Personalized variations on a theme

Four Star Video Rental keeps up a long tradition of human-driven recommendations.

It’s a streaming, short-form content world, and we’re just living it. Wait…are we actually living in it or just enduring and apprehensively passing through its besieging oversaturation? There was a period of time in the 2010s when the act of going out to pick out the new or new-to-you thing to watch felt like a true anachronism. But, even in my rut-stuck pessimism, it no longer feels so much that way as we approach the next decade’s halfway point.

The Criterion Collection’s semi-weekly Criterion Closet segments on YouTube, which humbly started over 14 years ago (I’ve even referenced one in a recent review), have grown so popular that the distribution company recently took a mobile truck version of the cramped physical media-packed closet on the road to the 62nd New York Film Festival. Cinephiles and collectors apparently waited in line for up to five hours just for a chance to pose for photos with 4K Blu-rays and DVDs—purchases that they could have made online with minimal fuss.

To me, this devoted act by more than a select few suggests that, we, as a culture, prematurely forced the shuttering of many video rental stores, where trying before buying was the standard. A business model as a radical form of consumerist mediation, if you will. Even more significantly, though, these spaces, like music venues, were hotspots for culture and media literacy, for drawing up the relationships between crews and actors, and for all manner of obsessive minutiae. However, this is not a piece where I should be defaulting to the past tense, because Four Star Video Rental on West Gilman Street is still standing. The algorithm-less recommendations are still flowing.

Staff and store hours have dramatically fluctuated over the 39 years that Four Star has existed, but one thing that has remained consistent during co-owner (and Tone Madison contributor, full disclosure) Lewis Peterson’s 11-year tenure there is “Today’s Theme.” Every day that the store is open (currently, Friday through Wednesday between 12 and 7 p.m.), the staff chooses a new theme and accompanying list of films from the store’s catalogue to play on the TV behind the front counter. After cuing them up in 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 as they walk in (along with a list of titles slated to arrive on store shelves the following Tuesday). 

Peterson spoke with me this month, mostly via email, about why he keeps up this combination of employee tradition, trivia game, and what he calls “a feature of the landscape of Four Star.” He also detailed the methods he and Four Star’s current staff—Alex T. Jacobs, C Nelson-Lifson (also a Tone Madison contributor), and Amber Strangstalien—use to select these themes, in addition to their monthly staff picks. “The main reason is to show off our wares, get people interested in something they maybe would have passed by otherwise, and keep the staff entertained,” Peterson writes. He also shared with me a separate 188-page ongoing document of movie themes that date back just to January 2020.

“Today’s Theme” can be as timely or timeless, political or fantastical, serious or silly, movie-geek or layperson-discernible as Four Star staff can imagine. And there’s always an insightful and evocative cross-section of films in Four Star’s catalogue through eras of film history on that whiteboard.

The first theme in Peterson’s immense document is a sobering “No War With Iran,” while mid-list entries (on pages 79 and 89) honor the broad work of then-recently deceased actors Philip Baker Hall and Anne Heche. September 2024’s themes included the not-necessarily-’90s-centric “Pulp Fiction Ripoffs,” the grimace emoji-worthy “Sex Robots Aren’t All They’re Chalked Up To Be,” and the simply stoic “Bald Guys.” Of course, the list wouldn’t be complete without an endearingly encyclopedic local focus. Peek at “Films By UW Alumni,” “Made In Madison,” “Wisconsin Horror,” “Bill Rebane: Wisconsin Auteur,” and even the intriguing “Midwestern Longing” staff have put together over the last few years.

Peterson continues his email explanation of the custom pretty bluntly: “In terms of how to pick 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 stretch of this revolting, further fascist-normalizing election cycle, this initial answer seems rightfully prioritized. Though, less heatedly, Peterson vividly remembers the foundational moment years ago when he first picked out something for the daily theme as a Four Star employee. It was Platinum Blonde (1931) for “Pre-1940s Morality Tales,” a more niche, opaque topic that threw him for a loop, and perhaps perfectly reinforced the purpose that the themes serve.

Furthermore, over the years, Peterson has learned what he thinks “makes a good theme is the ability for anybody to plug in and make a pick. If two people are working together, they trade off on who picks the movie.” Conscientiously, he concludes that “often the other person is gonna go with something you never would have considered or maybe haven’t heard of, which is kind of the whole point of the exercise.” This isn’t something that can be replicated with streaming or even browsing during half-off deals at brick-and-mortar retail stores. The physical video-store space is actively tracking relationships between movies old and new, and facilitating dialogue not only between customers but even cinephiles behind the counter (and surely, the former have usually become the latter).

While patrons are always going to cling to a few arresting favorites, like the time Peterson drew up a Dungeons & Dragons-style movie-vibe alignment chart (lawful good, neutral good, chaotic evil, etc.), he confesses his own personal favorites are “something that has more leeway to create connections between really disparate movies.” Take “Surrogate Mothers,” for instance, which puts Robert Schnitzer’s psychological horror film The Premonition (1976) in conversation with Nikole Beckwith’s dramedy Together Together (2021). He adds, “Being forced to think about how disparate movies relate to each other has definitely strengthened my viewing habits, and made me think more about how movies are kinda just a giant web of different iterations done more or less successfully.” 

Peterson’s wisdom recalls the maxim about many stories and narrative arcs being based off of a mere 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 that or buy into it, the spirit of this idea is transmuted to the ongoing act of making these thematic lists not as any sort of limitation, but as a kind of poor-person’s film school, a neophyte education. Or perhaps a respectable alternative to dropping tens of thousands of dollars for a diploma in Film Studies (or Communication Arts, if you’re at UW–Madison).

To offer readers a direct sampling, since we’re at the tail-end of spooky season—it was Halloween after all when this column first appeared in our email newsletter—I asked all current faces of Four Star to share a favorite or exclusive horror list they’d be able to fit in during a six- to seven-hour Four Star shift. I know they could all bend our ears for a while with the particulars behind each pick, but we’ll let the movies do the talking. Peterson submitted (the first) two.

“Abuse of Power Tools”

• The Driller 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”

• Perpetrator (2023, Jennifer Reeder)
• Pisces (2000, Hyung-tae Kim)
• Mad Love (1935, Karl Freund)
• Flesh For Frankenstein (1973, Paul Morrissey)
• Dirty Pretty Things (2002, Stephen Frears)

CNL offered the uniquely undead-themed “From Beyond The Grave.”

• The Night Evelyn Came Out Of The Grave (1971, Emilio P. Miraglia)
• Black Sunday (1960, Mario Bava)
• Cemetery Man (1994, Michele Soavi)
• Black Sunday (1960, Mario Bava)
• The Beyond (1981, Lucio Fulci)
• The Living Dead Girl (1982, Jean Rollin)* bonus movie that we don’t have at the store yet!

Alex T. Jacobs pitched the Zen-like “Sleepy Horror Movies.”

• Carnival Of Souls (1962, Herk Harvey)
• Let’s Scare Jessica To Death (1971, John Hancock)
• The Fog (1980, John Carpenter)
• Messiah Of Evil (1973, Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz)
• Throne Of Blood (1957, Akira Kurosawa)

Amber Strangstalien assembled a solid introduction to “Final Girls.”

• The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, Tobe Hooper)
• Black Christmas (1974, Bob Clark)
• Final Exam (1981, Jimmy Huston)
• You’re Next (2011, Adam Wingard)
• X (2022, Ti West)

The enduring freshness of “Today’s Theme” is undoubtedly part of what has kept Four Star Video Rental relevant through the shakiness of the past decade. The store as well as its employees and volunteers are laying a path through chaotically scattered minefields of streaming content, balancing personalized thematic coherence with some disarming, startling additions. Look for a few new and renewed things from Four Star before the end of the year, including a proper “Experimental” section on the opposite 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 distinctive lists for much-deserved clout, so they aren’t living solely in a limitless .docx file. In the meantime, Peterson cheekily adds, “If you wanna know what we know, you have to come here.”