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      Inside L.A.’s Vidiots, a Video Rental Store Where DVDs Still Have a Waiting List

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      Vidiots, a holdover from the golden age of VHS, is staging a comeback as a community hub.A companion to T’s 212 series about New York institutions, the 213 column highlights beloved landmarks in and around Los Angeles.In 1985, when Patty Polinger and Cathy Tauber opened their video store, Vidiots, in a former bail bonds storefront a few blocks from Santa Monica beach, the movie rental industry was just gaining momentum. Blockbuster, the mega-chain, opened that same year in Dallas, while smaller rental franchises like Captain Video and Video Station were springing up all over California. Polinger and Tauber, childhood friends who grew up in West Los Angeles, had been working in international film distribution and business management, respectively, when they decided to change course. “We were tired of working in corporate environments that were dominated by men. We wanted to be in business for ourselves,” says Tauber when we met on a recent video call with Polinger.The two friends came across a magazine article detailing the rise of video stores across the country — by the mid-1980s, there were some 15,000 movie rental outlets in the United States — and decided to take a leap. “Neither of us had ever worked retail before. We were in our early 30s and thought we were over the hill,” says Tauber with a laugh. “This was our chance.” When banks wouldn’t give them a loan, they cobbled together money from family. They knew they wanted a neon sign for the storefront but could only afford seven letters. A brainstorming session led to the name Vidiots.Cathy Tauber (left) founded Vidiots in 1985 in Santa Monica, Calif., with Patty Polinger (right). Maggie Mackay (center) is the Vidiots Foundation executive director. Photographed at the Eagle Theatre in the Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles on June 12, 2025.Carlos JaramilloPolinger and Tauber set out to distinguish their shop as an alternative video store, and one more welcoming than other niche retailers. They didn’t want customers to think that they “had to know every director,” says Polinger. “We were against that snobbery in other stores.” Initially they offered just 800 VHS cassettes for rental ($2.50 per day for members), including the Beatles documentary “Let It Be” (1970) and Jean Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast” (1946). The founders were also determined to make Vidiots — just 1,000 square feet — a community hub of sorts by hosting events. The year after it opened, customers were invited to a late-night gathering with the experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger. Another early event had Polinger and Tauber baking a breast-shaped cake for the director Russ Meyer, known for campy sexploitation films like “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” (1965). “Many women wore bras for tops and Russ was happy to autograph them,” recalls Tauber.Rare VHS cassettes on display at Vidiots. Many of the tapes are not available to rent because of their fragile condition, but the foundation has plans to digitize much of the collection.Carlos JaramilloThe store held puppet shows and limbo contests and threw a polka party for the documentarian Les Blank. An Elvis impersonator performed after the screening of the documentary “Mondo Elvis” (1984), and musicians from the nearby Venice Beach boardwalk would drop by to play drums on paint cans inside the store. “The vibe at night, especially on the weekends, was a party,” says Tauber.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Superman Handles a Lois Lane Interview

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      James Gunn, the screenwriter and director of “Superman,” narrates a sequence featuring David Corenswet and Rachel Brosnahan.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.A budding relationship gets in the way of dogged journalism in this scene from “Superman.”The film’s screenwriter and director, James Gunn, narrates the sequence in the above video, which involves a conversation between Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) and Superman, a.k.a. Clark Kent (David Corenswet) in Lois’s apartment. The two are dating, and Clark agrees to be interviewed as Superman by Lois. She asks him about a recent incident in which he prevented one fictional country in the DC universe, Boravia, from invading another, Jarhanpur.“I think the fun thing about the scene, what I really love about it, is that it addresses so many different things in so many ways,” Gunn said during an interview in New York. “We’re talking about Lois and Clark’s relationship in a way that we’ve never seen it. But we’re also getting to know them as human beings more and seeing what their belief systems are, which is important for a movie like this. And also, we’re saying, if somebody like Superman did exist, how he could affect world politics in such an incredible and strange way.”“I just wanted to keep things simultaneously grounded, but also fast paced,” Gunn said. “There is a little bit of ‘His Girl Friday,’ ‘It Happened One Night’ in the dialogue, but also keep everything as real as we possibly can and make it a surprise for ‘Superman’ viewers.”Read the “Superman” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      A New ‘Billy Budd’ Opera Premieres at the Aix Festival

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      An adaptation of the Benjamin Britten opera, in turn based on Melville’s classic novella, joins a lineage of beautiful enigmas.Billy Budd is a beautiful mystery. He is young, with a smooth and feminine face, but he doesn’t know his background; all he can say is that, as a baby, he was found in a silk-lined basket, hanging from the knocker of a door.One thing is certain in Herman Melville’s novella “Billy Budd”: This handsome sailor is good, gentle by nature and loyal to his shipmates, who call him Baby and find peace just by being in his presence.To Billy’s “good” Melville adds allegorically pure evil in the ship’s master-at-arms, John Claggart, and unbending virtue in Captain Vere. Like the legs of a stool, those characteristics hold up the drama of “Billy Budd,” which was left unfinished at Melville’s death in 1891 and wasn’t published until the 1920s.The story of Billy Budd, stammering and precious, then sacrificed to a strict idea of justice after he accidentally but fatally strikes Claggart, has intrigued readers ever since with its opacity and open-endedness. E.M. Forster called the novella “an easy book, as long as we read it as a yarn.” But tug at the thread, and it unravels into a pile of unanswerable questions: about desire, about morality, about the microcosmic world of a ship at sea.Perhaps that is why adaptations of “Billy Budd,” onstage and onscreen, have been so different. Each is as much an act of interpretation as translation, adopting a specific perspective, examining Billy’s tragedy through a particular character or idea.The latest version, a sexy and ingenious one-act called “The Story of Billy Budd, Sailor,” ran at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France earlier this month. It’s an adaptation of an adaptation: a chamber treatment, by the director Ted Huffman and the composer Oliver Leith, of Benjamin Britten’s 1951 opera “Billy Budd.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      James Gunn Didn’t Want to Make ‘Superman.’ What Changed His Mind?

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      His hit reboot is meant to kick off years of new projects from the rebranded DC Studios. But for a long time, Gunn couldn’t figure out the character.“Today I have my wits about me,” James Gunn said. “I was going to die yesterday, I was so tired.”It was two weeks before the release of “Superman,” and I had met Gunn at the film’s Los Angeles press junket, just one stop on the director’s whirlwind, worldwide media tour. At the time, he was hopeful that the movie would connect with audiences, and it certainly has: “Superman” opened last weekend with $125 million at the domestic box office and earned an A- CinemaScore from audiences.Still, that success barely affords Gunn the opportunity to sleep any easier. “Because this is our first DC movie and I’m also the head of the studio,” he said, “I haven’t had a day off work for months.”Best known for directing Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies, Gunn was initially lured to DC Studios in 2018, when Marvel fired the filmmaker over resurfaced tweets. Though he was eventually rehired to finish the “Guardians” trilogy, his work on DC projects like “The Suicide Squad” and “Peacemaker” impressed the Warner Bros. Discovery chief executive David Zaslav, who tapped Gunn to run DC Studios alongside the producer Peter Safran.James Gunn with David Corenswet on the “Superman” set.Jessica Miglio/Warner Bros. “I’ve always had this desire to create a fictional universe,” said Gunn, 58. “I got hints of that with ‘Guardians’ and the cosmic universe of Marvel, but since I took on DC I knew that I was just going to have to go crazy for the first few years.” That commitment meant juggling many major projects simultaneously: At one point, Gunn was filming both “Superman” (with David Corenswet in the title role) and the second season of “Peacemaker” (starring John Cena and Gunn’s wife, Jennifer Holland) while also overseeing forthcoming DC projects like the film “Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow,” out next year from the director Craig Gillespie.“I also had to resign myself to the fact that I can’t do everything,” he said. “I give notes on all these other projects, but I can’t micromanage” them all, even though, he added, “I always want to do more. That’s been difficult, finding at least some boundaries.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘No Sleep Till’ Review: Calm Before the Storm

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      This gauzy film builds an impression of Floridian malaise by trailing four locals the day before a hurricane.The naturalistic mood piece “No Sleep Till” captures a calm before a storm — specifically, the days before a hurricane is forecast to strike the coastal hamlet of Atlantic Beach, Fla.The film opens with a newscaster warning of the impending weather. The first-time writer-director, Alexandra Simpson, then follows four young locals — two stand-up comics on a road trip (Jordan Coley and Xavier Brown-Sanders), a teenager with a crush (Brynne Hofbauer) and a storm chaser living in his truck (Taylor Benton) — as they ignore the evacuation order and fritter away the hours before the hurricane hits.Eschewing traditional narrative, Simpson uses gauzy imagery to build an impression of Floridian malaise. Skateboarders land tricks on a concrete halfpipe. A motel guest wades into a pool illuminated by neon signage. A teenager slogs through a shift at a souvenir shop.As the storm grows nearer, the scenes take on an eerie feeling of liminality. In one weighted sequence, housing developers inspect a newly constructed residence. Simpson lingers on the wooden rafters, signaling at the irony of unchecked urban sprawl as climate disaster looms.“No Sleep Till” is an understated — and somewhat sleepy — film. Its mood of boredom tinged with dread sometimes verges on outright listlessness. It helps that Simpson uses a cast of first-time actors almost entirely from the area: When Mike (Brown-Sanders) punctures the film’s observational mode to articulate one of its themes — that he appreciates the hurricane because it gives him “an excuse to do something” — the sentiment feels organic.No Sleep TillNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Life After’ Review: What the End Means

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      The filmmaker Reid Davenport raises thorny questions about how the option of medically assisted death is presented to disabled people.Near the end of his feature debut, the self-shot “I Didn’t See You There” (2022), the director Reid Davenport expresses a wish: “I hope this is my last personal film,” he says. But “Life After,” his new documentary, couldn’t be anything but.Davenport starts with a hook: What happened to Elizabeth Bouvia, who, beginning in 1983, was the subject of a highly publicized legal battle in California? Bouvia, who had cerebral palsy, as Davenport does, had sought to starve herself to death with medical supervision — something the courts initially did not allow.Forty years later, Davenport can find no record of her death. Is she still alive? Has her perspective changed? His investigation is fueled in part by parallels he sees in his life. When he and his producer, Colleen Cassingham, locate Bouvia’s sisters, they learn that her trajectory was more complicated than the news media’s framing revealed.But “Life After” also dives into broader questions about the legalization of medical assistance in death. The director makes clear that he does not oppose that choice, but he is concerned that messages of rejection from society and the economics of long-term care might push disabled people toward that end. He casts a particularly harsh spotlight on Canada’s commercialization of this issue. (“Don’t miss out on your chance to have an assisted death,” says a video that he and Cassingham watch that urges viewers to make arrangements early.) Davenport, upon learning he would qualify for assisted suicide if he lived in Canada, wonders if he would see his life differently if he didn’t have such positive support from family and friends. He has felt alienated at times, but so have many people, yet only those with disabilities are subtly encouraged to consider a state-sanctioned demise.“Life After” doesn’t equivocate; neither does it offer easy answers. It tackles a thorny topic in a challenging way, with the tenderness, complexity and — notwithstanding Davenport’s earlier wish — the personal perspective it deserves.Life AfterNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Unicorns’ Review: Where Glitter Meets Grit

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      This movie, directed by Sally El Hosaini and James Krishna Floyd, follows Luke and Aysha, who meet by chance at a drag event.When Luke (Ben Hardy), a single dad in “Unicorns,” meets Aysha (Jason Patel), a drag queen, Luke thinks Aysha is a cisgender woman. After they kiss, there’s a palpable fear for Aysha’s safety when Luke recoils at the sight of her Adam’s apple.“Unicorns,” directed by Sally El Hosaini and James Krishna Floyd, follows in the cinematic tradition of straight men bonding with L.G.B.T.Q. characters — this time arriving at a moment when drag performers face renewed attacks.Their unlikely encounter begins at a nightclub in East London, when Luke, a white working-class guy, accidentally stumbles into the underground “gaysian” scene on his way to the bathroom. His eyes are fixed on Aysha, the night’s star performer. But why would Aysha — who later says that she receives death threats for doing drag — seek him out not once, but twice? First, by running in front of his car after his agitated reaction to their kiss, and then by showing up at his car repair shop in Essex. None of this clicks with who we discover Aysha to be: guarded by necessity.Whether the later conflict involving queer infighting comes off as a thoughtless subversion of expectations depends on if you identify more with Luke or Aysha. More effective are the subtleties within their blossoming romance, like during a karaoke duet sequence that shows Luke softening to Aysha’s charms. Hardy peels back the layers to reveal Luke’s sexual awakening so viscerally that it’s easier to overlook the film’s narrative shortcuts.UnicornsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes. In theaters. More