Magic Video carved its niche with friendly vibe, love of good movies
By Jim Phillips
Athens NEWS Senior Writer
March 24, 2008
During the 25 years that Magic Video has been in Athens, the owners have watched the video rental business get born, grow to vigorous maturity, and start down the road toward possible obsolescence.
Joel and Martha Laufman got into the trade when it was an emerging fad, rode its boom through the 1990s, then saw it run into a host of challenges, from a hot-wired world of new entertainment technology.
Along the way, they bucked the industry’s mass-market mentality, and kept their shelves stocked with foreign, classic and indie films you couldn’t rent anywhere else in town.
“They really seemed conscious of catering to this special niche market that we have here, of people who want classic, and foreign, and documentaries,” recalled loyal customer Suzanne Knauerhase. “They liked movies. I actually got the feeling that they weren’t in the business primarily to make money, that that was secondary to providing what people wanted.”
The formula worked, if The Athens NEWS’ Best of Athens contest is any measure. The paper’s readers chose Magic as Best Video Store seven times between 1991 and 2007 (the category was absent for seven years), and honored it for Best Window Display every year from 1993 to 1999.
Now, after a quarter of a century, the popular video outlet is closing its doors. After selling off its rich tape and DVD inventory to an eager public that rapidly stripped the shelves, it is down to a few hundred movies, a bunch of empty racks, and a lot of memories.
For local movie buffs, the pain of the store’s closing was assuaged by the going-out-of-business sale, that gave buyers the change to scavenge, at bargain prices, their favorite hard-to-find titles from a video collection put together with loving care over so many years.
“It kills me to see them all gone,” Martha Laufman admitted Friday. “Hopefully some things went to people who loved them… I’m happy that some of our good customers now have some of their favorite videos.”
When the store finally closes its doors within the next month or so, the Wild Mercantile store next door will expand into its current space.
THE NOTION OF renting videos was only a few years old in 1983 when Laufman and her husband, a teacher at Alexander High School, decided to open up shop.
“My husband got the idea from his brother who lived in San Francisco,” she recalled, and the couple bought around 100 VHS and Beta tapes in Cleveland, using their Mastercard.
Martha was working in a typewriter store on Union Street, and will always be grateful to her employers, Ruth and Augie Zorn, who let her set up the fledgling business after hours.
“We were open 5 p.m. to 8 p.m., three hours a day,” she recalled. “I would just push the typewriters to one side and set up our little video boxes.”
The business took off quickly, with locals eager to try out movies at home. Athens’ second video store, Home Video on Richland Avenue, opened just three days after Magic, followed soon by the first Athens Video store.
Magic had to rent and sell VCRs at first – it stayed in the machine-rental business for years – so people could watch the movies. “Once they tried it, we had a lot of regular customers,” Laufman said.
Knauerhase and her husband, Billy Rhinehart, were among them. “We used to rent the machines,” she recalled. “(Our daughter) was like 3, and we would rent ‘Popeye’ over and over again.” (Magic Video’s copy of the Robert Altman classic is now in the proud possession of this reporter, along with way too many other VHS tapes from the sale.)
As the business grew, it had to keep finding bigger spaces, including the Motyre building on Court Street, and the building that until recently housed the New-to-You Shoppe on Stimson Avenue. Along the way, it had satellite stores in Albany and at the Station Plaza in Athens.
Along with the growth came diversification in movies. While chains like Blockbuster were arising, that focused on stocking large numbers of copies of the biggest hits, Magic went a different direction. It carried the hot new releases, but steadily expanded its stock of harder-to-find titles as well.
“I started buying foreign titles when we were on Stimson. I was interested in them just from a movie standpoint,” Laufman remembered. “I wasn’t a film buff by any means, but I would study about the foreign titles, and get the classic ones.”
Since the beginning, Laufman said, she viewed Magic Video as being part store, part video library. She’s always been willing to take customer suggestions for what movies to buy, and has provided over the years a valuable resource for Ohio University film profs, who could assure their students that the classic Lubitsch comedy or Flaherty documentary they were studying could be found at a store in town.
“One professor, his handout to the students said, ‘You can get all these films at Magic Video,’” Laufman noted.
The business did very well for a while, especially in the 1990s, due partly to its current location on East State Street — within walking distance of OU with plenty of parking – and the cultural trend of setting up for the weekend with a video or two.
“On Friday and Saturday nights (in the peak years), we would have four or five employees behind the counter,” Laufman said. “We watched a whole generation of kids grow up, coming in with their families.”
Loyal customers came to appreciate that Magic Video employees were kind of like those record store employees in the movie “High Fidelity” – passionate and knowledgeable about the product (though not as rude as Jack Black). Store manager Michael Van Auken in particular was a fund of information for the novice film afficionado.
“I just can’t say enough about what an asset Michael has been,” Martha Laufman said. “He’s been a friend first, and a business associate second. We were a great team. It was Michael who established the rapport with the customers… People who came and applied to work here were people who loved movies.”
THE FRIENDLINESS OF THE store, and its community feel, were clearly as much a part of its success as its inventory.
“It was just such a great place,” Knauerhase said. “So many people my age, women especially, have said to me, ‘Where are we going to go now to run into our friends?’”
Besides the widest local selection of titles, the store also offered, for many years, a tradition of movie-themed window displays that simply blew away any competition in the Best of Athens polls.
In creating them, Laufman used her own skills as an artist (she has a BFA from OU) and the technical assistance of Van Auken to create some incredible displays – including a perception-twisting string contraption for the movie “Mouse Hunt” that brought the title into clear view only gradually as you walked to a point directly in front of it.
Though the store has weathered the advent of the big chains, pay-per-view TV, downloadable movies, the switch to DVDs, Netflix and more, Laufman said she’s seen the writing on the wall for a while now.
“For the last 15 or 20 years, they’ve been predicting the video rental business had five more years to go,” she joked.
But, she added, with new forms of entertainment delivery popping up daily, and the family video weekend a dying tradition, she decided it was time to call it quits.
“I probably should have gotten out of the business five years ago,” she sighed. “But it’s hard, when you’ve got customers you’ve been waiting on for 10 years who really appreciate that you’re here.”
Comments
Please log in to post a comment.
Don't have an account? Get one here. It's free and easy!
herronsa commented, on March 24, 2008 at 9:58 p.m.:
Martha-
Will miss MV and conversations with you and Michael. But was wondering...are you selling any of the little figures? I'll be calling. :) Boy no Magic Video, no School Kids, Athens will not be the same. Sally Herron
