Chicago Avenue in Evanston. Photo: Thestraycat57, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Stirling McLaughlin used to tell himself that if he ever won the lottery, he’d open a video store in Evanston. He never won. He’s opening it anyway.
McLaughlin, a director and screenwriter who has lived in Evanston since 2011, got the keys on Nov. 1 to 1043 Chicago Ave., a storefront in the Main-Dempster Mile that most recently housed MBG Products. The shop will be called Movies the Store, and if the last few weeks of setup go as planned, it opens in late November. Most of the inventory is already inside.
“Kind of without me noticing, I just started moving into what was pretty serious business planning,” he told the Evanston RoundTable this week. The lottery daydream turned into lists of what he’d stock, how much money he’d really need and which storefronts could work. He started looking in earnest this summer.
Sales, not rentals
Anyone hoping for a return of the Friday-night rental run will be disappointed. Movies the Store won’t rent anything. It’s a sales shop for movies on disc, plus books about film, gifts and apparel such as T-shirts. The store’s website describes it as a place for “movies. Not just FILMS,” an intimate room that treats motion pictures as an art form “while simultaneously remaining decidedly unpretentious.”
That second half matters to him. “I think everybody loves movies, and I think a lot of people feel intimidated by this idea of not liking the right movie,” McLaughlin said, “or not having the best taste and being embarrassed about that, or this idea of like guilty pleasures, which I fundamentally don’t believe in.”
So the shelves will carry the crowd-pleasers along with the harder stuff. His own favorite is Broadcast News, James L. Brooks’ 1987 newsroom comedy, which says something about where his tastes sit.
The case for owning a copy
McLaughlin isn’t against streaming. He’s tired of what he calls “the commodification of entertainment,” and he thinks a growing number of people feel the same. Physical media, he argues, has some of the same appeal as vinyl. “The idea that you can put on a record and not have to listen to ads, what a concept,” he said.
There’s a preservation argument too. One of his favorite recent movies, the 2020 time-loop comedy Palm Springs, is streaming-only, with no legal way to buy a physical copy in the United States. “If they decide for tax liability or other reasons that it’s no longer profitable to host it online, it’ll be gone, and there’ll be no recourse to that,” he said. “There’ll be no way to access it, and that’s really kind of sad and terrifying.”
Who’s behind it
McLaughlin grew up in Pennsylvania and has spent his working life in film, marketing and communications, from indie features to commercials. His films and scripts have won awards at Filmquest, deadCenter Film Festival, Nightmares Film Festival, Renegade Film Festival and Geneblast, and he’s been a finalist at the Anchorage International, Nashville and Sidewalk festivals. He executive produced Cold War, which he has described as an anti-rom-com. He has told interviewers that he fell for movies after seeing Ghostbusters in a theater as a kid.
A bet on the middle of the district
The storefront sits in a building shared with Kim’s Cleaners and Papa Bop, a Korean restaurant, roughly halfway between the Main and Dempster Purple Line stations. That middle stretch of Chicago Avenue doesn’t get the walk-by traffic of the blocks closer to Main Street, and the business association knows it.
“He finds himself in that bit of a foot traffic desert, but that’s probably only gonna get better as the street evolves,” said Katherine Gotsick, executive director of the Main-Dempster Mile. She said McLaughlin “has a community of people who are dying to see this store succeed,” and that she hopes the shop pulls more people into the center of the district.
Independent video and disc shops have had a small revival in recent years, helped by boutique labels like Criterion and Arrow and by collectors who want to own the movies they love. Whether that crowd is big enough to support a store on a quieter block of Chicago Avenue is what McLaughlin is about to find out.
He’s posting updates and an opening date on Instagram at @moviesthestore.
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Rachel Lindqvist covers community life, the lakefront, dining and the arts for The Evanston Edge.
