Seattle’s Scarecrow Video, the world’s largest publicly available video archive, needs your help

It’s hard out there for a video store when it’s trying to get money for the rent. Look no further than our old friends at Scarecrow Video in Seattle, Washington. We last wrote about them in 2014, when the store was in the process of transitioning from a for-profit video store into a non-profit video archive. That fundraiser was a massive success, shattering the proposed goal of $100,000 to bring in more than $130,000. The store is currently the largest publicly available video archive in the world, but 10 years, three presidents, and a global pandemic later, Scarecrow Video is on the brink.

Coupled with the ravages of the pandemic and a decrease in private and institutional funding, Scarecrow’s problems outweighed its fundraising. Now, after cutting staff hours and reducing expenses, they’re still stuck. Scarecrow is looking to raise $1.8 million to stay in its current location, provide its staff with a living wage, hire permanent leadership, and have enough capital to “stabilize the organization,” Scarecrow’s leadership wrote in an open letter.

“We are at this crisis point where our rental and sales revenue has declined by about 40%, but we haven’t even returned to 2019 levels,” Scarecrow Video executive director Kate Barr told The A.V. Club by phone. “At the same time, our major expenses, like our rent and payroll, have gone up by like 25%. As a non-profit, the hope was that we would raise enough money through donations, memberships, and grants to be able to make up the gaps, but our efforts just aren’t able to keep pace.”

There are plenty of ways to help, too, even if you’re not in the vicinity of Cafe Nervosa. Those interested can donate at Scarecrowvideo.org/sos, where you can also find out more about the store and other ways to help. Scarecrow, Barr told us, also does rental by mail, “So you can be anywhere in the country and rent from us.” They also have Blu-rays, DVDs, and some videos available for sale on eBay and the Scarecrow website. Wouldn’t you like to be the proud owner of Amadeus on a glorious VHS cassette? Now own one for a good cause. This is about preserving not just one store, but one of the largest publicly available archives in the world (which, once again, anyone around the country can rent from). It matters that these movies have a shelf to be on because the streamers aren’t giving them the time of day.

“Whenever I talk to people about Scarecrow, I usually ask how many titles they think Netflix has available online for streaming,” Barr said. “The answer is about 3,000 titles. If you put Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, it’s roughly over 40,000 titles that they have collectively. We have 148,000 titles.“

As proponents of the physical media experience, not to mention big fans of video stores ourselves, we can’t sit idly by as another cathedral to cinema shutters. Every community deserves a video store, and before we can go all Johnny Applestore, planting rental shops around the country, we should secure the ones we have. For some movies, especially those outside Netflix’s surprisingly meager offerings, the video store is their last chance for people to hear those stories.

“The difference is the diversity of voices. We have things from all over the world, from every walk of life, from every level of budget. Big budget, small budget. We have all of those stories that we are stewarding forward. We are the stewards that are trying to carry those stories forward. So what would be lost would be all those stories. They would just be gone.”

Help Scarecrow Video reach its goal by visiting Scarecrowvideo.org/SOS.

Or, if you need more convincing, check out this delightful store tour hosted by the wickedly talented, one and only Tom Skerrit.