Venerable Glebe Video to close after 40 years, one rental shop remains
After 40-some-odd years, the venerable movie rental spot Glebe Video International will soon shutter for good, says Peter Senecal, owner of the Bank Street store for just over a decade.
Declining an interview, Senecal said only that his clientele had
from
in recent years: “People would prefer to stream.”
Although he contemplated selling the store’s vast inventory of film titles as a single collection — the oft-cited number of movies is 18,000 — Senecal now plans to keep a significant portion of it for his own use while selling the remainder piecemeal. Depending on its condition, an archive of that size and quality could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Long housed above the current Glebe Central Pub at 779 Bank St., Glebe Video relocated to the basement of the Fourth Avenue Baptist Church, a block and a half south, amid the pandemic. At one point, a group of neighbourhood supporters launched a GoFundMe campaign to help keep it afloat.
Morgan Sugars-Keen, who grew up frequenting the store, worked a summer packing and moving its thousands of movies to its new quarters (a gargantuan task some might compare to the carrying of the steamship over a mountain in Werner Herzog’s 1982 classic
Fitzcarraldo
).
“Once in a while I’d come across a movie we’d rented or that I remembered,” says Sugars-Keen, now 20 and a student at the University of Ottawa. “
Holiday Inn
,
White Christmas
, I randomly came across them as I was putting them away — and I just got that hit of nostalgia.”
The earliest mention of Glebe Video in the pages of the
Ottawa Citizen
dates to 1985, when it is listed in an advertisement as among the 12 Ottawa video stores at which
Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning
would be available; the release fell, cannily enough, on Friday, Sept. 13.
But Glebe Video, long owned by Robert Lecuyer, was better known for its classic, foreign, often highbrow film selection, a place enthusiasts could rely on for stocking hard-to-find titles.
The business even rented VCRs along with VHS cassettes for films unavailable in newer formats.
Its closure, which Senecal indicated would come before the end of the year, leaves one single remaining rental shop in Ottawa, Movies ‘n Stuff, located in an Alta Vista strip mall.
Owner Peter Thompson, whose parents began the business in 1984, and who purchased it from them in 2017, acknowledged the difficulties of running a rental business in the age of streaming.
“I get it, it’s hard,” said Thompson, who initially had to put off an interview because he was dealing with a customer. “At the same time, if you give people the selection they either don’t know they’re missing or have become accustomed to, you can carve out a pretty good niche.”
Presided over by a child-height and yet still menacing Darth Vader perched behind the cash, and with its walls covered in movie posters, the store on Kilborn Avenue hasn’t changed much since Thompson’s parents first opened the location — once one of a chain of five — in the late 1980s, he says. He says he must be “insanely committed” to curating the store’s selection and keeping customers engaged, and that his recommendations set him apart from the algorithmic options available at home.
Thompson points out that streaming has become an expensive ordeal, with film and television viewers often finding themselves subscribed to multiple services and yet unable to find anything worthwhile to watch. “You have to pay here, do an introductory thing there, and people just get fed up with it,” he said. “Trying to find something good — and I’ve heard this a lot — takes half your life — and man, if you’re like me, you don’t have the time for that.”
Movie ‘n Stuff is the only rental shop left after their numbers peaked in the late 1990s, with Blockbuster Video and Rogers Video two of the dominant mainstream players. But Glebe Video was just one of many boutique stores in Ottawa specializing in arthouse, cult and foreign films.
In 1991, Mondo Video, housed in what was once the Towne Cinema on Beechwood Avenue, said its most popular title was Pedro Almodóvar’s
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
. In 1996, Elgin Street Video Station put rainbow stickers on movies like
A Man of No Importance
(starring Albert Finney) with LGBTQ+ themes, “helping to fill a need for gay and lesbian audiences who rarely see their lives reflected on the screen,” a reporter for the
Citizen
wrote at the time. Later, Invisible Cinema, for much of its existence at Bank and Lisgar Street, ordered in an array of hard-to-find alternative films that would otherwise have been unavailable here.
Elgin Street Video (as it later became known) shut just over a decade ago, and staffer Michael Varty, already then a veteran bookseller, moved directly next door to another independent physical media retailer — Perfect Books — where he is now manager. At the dawn of online retail in the 1990s, bookstores felt like an endangered species, but things have since turned around. “We’ve enjoyed a lot of growth, so that’s been a very positive thing,” says Varty, who attributes the success of indies like Perfect Books to “the need for people to come in and see stuff — that tactile experience — which I don’t think that’s ever going to go away.” Varty wonders if film ownership has the same sort of pull.
Invisible Cinema closed in 2014 — for “biographical” reasons, says Nick Shaw, its owner for seven years: “People would assume it was a financial disaster or something and that wasn’t totally the case.” Shaw, still a close watcher of the industry, says the dwindling number of video shops stands at odds with the thriving business of home video distribution. Specialty labels such as Vinegar Syndrome and Arrow Films are now putting out restored back-catalogue titles on high-end Blu-ray, an output of material that appears to be only growing. Shaw cites Vinegar Syndrome’s recent limited-edition release of Michael Mann’s creepy 1983
The Keep
, which sold out its 12,000 run in a weekend, as proof physical media continues to be a draw.
The video rental businesses that continue to succeed now often do so only with the backing of retail operations that capitalize on that growing market for niche genre films and nostalgia.
“We’re doing very well,” says Brendan Whelton, manager of Bay St. Video in Toronto, still in business after 30 years. “We’ve always had rental and sales — rentals kept us going when sales were down, sales kept us going when rentals were down.” The prestigious Criterion Collection’s strikingly packaged
Godzilla: The Showa-Era Films, 1954-1975
, or
The Wes Anderson Archive: Ten Films, Twenty-Five Years
, a clothbound box set that looks much like a set of encyclopedia, have retailed at the store for hundreds of dollars.
Too bad that Senecal’s shop in the church basement only boasted film masterpieces.
“A lot of the movies we rented there were older classics,” remembers Sugars-Keen, the young woman who helped Senecal with his move several years ago. “The classic movies that everybody needs to watch in your life at least once — you know,
Citizen Kane
,
Schindler’s List
. There are so many movies that you can’t get online or you haven’t even heard of before. And they were all there, and now — it’s a big loss.”
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