As he leads me on a tour of Scarecrow Video, longtime buyer Mark Steiner spots former employee Xoe Amer in the new releases section and waves. Steiner, who started working at Scarecrow in 1992 and retired in September, has worked with Amer’s mom, witnessed Xoe grow up, and seen her work at Scarec row’s erstwhile coffee stand VHSpresso. “Just seeing Xoe browsing the shelves, that’s second-generation right there. Right behind the counter, too,” he says, gesturing toward Sophia Soriano, an employee whose mother, Rebecca Soriano, cofounded Scarecrow in 1988. “It blows my mind. We’ve endured, no matter what got thrown at us, and it boggles my mind that we’re still here.” Credit: Billie Winter Credit: Billie Winter This kind of relationship is emblematic of Steiner’s 34-year stint at Scarecrow, which has surpassed the entirety of Blockbuster’s 29-year corporate retail era in the US; international stores closed in 2020. He has seen the store go from around 1,000 titles to over 156,000, and nearly every single one has passed through his hands. Even he still sometimes gets overwhelmed by Scarecrow’s massive inventory. “Every day I do my job, and I leave and I have 50 things to watch,” he says. “So I always tell people, ‘I get intimidated in this place too, and I’ve been here.’” As he points out, nobody will live long enough to see every movie in the store. “It blows my mind. We’ve endured,no matter what got thrown at us.” Steiner may well be the longest-tenured video store employee in history, but you wouldn’t know it from his affable, modest demeanor. “I just put my head down and came to work,” he says. “And the other corollary that is equally important is that it’s a really cool place to work, and everybody who’s run it has always been nothing but supportive.” In 2006, a tree fell on his house, nearly killing both of his children, and Scarecrow bolstered him through the crisis. They also allowed him to work four days a week, enabling him to spend more time raising his kids. Steiner lights up when he talks about film, gesticulating and reciting a steady stream of trivia from the annals of his cinematic knowledge. As a child in Detroit, he learned to read by poring over film critic Leonard Maltin’s annual movie guide. While home sick with chickenpox one day, he was wowed by North by Northwest on TV. The summer he turned 10, he rode his bike to the theater to see Star Wars, which he says “blew up my world.” His family got a VCR when he was 11, and each of them got to pick out a movie. Steiner chose Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H because he liked the TV series, which was based on the film, and watched it daily. Altman eventually became his favorite director, and some 40 years later, he’d let M*A*S*H actor Tom Skerritt into Scarecrow and chat with him. At 13, his bubbe took him to see Raging Bull, his first R-rated movie. “That was the first movie that really knocked my socks off that I saw in the theater,” he remembers. Around the same time, his cousin, who worked at a record store in Detroit, introduced him to artists like Mott the Hoople, Lou Reed, and David Bowie, sparking a lifelong love of music and “rabid” record collecting habit. “I’m an omnivore, I guess,” he says. “I like what I like, but I always want more.”  At Michigan State University, Steiner and a friend launched a film club, screening mostly foreign films on campus. He also frequented the Lansing video store Video to Go, which stocked a wide variety of titles and which he calls an “early model” for Scarecrow. After graduation, he moved to Seattle, having absorbed romantic visions of the Pacific Northwest from the films McCabe Mrs. Miller and Trouble in Mind and the Tom Robbins novel Jitterbug Perfume. There, he became a regular at Scarecrow Video’s original Latona Avenue location. One day in 1992, he walked in feeling completely burned out from working in social services, and the staff encouraged him to apply for a job. Although he accidentally missed a meeting on his first day, the team embraced him warmly, and thus began a decades-long career. The following year, Scarecrow moved to its current Roosevelt location, and the buyer position was created for Steiner.  Credit: Billie Winter Steiner’s life is inextricable from his vocation. Even his 1998 wedding vows came from the 1945 romantic drama The Clock, directed by one of his favorite directors, Vincente Minnelli. In the film, Judy Garland (who would later marry Minnelli) and Robert Walker play a young couple who wed within the course of a 24-hour whirlwind romance. Similarly, Steiner and his now-wife fell in love during a 24-hour first date, so the lines felt apt. “We were like, okay, good enough for Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli,” he says. His curiosity and humility have served him well, helping him discover titles beyond his own taste. He credits his kids with broadening his horizons and stresses the importance of “know[ing] you’re a dumbass.” “You gotta pay attention, you gotta hear from people, because if it was just me, it’d be all Westerns on the main floor,” he says. “With any curating, I think you can view it with your knowledge, but that shouldn’t be the beginning or the end.”  From his office on the second floor, Steiner could overhear customers talking to staff, which helped him gauge demand and learn about films he wouldn’t have otherwise. No day as a buyer was exactly the same as another. The position demanded grit, adaptability, persistence, and an ability to build relationships with distributors. “It’s a mix of listening to people and just being really, really diligent and detail-oriented, and that’s sometimes a slog,” Steiner says.  Scarecrow almost went out of business in 2014 due to competition from streaming services; Steiner helped them survive as they became a nonprofit and introduced their popular DVD-by-mail program across the country in 2021. “He’s been a stabilizing force through all of that stuff. He’s paid his dues, he’s earned some rest,” veteran employee Joel Fisher says. Fisher, who helped spearhead Scarecrow’s transition into a nonprofit, is taking over as buyer. He says that the connections Steiner has cultivated with distributors will be the most difficult thing to replace. “That’s going to be a thing that I just have to earn through time and build from scratch. I’ll probably do things in my way and just try to figure out a good way to move forward,” Fisher says. “Things are always changing in this realm. We’re actually in a really good place now that the pendulum has swung back towards people understanding the importance of physical media.” Fisher will miss Steiner’s dedication. “Mark’s been around forever, so he remembers everything that happens, and he’s really passionate about helping people out,” he says. “He’s dealt with all the special orders and availability checks, so he’ll go out of his way if people are searching for a thing. If he can find it, then he’ll leave no stone unturned, and he’s always really good with that.” Once, Steiner tracked down a VHS copy of Apocalypse Now for an older woman who wanted to watch it because it was her late husband’s favorite film—at the time, DVDs could not be easily paused with the intent of resuming later in the same spot, and she couldn’t sit through a three-hour movie. The year Napoleon Dynamite came out, Steiner went to Costco to buy up their stock because of the extreme demand for it around Christmas, and it was so popular that people were begging to buy copies in the Scarecrow parking lot when he returned. Steiner has a gold mine of stories about brushes with celebrities and film industry behemoths. He’s seen stars like Bridget Fonda, Roger Ebert, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Quentin Tarantino (a former video store employee himself) walk through Scarecrow’s doors. When legendary director Bertrand Tavernier came to SIFF in 1997 to promote his film Capitaine Conan, Steiner invited him to the store and followed him around for three hours as he rifled through titles and remarked on them in a thick French accent. He once sat in on director Werner Herzog, actor Crispin Glover, and former Scarecrow employee Norm Hill recording the commentary for Herzog’s film Even Dwarfs Started Small, in which Herzog uttered the sage wisdom, “Chickens are something that frighten me because they are so stupid… When you really take a close look into the eyes of a chicken, it’s really, really weird.”  “The pendulum has swung back towards peopleunderstanding the importance of physical media.” Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love used to patronize the Latona location. Once, late Scarecrow cofounder George Latsios, who would read back customers’ first and last names in order to memorize them, loudly repeated “Kurt Cobain” several times, having never heard of the Nirvana frontman. “He was trying to keep a low profile, and George is like, ‘Hello, Kurt Cobain! Oh, you’re Kurt Cobain,’ and you see these people in the store, their ears perking up,” Steiner recalls. Still oblivious, Latsios inquired what Cobain did for a living and asked, “You aren’t one of those grunge musicians, are you?” When Cobain responded that he was, Latsios earnestly wished him luck. (For context, this was a week after Nirvana appeared on Saturday Night Live.)  As for Love, she favored British dramas like Brideshead Revisited due to her time living in the UK and would rent a “shitload of tapes” at a time, until Love and Cobain’s nannies inevitably returned them late. She incurred so many late fees that her accountant had to have a talk with her, according to Rebecca Soriano, but Steiner calls it a “wonderfully symbiotic relationship,” since her fines helped support the store. He’s invigorated by the new wave of younger generations’ enthusiasm for film. “We’re really engaging more and more with customers, and that’s what I’m most excited about,” he says. “It used to be this boys’ club.” He’s seen a rise in interest in body horror, such as Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, David Cronenberg’s films, and Louise Weard’s Castration Movie series, which sold a staggering 30 copies. Credit: Billie Winter It’s important to Steiner that Scarecrow persists as an archive. He says many people don’t realize that they don’t sell off anything from their stock, unless they’re upgrading existing titles. “If you came in here as a kid and saw something, it should still be here for you 30 years later,” he says. Of Scarecrow’s 100 rarest titles, 88 aren’t even in the Library of Congress. In retirement, Steiner looks forward to spending time with his wife and his dog Gracie and continuing to pursue his twin passions of movies and music. He’s excited about the possibility of working with Rebecca, who is retiring from teaching third grade, to bring film education to classrooms. Since 2019, he’s also hosted a radio show called Soundtrack Cinema from 7–8 p.m. each Thursday on SPACE 101.1 FM. “I’ve just always wanted to share cool things, and radio is perfect for that,” he says. Every week, he creates a themed soundtrack, using film and TV scores, needle drops, and other film-related music.  Nevertheless, he’ll still be found roaming the shelves of Scarecrow from time to time. “I mean, how could I not?” he says. “I’ve had this at my fingertips for my whole adult life, so I couldn’t conceive of not taking something home when I come in.”  The post Shelf Life appeared first on The Stranger. ...read more read less