Bob Whiteford described it as “the final bullet in the head” that killed his business. After nearly 12 years, the quirky indie movie store Insomniac Video is dead. The economy killed it.
But the memories will live on for Whiteford and his legion of supporters who came to the small video store on Broad Street to find the movies they couldn’t get anywhere else.
“My favorite memories are of watching people grow up,” Whiteford said. “In the last week or so I’ve had parents whose kids grew up here; they’re in college now and this was a big part of their life. That makes me proud.”
For several years Insomniac Video was the only place a person could rent many of the strange cult films that made the shop so revered by its customers. Even some cult directors started taking notice themselves.
“(Grade-Z filmmaker) Larry Buchanan, when he was alive he used to live around here, he came here and showed me shot for shot how he shot ‘Zontar the Thing from Venus,'” Whiteford said.
Eventually, with the advent of ship-to-you giants like Netflix and Blockbuster Online, Insomniac’s revenue started taking a hit.
“Netflix, downloading, YouTube and such definitely was hurting us. But the bad economy was the final blow,” Whiteford said.
After a summer that Whiteford called the store’s worst ever, things got even worse.
His property owner raised rent, forcing the shop to close its doors for good.
Insomniac Video may be one of the first small shops to close its doors in San Luis Obispo, and while Whiteford said he strongly hopes that he is the last, there may be more problems to come for downtown’s small-business scene.
“I suspect strongly that the entire mercantile landscape of this town is going to change,” Whiteford said. “I think a lot of the tried-and-trues that made this town what it is are going to be gone.”
While the shop is in its final days, many customers are also mourning the loss of the indie film champion and reflecting on its loss to the community.
“I’m pretty torn up about the whole thing,” former customer Gene Schoensee said. “I watch a lot of movies and many of them are off the wall, out of print or otherwise unavailable from Blockbuster or Netflix. Insomniac was the only place to find those gems that would otherwise be inaccessible to people. ”
Schoensee, who discovered the shop through his girlfriend’s family several years ago, will also miss the wealth of knowledge that Whiteford and his staff brought with them.
“The vast stores of knowledge about film and film history within Insomniac is amazing and it’s a sad thing that those of us seeking to draw upon that deep well of knowledge will no longer have a place we can drink,” Schoensee said. “No rental chain can compare to the individual attention and understanding of movies like Bob and his staff. Imagine trying to discuss a movie like ‘Breathless’ (A 1960 French film directed by Jean-Luc Godard) with the kid behind the counter at Blockbuster. He would look at you like you were speaking, well, French. That is assuming they even had the movie on their shelves”
Schoensee has many memories of the store, but one of his favorites involves one of his early trips to the shop looking for an off-the-wall film.
“I asked for a movie called ‘Auntie Lee’s Meat Pies’,” Schoensee said. “Bob laughed and told me that it had been the cornerstone of their cannibalism section for years. I thought to myself that any video store that has a cannibalism section is (in the words of Hunter S. Thompson) ‘Too weird to live, and too rare to die.’ Unfortunately it did.”