World of Video

Netflix recently held a competition to create the best “collaborative filtering algorithm” to predict how much a customer would like a movie based on how much they liked other movies. There was a winner and now Netflix is 10 percent better at predicting how much you'll like a movie. There’s a low ceiling for improvement, though. One contestant bemoaned the “inherent variation”" makes perfection impossible; people fudge numbers.

Sean Gallagher brings that competition to mind. Gallagher is a manager at World of Video, where he’ll recommend a movie if you tell him what you’ve seen and what you thought of it. He’s kind of like a collaborative filtering algorithm, but he’s also alive.

“It’s like what I do with my mom,” says Gallagher. “I try to figure out what people’s tastes are, and then I try to recommend something that I know is within that taste or maybe a liiiittle bit outside the area that lets them stretch a little bit.”

“Sean knows everything,” said Linda Samuels, one of the store’s co-owners, her voice hushed and reverent. And then there’s Pete Coffey and Justin Paris and the rest of the crew—all distinctly human and dizzyingly knowledgeable about movies.

Samuels and Debra Grappone and their partners opened World of Video in 1982 after they got tired of renting videos from a shop on MacDougal Street. That shop had a chaotic system of putting empty VHS boxes out on the shelves for customers to browse but keeping the actual tapes behind the counter. “You’d have to wave the boxes to ask if something was in,” says Grappone. It was loud and hectic and it was a stupid system, and the store charged a lot of late fees. Samuels summarizes their conversation: “This is ridiculous. Why don’t we open up our own video store?”

The small store they opened on West 10th off Seventh Avenue later moved to a bigger space above the Village Vanguard, and then to its current location in what used to be a Pottery Barn on Greenwich Avenue between Perry and Charles. World of Video gave up half of that space six years ago, partly because of market pressure but also because the switch from VHS to DVDs halved the space needed for stock.

Throughout the 80s and 90s, the store was packed and happening, especially in bad weather. John Gaffney, who worked at World of Video until recently and who now teaches a course on “The Power of Film” at Lehman College, remembers one Sunday in “monsoon weather” when the store had on Sunset Boulevard: “and when [Gloria Swanson] makes her glorious descent down the staircase and she stops everything and she says how great it is to be back in movies and then says, ‘All right, I’m ready for my close-up’ and walks into the camera and the camera absorbs her and dissolves into a white fade out, the whole store applauded—a spontaneous celebration,” Gaffney recalls. “That was the quintessence of what it was like to work at the place.”

World of Video rents. They invite familiarity; their customers become regulars. People, alarmingly, get to feel at home in the store. And they rent not waffle irons or new, plastic-smelling cars, but movies! Things that rile and excite and occasionally get banned! And they rent them to “Village people”! This stuff is bad for business; this stuff makes a community.

When Hurricane Irene headed toward New York last August, the city shut down. Anticipatory terror stopped subway service and pasted innumerable tape crosses on windows and bought up all of the batteries at the grocery stores. Modern life broken down, which is to say that World of Video was flooded with crowds it hadn’t had since the 90s. That was partly because it’s nice to watch movies on rainy days, but also because it makes sense to stock up before a cataclysm – to physically procure entertainment in the same way people stocked up on batteries and astonishing quantities of pickles. Netflix and Cable TV were suddenly abstract entities dependent on unfathomable infrastructures, things unseen and untouched. Hunkering down calls for a hunk of something – for a movie in a box in a hand.

World of Video always has a movie on. It has a bench and a chaise longue and two stools and a chair and a whole tidy area in which to make oneself comfortable. This reporter felt comfortable lingering long after anyone was interested in talking to him. The bathroom is there for whomever needs it. The wall behind the register is a metastasizing collection of DVD boxes – it looks like the great, messy minds of the people who work in front of it. Their knowledge of film is almost exasperatingly sprawling: Did you know that Humphrey Bogart used to play “Tennis anyone?” characters, effeminate sidekicks, before making it big playing hard-boiled types? Did you know that an earlier version of “Inglorious Bastards” was made by a kind of Italian Ed Wood?

During one recent visit, the store was redolent of garlicky chicken. Justin Paris, of late, is often strumming a ukulele. World of Video is pricelessly leisurely. “It’s a fun place,” says Samuels. “No stress, because it’s that kind of a business. You don’t have any deadlines. It’s just a video store, so relax.”