell the sites of CMT and VH1, another source of solid documentary filmmaking (as well as plenty of aughts-era trash...or treasure, depending on who you ask).

In an Instagram post, Gini Sikes, who previously worked on MTV documentaries, summed it up as: “Beyond depressing… Who willingly wipes out decades of cultural history?”

This places physical media and the institutions that venerate it, and their collections, in a unique position. Scarecrow Video, along with Portland's Movie Madness , has taken up the mantle of cultural institution, but it all started as a video rental business .

From the 'golden age' of video to now

Established in 1988, Scarecrow rose to prominence in what may be thought of as “the golden age” of home video. Founded by George and Rebecca Latsios, Scarecrow grew rapidly from a collection of fewer than a thousand titles to 18,000 in 1993, leading to the first of several location changes. Trying to stay on the bleeding edge and innovating, Scarecrow added an in-store cinema and began stocking Laserdiscs, before adapting to the DVD and Blu-ray eras as home video grew more sophisticated and technologically advanced.

After a change in ownership and the move to its current Roosevelt Ave space in Seattle's University District, Scarecrow continued to expand its reach and community.
They published a book of film criticism written by staffers and created a distribution label, Subversive Cinema, which would go on to distribute 40 titles over its lifespan.

After Netflix gave birth to the modern streaming era in the early 2010’s, Scarecrow’s management and leadership team saw their revenue plummet precipitously. Long-standing rental chains like Blockbuster and Hollywood filed for bankruptcy and closed their doors for good. The decision was made to transfer to a nonprofit model, which was a momentous decision that the greater Scarecrow community stepped up and supported in those early days.

Barr recalled the beginning of this era with a combination of incredulity at their naivete and pride that they managed to make it work at all.

“We taught ourselves a lot about fundraising and what it takes to be a nonprofit," she said. "Then you get thrown into it and you just do what you can do, and that gets you through, but it’s no longer about just getting through. Now it’s about building the infrastructure that we need to have a viable future.”

After seeing a precipitous drop off in rentals and revenue during the height of the pandemic Barr knew that something needed to change.

They revamped their website and updated their aging backend infrastructure. But now, as Barr said, “we need to bring in the people who can make use of these tools.”

“I’m the one putting my hand up and saying, ‘I’m at the end of the road of what my knowledge base is,’” Barr said.

Thrust into the executive role in the nascent days of Scarecrow’s nonprofit era, the scrappy employees of the beloved video rental shop improvised and adapted as best they could. And for longer than any of them expected, it worked.

(Im)possible futures

Scarecrow Video is the latest in a long line of Seattle arts and culture institutions making the case for help, trying to financially find their way in a changed city.

A growing list of organizations have launched capital-raising initiatives in recent years. Whether its to secure permanent homes like Jazz Night School ; Bellevue Arts Museum asking for help to keep its doors open ; or music venues like Café Racer and Conor Byrne reimagining their models, cultural hubs across the city are facing challenges as costs rise and revenues stay stubbornly below previous levels. (Conor Byrne is reopening as a co-op in August, while Café Racer will focus on its community programs.)

Forced to reimagine Scarecrow’s place in this new landscape, Barr focused on one guiding question: “What is our responsibility to this art form in the future?”

For her, it is the preservation of what has become one of the largest publicly available video collections, which continues to grow by 3,000-4,000 titles each year, and the community it helped cultivate.

Beth Barrett, artistic director of the Seattle International Film Festival, believes Scarecrow is “a gem” and is almost single-handedly keeping genre film alive for home video enthusiasts. She called it “a home for stuff that you truly can’t find anywhere else.”

Fennessy, who also serves on the board of the Northwest Film Forum, pointed out that Scarecrow Video has even stepped in to fill a gap left by Netflix when the company ended their DVD-by-mail service last year.

"Scarecrow continues to make an impressive variety of films available to cinephiles both local and throughout the country," she said. "Our understanding and appreciation of cinema history greatly benefits from Scarecrow's continued existence."

Barr has a particular fondness for a niche feature of Scarecrow that seems impossible in the current algorithmically oriented content consumption model: the “things that have never rented before” section, which she hopes to resurrect someday. She spoke about with the enthusiasm of someone who loves not only films but the act of discovering them.

“It’s not about this moment. It’s about 10 years, 50 years, a 100 years from now. We can’t meaningfully assess the cultural value of this item in this moment, because we don’t know what it’s going to mean for future generations,” Barr said.

The meaning of a collection as vast as Scarecrow’s to future generations is impossible to calculate, but its loss would be a tremendous blow to film culture, not just to Seattle, but to the world.