Photo by Matt Cohen.
Update: Turns out there’s another video store in D.C., and it’s not closing anytime soon: Woodner Video Rental.
It’s an unusually chilly spring evening in Chevy Chase, and two clerks at Potomac Video are watching the 2003 Marvel film Daredevil on a small TV in the store. As general manager Matt McNevin defends aspects of the almost universally panned film to assistant general manager Justin Chaplin-Brown, a customer walks down the stairs to the Connecticut Avenue video store and throws her hands up. “I can’t believe you guys are closing!” she says. “I know, I know,” McNevin replies.
That’s been the typical scene at the video store—the last proper one in the District—since they announced on their Facebook page this month that they’re closing their doors for good at the end of May. “One guy who came in was so angry that he taped a This Is The End poster to the pole in front of the store,” McNevin says. But while a lot of customers are angry that Potomac Video is closing, no one came to the store’s rescue when they were trying to figure out how to stay alive a year ago. “There are some people that care [about us] in this community,” McNevin says, “but not enough.”
But when it comes down to it, Potomac Video’s closing is just the latest in the video store death knell. Since delivery services like Netflix, and streaming services like Amazon Instant and Hulu, became popular, it was only a matter of time before video stores would become all but extinct. “Convenience wins over quality every single time,” McNevin says. Ben Fogle, owner of Potomac Video, opened the first store in 1981 in Potomac, Md, and at the time thought technology would put video stores out of business a lot quicker than it did. “I figured the video business would ultimately end and be overtaken by electronic delivery,” Fogle says. “Initially, I thought it would probably not last more than four years before we’d be overtaken by technological advances. But it took 33 years!”
Before Fogle opened Potomac Video, he was a scientist, working as the Program Director of Polar Atmospheric Sciences for the National Science Foundation. It was a job that often took him to the South Pole to study the polar atmosphere for long stretches of time. “One year I went down there in December or January, when the sun is out 24 hours a day, which makes it hard to sleep,” he says. “So you had to bring a lot of reading material to pass the time when you’re not working.” Among the many reading materials he brought for that trip was an article in a Sunday edition of the New York Times that talked about the home video revolutions. “It talked about how it was going to change the habits of people,” he recalls.
The Polar base Fogle was stationed at also had a Betamax player for scientists to use, something that Fogle hadn’t encountered before. Fogle was transfixed with Sony’s player and the idea of home video entertainment, and knew there was a big business opportunity with that technology. As Fogle’s shift in the South Pole came to a close, he began to entertain the idea of opening up a video rental store in Potomac, Md., where he lived.
“I asked the station manager, who was a big movie buff, what he was going to do when he goes back to the states,” Fogle recalls. “He said, ‘I don’t have a job at this point, but I’ll find one.’ And I said, ‘I think I might open a video store in Potomac. How would you like to run that?’ And he said, ‘Oh, I’d love to do that.’ And I said, ‘Great, consider yourself hired.'”
The first Potomac Video opened in the Potomac Promenade shopping center in March of 1981, and it didn’t take long for it to become a big success. Not long after, Fogle opened a second Potomac Video in D.C. and soon a third. It was after the third store opened that Fogle took early retirement from his government job and focused on Potomac Video full-time, opening locations left and right. “As a function of time, we kept finding more nice spots and opening stores,” he says. At the height of its popularity, there were 22 Potomac Video stores throughout D.C., Maryland, Virginia, and even West Virginia. Jon Francke, who was hired as the chain’s manager shortly after the first store opened, spent more than $1 million a year on videos for Potomac Video stores.
But as the demand for video rentals waned in the mid-aughts, Fogle’s stores began to close one by one. The last two stores to close before the Tenleytown location were in West Virginia, one of which was located in a hotel Fogle bought as a real estate investment from his video store profits years ago.
Among the shelves of Tenleytown’s Potomac Video is an impressive collection of rare and hard-to-find foreign, independent, cult, horror, and sci-fi titles — something that’s become part of Potomac Video’s reputation. “We had a magnificent collection,” Fogle says, thanks in part to Francke, who he says “has a keen eye for finding things that nobody knows exists.”
Part of what worried Potomac Video’s last remaining employees is what would become of its famed library and how they could keep the Potomac Video name alive, even if its physical presence dies. “It would be nice to keep the Potomac Video name [alive],” McNevin says. “People trust that name. People of a certain cinematic taste, which is pretty much this neighborhood, The Avalon Theatre crowd. They associate Potomac Video with foreign, independent, and documentary cinema.”
Photo by Matt Cohen.
Fogle, McNevin, and Francke spent the better part of last year trying to come up with ways to keep Potomac Video alive in one form or another, but Fogel says “nothing seemed to quite work out.” They looked into starting a subscription and delivery service themselves, or trying to get one of the local libraries to buy their collection for very cheap to keep the legacy going. McNevin even tried to work something out with American University, where he teaches screenwriting, but that didn’t work out either. No place was in a financial position to take their extensive catalogue, even if they were selling it for next-to-nothing.
The closest they came to keeping Potomac Video alive was to sell the store to a used book dealer, Wonder Books in Maryland, and merge the two businesses. “His concept was to diminish the library to just a token library, and put in a lot of books,” Fogle says. “He wanted to sell a lot of the [foreign and independent titles] overseas. It would rip the heart out of the library and people wouldn’t like that.”
Everything led to a dead end, and last spring, Fogle thought they could comfortably coast for another year before they had to close up shop. “We knew it was inevitable at some point,” says McNevin, who’s worked at Potomac Video since 1999. “One day we were a rental store and the next day we’re selling everything off.”
In the final days of Potomac Video, the scene is a lot more lively than it’s been in a long time. People are coming in and out scooping up choice titles from their revered library for cheap. And there’s still a nostalgic vibe to the place, reminiscent of video store culture of yesteryear. “For me, rental stores were always a prominent part of my life,” says Chaplin-Brown, who started working at Potomac Video in 2010. By the time he came to work there, the business aspect had already kinda diminished, but he says that’s why he was attracted to work there. “It’s this kinda bohemian little place with movie buffs I want to talk to,” he says.
Although Potomac Video is selling off as much of their collection as they can, McNevin says they’ll probably be left over with between 10,000 and 15,000 titles that they’ll probably sell off to wholesalers. After that, they’ll spend another month gutting the store for whatever will take over the space. Both Fogle and McNevin are still trying to figure out if there’s a way to continue Potomac Video somehow, even if its physical presence will be gone. “There’s a niche community here that values us,” McNevin says. Perhaps the Potomac Video name could come back in the form of hosting screenings, but for now they’re just trying to focus on the last days of the store. “I have all this useless knowledge,” McNevin jokes. “And I don’t know what to do with it now.”
Editor’s note: This post originally stated Potomac Video is in Tenleytown. It’s in Chevy Chase.
