By james art 
Four Star Video Rental maintains a long tradition of human-driven recommendations.
This is the first column of our newsletter, Microtones. It goes live on the site on Friday, but you can get it in your inbox on Thursday by signing up for our email newsletter.
It’s a world of streaming, short form content, and we just live in it. Wait… are we actually living in it or just enduring and anxiously going through its besieging glut? There was a time in the 2010s when the act of going out to pick something new or new to you to watch felt like a real anachronism. But even in my entrenched pessimism, I don’t feel quite that way anymore as we approach the middle of the next decade.
The Criterion Collection’s semi-weekly Criterion Closet segments on YouTube, which started humbly more than 14 years ago (I even mentioned one in a recent review), have become so popular that the distribution company recently took a mobile truck version of the cramped physical media-crammed closet on the road to the 62nd New York Film Festival. Movie buffs and collectors have apparently waited in line for up to five hours just for a chance to pose for photos with 4K Blu-rays and DVDs –purchases which they could do online with minimal effort.
To me, this dedicated act by more than a select few suggests that we, as a culture, have prematurely forced the closure of many video rental stores where try-before-you-buy was the norm. A business model as a radical form of consumer agency, if you will. More importantly, however, these spaces, like music venues, were hotspots for culture and media literacy, for the drafting of relationships between crews and actors, and for all sorts of obsessive minutiae. However, this is not a piece where I have to use the default past tense because Four Star Video Rental on West Gilman Street still exists. Non-algorithm referrals are still ongoing.
Staff and store hours have changed dramatically in the 39 years since Four Star has existed, but one thing has remained consistent throughout the co-owner’s (and Ton Madison contributor, full disclosure) Lewis Peterson’s 11-year tenure there is “Today’s Topic.” Each day the store is open (currently Friday to Wednesday between 12pm and 7pm), staff select a new theme and accompanying list of films from the store’s catalog to play on the TV behind the front counter. After directing them to the Blu-ray player, they write the titles on a whiteboard that hangs perpendicularly, facing the main door. It’s one of the first things customers see when they walk in (along with a list of titles due to hit store shelves next Tuesday).
Peterson spoke with me this month, mostly via email, about why he maintains this mix of employee traditions, trivia play and what he calls “a feature of the Four Star landscape.” He also details the methods that he and current Four Star staff—Alex T. Jacobs, S. Nelson-Lifson (also Ton Madison contributor) and Amber Strangstalien – use to select these topics, in addition to the monthly staff picks. “The main reason is to show off our wares, get people interested in something they might otherwise pass by, and entertain the staff,” Peterson wrote. He also shared with me a separate 188-page document devoted to movie themes that date back simple until January 2020
“Today’s Topic” can be as timely or timeless, political or fanciful, serious or silly, geek or layman-obvious, as Four Star staff can imagine. And there’s always an insightful and emotional cross-section of films in the Four Star catalog across eras of film history on this whiteboard.
The first topic in Peterson’s mammoth document is a sobering No War with Iran, while entries in the middle list (on pages 79 and 89) honor the wide-ranging work of then-recently-deceased actors Philip Baker Hall and Ann Hatch. The themes for September 2024 included not necessarily the 90s-oriented “Criminal Ripoffs, the cringe-worthy “Sex robots aren’t all they’re cracked up to be” emoticons, and the simply stoic “Bald Guys.” Of course, the list wouldn’t be complete without a charmingly encyclopedic local focus. Take a peek at UW Alumni Films, Made in Madison, Wisconsin Horror, Bill Rebein: A Wisconsin Author, and even the intriguing Midwest Longing team assembled over the past few years.
Peterson continues his e-mail explanation of the custom quite bluntly: “In terms of how to choose one, the most obvious is to just center it on some current holiday or [newsworthy] event (one of our most popular was ‘Nazis Getting Punched In The Face’ inspired by Richard Spencer getting punched in the face on camera [in 2017]).” During the end of this disgusting, further fascist normalizing election cycle, this initial response seems rightly prioritized. Although, less heatedly, Peterson vividly remembers the seminal moment years ago when he first picked something for the day’s theme as a Four Star employee. It was Platinum blonde (1931) for Pre-1940 Morality Tales, a more niche, opaque subject that threw him full circle and perhaps perfectly reinforced the purpose that subjects serve.
Also, over the years, Peterson has learned what he says “makes a good theme is the opportunity for everyone to get involved and choose. If two people are working together, they trade off who gets to choose the film.” In good faith, he concludes, “often the other person will agree to something that you would never have thought of or perhaps not heard of, which is the whole point of the exercise.” That’s not something that can be replicated by streaming or even browsing during half-price deals in brick-and-mortar stores. The physical space of the video store actively traces the connections between old and new films and facilitates dialogue not only between customers but even cinephiles behind the counter (and certainly the former usually become the latter).
Although patrons will always stick to a few arresting favorites, like the time Peterson drafted Dungeons and Dragonsin the style of a movie alignment chart (lawful good, neutral good, chaotic evil, etc.), he admits that his personal favorites are “something that has more freedom to make connections between really different movies.” Take, for example, Surrogate Mothers, which sets Robert Schnitzer’s psychological horror film The premonition (1976) in conversation with Nicole Beckwith’s drama Together Together (2021). He adds: “Being forced to think about how different films relate to each other definitely reinforced my viewing habits and made me think more about how films are sort of a giant web of different iterations made more or less successful.”
Peterson’s wisdom recalls the maxim of many stories and narrative arcs based on just a few basic plot constructs. Several authors have argued and illustrated this since the second half of the 20th century. Whether or not we should put stock in it or embrace it, the spirit of this idea translates into the ongoing act of making these thematic lists not as some kind of restriction, but as a kind of poor man’s film school, a neophyte education. Or perhaps a respectable alternative to dropping tens of thousands of dollars on a degree in film studies (or communication arts, if you’re at UW–Madison).
To offer readers a direct sample as we are at the end of the spooky season – this it was Still, Halloween, when this column first appeared in our email newsletter—I asked all current Four Star faces to share a favorite or exclusive list of horrors they could fit into during a six- to seven-hour shift at Four Star . I know they could all twist our ears for a while with the details behind each choice, but we’ll let the movies do the talking. Peterson presented the (first) two.
“Misuse of power tools”
- The borehole killer (1979, Abel Ferrara)
- The Toolbox Murders (1978, Dennis Donnelly)
- Nail Gun Massacre (1985, Terry Lofton and Bill Leslie)
- Body Double (1984, Brian De Palma)
“Organ Transplants/Recycled Body Parts”
- Executor (2023, Jennifer Reeder)
- Fish (2000, Hyung-tae Kim)
- Crazy love (1935, Karl Freund)
- Flesh for Frankenstein (1973, Paul Morrissey)
- Dirty beautiful things (2002, Stephen Frears)
CNL came up with the unique undead theme “Beyond the Grave”.
- The night Evelyn came out of the grave (1971, Emilio P. Miraglia)
- Black Sunday (1960, Mario Bava)
- Graveyard Man (1994, Michele Soavi)
- Black Sunday (1960, Mario Bava)
- The beyond (1981, Lucio Fulci)
- The living dead girl (1982, Jean Rollin)* bonus film not available in store more!
Alex T. Jacobs presented a Zen-like “Sleepy Horror Movies.”
- Carnival of souls (1962, Herc Harvey)
- Let’s scare Jessica to death (1971, John Hancock)
- The fog (1980, John Carpenter)
- A messiah of evil (1973, Willard Huick and Gloria Katz)
- The throne of blood (1957, Akira Kurosawa)
Amber Strangstalien has put together a solid introduction to “Final girls.”
- The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974, Tobe Hooper)
- Black Christmas (1974, Bob Clarke)
- Final exam (1981, Jimmy Huston)
- You’re next (2011, Adam Wingard)
- X (2022, Ti West)
The enduring freshness of “Today’s Topic” is undoubtedly part of what has kept Four Star Video Rental relevant through the volatility of the past decade. The store and its staff and volunteers navigate a haphazardly scattered minefield of streaming content, balancing custom thematic coherence with some disarming, startling additions. Look for some new and revamped stuff from Four Star before the end of the year, including a proper Experimental section on the other side of the New Arrivals shelves. If only we could get Peterson to create an official Four Star Letterboxd account to share some of these preciously distinguished lists for much-deserved influence so they don’t just live in a limitless .docx file. Meanwhile, Peterson cheekily adds, “If you want to know what we know, you have to come here.”