Fast Food

Back in the old fogey days I worked in a video store, a step removed from the opening-night show-business excitement of a movie theatre, most of the films at least 6 months old and just more boxes filling up the New Release wall that stretched from one end of the store to another.

It was all so much product, all the same, some more popular than others. What really got our cocks hard though was the burgeoning undertow of old cult classics that would be released to backfill the catalog of the Blockbusters and Hollywood as secondary rentals and alternates when the new hot releases weren't in. Don't have any more copies of "Die Hard 3"? Have you seen Bruce Willis's "Color of Night": we have 6 copies currently in stock. "Heat" all checked out? How about "The Real McCoy" also with Val Kilmer?

We arranged the old titles next to the new ones, putting boxes with like subject matter together to trick the rubes, increase rentals and get another $100 on our bonus that month. It was a film-geek exercise worthy of Tarantino remembering vague co-stars and stretching thematic connections between unknown arch oddities ("Sonny Boy" (1989)) and new hip films ("Miller's Crossing"(1990)). One thing we could always count on renting out were erotic thrillers. In the go-go age of straight-to-video they knew how to design those boxes. Casting Tayna Roberts always helped.

We made our own sub-sections, pulling things off of the Never-Rented lists and spotlighting them on an endcap. We actually has a small section called "Never Watched," which slowly got smaller once someone rented one. Then we placed "Bonnie & Clyde," "Dick Tracy," "Melvin & Howard," "Scrooged," "Tango And Cash," a couple TV things and "Roxanne" in their own section and named it the Michael J. Pollard Section because they all had him in them, a goofball sidekick you saw everywhere during the '70s and '80s who would steal a scene by doing nothing.

Seriously, in "Fast Food" (1989), some kind of precedent to either "Hot Dog the Movie" or "Mortuary Academy" he steals the film from such scene gobblers as Kevin McCarthy, Traci Lords and Jim Varney by just standing there with a goofy goddamn look on his face listening to the exposition.

He'd become one of our favorites since someone taped "Big Fauss and Little Halsy" (1970) off cable and passed around the VHS like a dog-eared and much-loved dirty magazine.

"Scrooged" was the only one that ever rented, usually in December.  Completely an inside joke.  But imagine the delight when some film student came in and actually asked for "Bonnie & Clyde" and I was able to say, "Oh that would be in our Michael J. Pollard section" and walked him over to it where he saw this Pollard guy had quite a few legit credits, as well as some junk (but hey who doesn't?), and wondered why he hadn't heard of a guy who rated his own endcap.