The Brief

Would you be surprised to know there’s a new film getting a VHS release this year?

The People’s Joker, a DIY parody about a closeted trans girl “Joker the Harlequin” trying to make it in comedy, has had an unconventional path to release, and has now found a home on several formats, including on a beautiful purple VHS.

The poster for Vera Drew's "fair use film."

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The People's Joker / Altered Innocence

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Vera Drew, the film’s co-writer, director, editor and star, says the retro format was always crucial to the movie. “The movie really is supposed to feel like you're watching an otherworldly VHS tape, or something somebody’s personality transposed through this glitchy analog dream,” Drew said of her film, which she describes as a “queer comic book coming of age story.”

The ‘physical’ media community

After months of secret screenings, People’s Joker publicly played at OutFest in 2023 and, this summer, has screened in more than 100 U.S. theaters. But Drew is so happy with the VHS release, adding, “I think that will end up being the definitive version.”

Frank Jaffe, head of film distribution company Altered Innocence, saw it at Outfest and knew he was the right person to release the film. Jaffe wanted to “connect with cool queer cinephiles,” and to make sure the film had what’s called a “physical” release — something tangible that viewers can touch, hold and feel. Basically, something that won’t disappear if your streaming subscription of choice loses or sells the film rights.

“One small reason why people are into physical media is the community that you can build through it,” Jaffe said, imagining friends lending their DVD or VHS copies to each other. (For the Gen Xers out there who swapped mixtapes, you know what we’re talking about here).

And that kind of community is what’s been driving this renewed interest in VHS, especially right here in Los Angeles.

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#299: 

VCRs are buzzing again in the city...that's right! Watching a movie on VHS is back! But in 2024, with streaming and Blu-Ray, why watch something on tape? HTLA producer Victoria Alejandro spoke with VHS vendors, collectors, and other tape aficionados around the city (including filmmaker Vera Drew of "The People's Joker") to understand the subculture, the community, and let YOU know why tapes are back, baby!

Guests: Filmmaker Vera Drew, head of Altered Innocence Frank Jaffe, Michelle Halac and Alex Gootter of Hollywood Entertainment, Erik Varho and Jessica Gonzales from Whammy!, Eliana Oropeza from Aztec Pickers, Jackie Forsythe from AMIA

Hit pause and rewind! VHS is making a comeback

#299: 

VCRs are buzzing again in the city...that's right! Watching a movie on VHS is back! But in 2024, with streaming and Blu-Ray, why watch something on tape? HTLA producer Victoria Alejandro spoke with VHS vendors, collectors, and other tape aficionados around the city (including filmmaker Vera Drew of "The People's Joker") to understand the subculture, the community, and let YOU know why tapes are back, baby!

Guests: Filmmaker Vera Drew, head of Altered Innocence Frank Jaffe, Michelle Halac and Alex Gootter of Hollywood Entertainment, Erik Varho and Jessica Gonzales from Whammy!, Eliana Oropeza from Aztec Pickers, Jackie Forsythe from AMIA

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Treasures at the tape swap

At the end of June, the Gardena Cinema, L.A.’s last family owned movie theater, hosted a VHS tape swap in partnership with the video store Whammy! It drew in all sorts of fans and curiosity seekers from New Beverly Cinema projectionists Danielle Wakin and David Chien (who grew up just down the street from The Gardena Cinema) to volunteers like VHS aficionado Conor Holt.

Theater owner Judy Kim speaking to New Beverly Cinema projectionist David Chien at the Gardena Cinema tape swap.

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Victoria Alejandro

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Over a dozen vendors tabled inside the 800-seat theater with crates of tapes. Every possible genre and niche was on display, from mainstream 90s horror to Mexican films from the 60s to punk concerts from the 80s.

Eliana Oropeza, who sources and sells tapes with her husband under the name “Aztec Pickers,” drove all the way down to Gardena from Fresno. She said they found out about the event through a tape collectors Facebook group that has over 100,000 members.

Oropeza's husband at the Aztec Pickers' VHS table.

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Victoria Alejandro

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Oropeza said Aztec Pickers gets their tapes mostly from estate sales or other long-time collectors, which often means there’s a lot of storytelling that goes into each tape.

“That sharing of knowledge, it’s like old times, right? We're coming here, of course, to sell, and also to learn,” Oropeza said about the culture surrounding tape swaps. “And when we talk to each other, it brings the community together, you know?”

How did I not know that existed?

Community and a love of film is what drives the folks behind Hollywood Entertainment, a featured vendor at the tape swap, and a nonprofit that boasts adventurous and underseen programming for film events. The three founders, Alex Gootter, Michelle Halac and Mike Perry, care about sharing things that never made it off of tape onto Blu-Ray or DVD, or got wide distribution.

Michelle Halac, Alex Gootter, and Mike Perry of Hollywood Entertainment selling VHS at the Gardena Cinema.

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Victoria Alejandro

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The three film lovers got together in April 2020, streaming rare, unavailable and unrentable films online under the name “Moviepassed,” raising money for community and art spaces during the worst of the pandemic lockdown. They’ve since changed their name and moved their screenings into brick and mortar spaces around the city — and across the nation — including 2220 Arts + Archives, Whammy! and the Museum of the Moving Image in New York.

“The best compliment we can get after something is ‘How did I not know that existed?’” Gootter said.

It’s not hard for a film to fall through the cracks.

For example, movies like The Wrong Guy, a 1997 Canadian comedy starring Dave Foley and Jennifer Tilly, are impossible to stream due to a snafu with the film rights.

“You were lucky to see it if you happened to catch a Tuesday afternoon rerun on Comedy Central in like, 2000,” said Michelle Halac. So, the trio at Hollywood Entertainment managed to hold a screening of it in 2023. 

“The three of us have spent our lives digging for treasures like this,” Halac said.

Don’t throw away those tapes

The name on everyone’s lips when discussing the state of tapes in L.A. today is Whammy!

It’s an actual video store on Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake run by husband and wife team Erik Varho and Jessica Gonzales, who opened the space in 2022.

Erik Varho and Jessica Gonzales prepare to open Whammy! for the day.

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Victoria Alejandro

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“We love being literally underground,” Gonzales said of their basement space with an alley entrance. The shop is covered wall to wall in VHS tapes for sale, with a microcinema in the back that seats around 50 people.

Varho and Gonzales also care about featuring films that were only created for the direct to video market, or giving directors who never thought they’d get to see their work with a crowd the chance to do so. “For people to come out and celebrate works that maybe they hadn't been asked to celebrate in a long time, I think that does speak to the core of what's magical about VHS,” Gonzales said.

And celebrating movies that are “stuck on tape” can help plastic waste from entering landfills. “I think about all the tapes being thrown away every single day…they're not particularly recyclable,” Varho said. “If you can adopt a few into your home, that just helps so much.”

The Whammy! membership troll beckons you to join.

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Victoria Alejandro

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Now, if you’ve thrown out your VCR in the past few decades, which is likely, you might be wondering how to adopt a tape into your own home. Whammy! has a sister nonprofit to help with that. Gonzales started TAPE — that’s Teach, Archive, Preserve, Exhibit — in September of last year. The nonprofit offers VCR rentals, analog camera rentals, digitizing services for tapes and general workshops for all things film related.

Gonzales hopes TAPE can fill a little bit of the gap left by the Echo Park Film Center, which offered similar services until its closure two years ago. The collective shuttered their physical location after 20 years in business.

What about our home movies?

Jackie Forsythe, Whammy!’s technical director, says this work is also crucial for preserving people’s memories. Forsythe is a recent graduate of UCLA’s Master of Library Sciences program and while there she was part of a student chapter of AMIA, the Association for Moving Image Archive.

The AMIA zine stands out among free media preservation zines at Whammy!

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Victoria Alejandro

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Forsythe’s passion is home movies. “They're meant to be seen by people who love you and who you love. And so when we lose access to them, it's devastating,” she said.

On Aug. 24, Forsythe will be part of the team behind Home Movie Day at Whammy!, an event where people can make an appointment to have their tapes looked at, digitized, and even learn how to clean and maintain their VCRs. And, if participants want, they can have their home movies screened in the microcinema.

While those hard plastic tape shells might not break down in a landfill, the tape itself has a ticking clock before it starts to degrade. VHS has an estimated 30 year lifespan, so helping people digitize and preserve is key in the case of precious memories.

The act of screening is crucial to preservation, Forsythe said. “I think the key to getting people to care about things is to have a culture around viewing it.”

It’s about the size of a park bench and made of steel and wood. The bench’s arm rests are formed by the letters “L” and “A” in a design that’s unmistakable to any sports fan. But the welder-artist who created it says it’s not a Dodgers bench.

“This is about civic pride, L.A. pride. I made a design statement saying that it has nothing affiliated with the Dodgers,” said Steve Campos.

Campos grew up near Dodger Stadium, raised by parents who were die-hard Dodgers fans. So much, that they named him after Steve Garvey but that legacy doesn’t keep him from confronting how the Dodgers benefitted from the mass displacement of working-class people from Chavez Ravine after World War Two. That’s why he calls it an L.A. Bench, and not a Dodgers Bench.

The logo may be synonymous with the city's beloved baseball team, but the design of the interlocking letters was used by the L.A. Angels minor league baseball team before the Dodgers moved to L.A. in 1958.

“The monogram was here before the Dodgers,” Campos said.

A second-generation welder

Welding is the Campos family business. His father created gates and security bars for windows and doors for L.A. clients. That was the foundation for the work Campos has done for two decades since graduating from Lincoln High School, L.A. Trade Tech College, and enrolling in a summer program at Art Center in Pasadena.

The inspiration for the L.A. Bench came last year while he was playing around in his shop creating versions of the L.A. logo. A friend he hangs with at Echo Park Lake asked Campos to make him a piece of furniture.

“I was trying to figure out what my friend Curly wanted. He liked Dodgers and drinking and getting into fights, so I was like, 'Let me make something with the LA monogram,'” he said.

Welder-artist Steve Campos created whimsical steel sculptures with the LA logo.

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Courtesy Steve Campos

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It didn’t design itself. He said he had to lengthen the legs on the “A” and lean the back of the “L” in order to make the bench functional. In the process, he’s made a piece of furniture with a ubiquitous logo that he’s embedded with his own L.A. pride, as well as city history past and present.

LA civic pride travels to Japan

Campos vacationed in Japan the last week of April and took advantage of the trip to reach out to people who may be interested in the L.A. Bench. He was caught off guard by people’s reaction when he showed them pictures of it.

“They look at it and they go, 'Oh, Ohtani bench,'” he said.

For them, it’s still a bench embedded with pride, he said, but centered around Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani, an icon in his native Japan.

Campos has made four L.A. benches and is selling them fully assembled, he said, for $2,500 each — taking into account his labor and how costly the raw materials have become. For now, he’s offering the metal parts as a package for $500, which requires the buyer to purchase the wood for the seat and the back — an easy process, he said.

While he has no plans to mass produce the L.A. Bench, he does have one goal in mind that shows how hard it is for him to separate L.A. civic pride and the Dodgers.

“I would love to get a couple of them installed at Dodger Stadium,” he said.

The Venice Boardwalk after sunset has generally been a no-go zone for tourists and locals alike, as the beachside bars and restaurants close on the early side and safety is often an issue. Now, a group of artists is out to bring some vibrancy to the creative neighborhood with a series of new installations that will include live evening performances – and even a “Venice Opera House.”

“Let's play with light and let's play with sound and give people a reason to come to the Boardwalk after sundown,” said artist and entrepreneur Stefan Ashkenazy, who is curating the project and owns the buildings housing them. “I mean, let's just be open 24 hours a day.”

The concept doesn’t have an official name yet, but he’s been calling it “See World.”

Artist James Ostrer's space looks out from a bed through the fence to the ocean at Venice Beach.

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Laura Hertzfeld

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LAist

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William Attaway, a longtime Venice artist, created a gallery space filled with various paintings and sculptures.

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Laura Hertzfeld

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LAist

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The pair of modern buildings on the Venice Boardwalk at Thornton Ave. – with their big balconies, floor-to-ceiling glass windows, and seven open garage-style retail spaces – have sat mostly empty since Snapchat vacated their beachside offices in 2019. Ashkenazy recently bought the building and recruited artists to fill those front-facing spaces with creative work until a full-time tenant comes in.

Over the past several weeks the installations have been created in real-time, in public.

All of the projects are loosely along the theme of “home,” with each artist claiming a “room” in the two buildings that stretch across a full block on the Boardwalk. Several local Venice artists are featured, including William Attaway, whose intricate mosaic work is recognizable on the Venice public restrooms along the beach. Attaway’s space features a floating larger-than-life-sized statue and various works in a mini-gallery. In the next room is Robin Murez’s pieces, featuring carved wooden seats from her beloved neighborhood Venice Flying Carousel.

Ashkenazy is no stranger to wild (and wildly successful) art ideas. He’s the owner of the Petit Ermitage hotel in West Hollywood, a longtime haven for visiting artists, and the founder of the decade-old Bombay Beach Biennale, where artists install all kinds of work in an annual event near the Salton Sea. Many of the artists from that community are featured at the Venice project.

A "Venice Opera House" will host pop-up music events throughout the summer.

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Laura Hertfeldz

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LAist

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New York-based artist Greg Haberny's paintings on the wall of his Venice space.

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Laura Hertzfeld

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LAist

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New York-based artist Greg Haberny and London-based artist James Ostrer have brought some of their work in the Bombay Beach Biennale to the Venice project. Their windows on the Boardwalk both speak to a child-like sense of wonder and creativity.

“I think it's just kind of exploring and playing a little bit, to have the freedom to be able to do that,” Haberny says of his imagined child’s bedroom space, which includes a fort made out of puffy cheese balls. “It's a big space, too.
It's beautiful.”

Ostrer is experimenting with a performance art idea where he sits in bed amongst a room full of his own artwork, which he describes as “happy art with an edge.” Looking out at the ocean from the bed, he’s invited passersby to sit and have chats with him about his work or anything else they want to talk about.

“It’s a very intimate space, so you have a different kind of conversation,” he said. “I use art to channel human creativity, and [talk about] dark things.”

While there are open fences that block off the spaces, they aren’t sealed up at night. Both Ashkenazy and the team of artists seemed open to the idea that anything could happen and that the installations are a conversation with the public – and with that comes some risk.

Greg Haberny (right) works with his assistants on an installation featuring kid-inspired graffiti art and a "cheesy puff" fort.

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Laura Hertzfeld

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LAist

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“I don't really know if I [would] say worried, but I guess it's just the cost of doing business,” Haberny said. “I don't really make things to get damaged or broken, sure. But I have done [things like] burned all my paintings and then made paint out of ash.”

While he’s felt safe – and even slept overnight in the installation – Ostrer has been collaborating with a local female artist who performs in a pig mask in front of his installation some nights. Watching her perform, he said, has taught him about the vulnerability of women in public spaces like the Boardwalk. “I've started to, on a very fractional level, have seen how scary that is. Because I've sat in the bed behind her performing at the front here… the way in which men are approaching her and shrieking at her … it's shocking.”

Ashkenazy says he will keep the artists in the space, potentially rotating new ones in, until a fulltime tenant takes over.

“This is an experiment … and after acquiring the building, the intention wasn't, ‘let's open a bunch of public art spaces,’ he said. “It is kind of …what the building wanted and listening to what the Boardwalk needed. Let's play, let's have the artists that we love and appreciate have a space to play and engage and give the locals and the visitors to the Boardwalk something to experience.”

A new trail across the beloved natural area of Elephant Hill in Northeast Los Angeles is officially opening this weekend.

The route is years in the making, and it's a big milestone in the decades-long conservation efforts to preserve this local jewel in the community of El Sereno.

The hiking trail connects one side of Elephant Hill to the other — from the corner of Pullman Street and Harriman Avenue all the way across to Lathrop Street.

It's 0.75 miles in total, but packs a punch.

"It's a pretty straight shot, but because of the terrain — the trail is kind of twisty and curvy. There's switchbacks — and great views," Elva Yañez, board president of the nonprofit Save Elephant Hill, said.

People have always been able to access the 110-acre green space, but Yañez said the new trail provides a safe and easy way to navigate the steep hillsides.

The El Sereno nonprofit has been working for two decades to preserve the land. Illegal dumping and off-roading have damaged the open space over the years. And the majority of the 110 acres are privately owned by an estimated 200 individual owners.

Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority (MRCA) joined the efforts in 2018, spurred by a $700,000 grant from Los Angeles County Regional Park and Open Space District, in part, to build the trail. The local agency received some $2 million in grants from the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy to add to the 10 acres of Elephant Hill it manages and conserves. This year, MCRA acquired an additional 12 parcels — or about 2.4 acres.

And the spiffy new footpath — with trail signage, information kiosks and landscape boulders — is not just a long-sought-for victory but a beginning in a sense.

"We know that it means a lot to the community," Sarah Kevorkian, who oversees the trail project for MRCA, said. "We're wrapping up the trail, but it really feels like the beginning of all that is to come."

A hint of that vision already exists — for hikers traversing the new route, courtesy of Test Plot, the L.A.-based nonprofit that works to revitalize depleted lands.

"They're able to see at the end of the trail, at the 'test plot' — exactly what a restored Elephant Hill would look like," Yañez said.

Here's a preview:

A coalition of residents from across the San Gabriel Valley are mobilizing over a battery storage project and possibly more industrial development in the City of Industry they say could pollute communities next door.

A protest is scheduled today in neighboring Rowland Heights, targeting a 400-megawatt battery energy storage facility sited on about 9 acres that was approved by the City of Industry leaders in January.

Such Battery Energy Storage Systems, or BESS, are used to keep the power grid stable, especially as output from renewable energy sources like solar and wind fluctuate. But fires involving lithium batteries at some sites have heightened environmental and public health fears.

Because of the City of Industry’s unusual, sprawling shape stretching along the 60 Freeway, it borders on more than a dozen communities, meaning what happens there can have far-reaching impact.

“Pollution does not end right at the border,” said Andrew Yip, an organizer with No Data Centers SGV Coalition. “Pollution travels.”

Some local activists with the Puente Hills Community Preservation Association have challenged the approval of the battery facility under the California Environmental Quality Act.

Beyond environmental concerns, locals have also been frustrated with how decisions are made by officials in the City of Industry, a municipality that’s almost entirely zoned for industrial use and has less than 300 residents.

Organizers say they’ve struggled to get direct responses from city officials whom they say have replaced regular meetings with special meetings, which under state law require less advance notice.

A city spokesperson has not responded to requests for comment.

The so-called Marici Energy Storage System Facility would be run by Aypa Power. The fact that the battery storage developer is owned by the private equity giant Blackstone, a major investor in AI and data centers, has only fueled concerns that a battery storage facility would lay the groundwork for data center development.

A request for comment from Aypa was not returned.

Today’s protest is taking place at Peter F. Schabarum Regional Park in Rowland Heights across the street from the Puente Hills Mall, a largely vacant “dead” mall, which activists fear could be redeveloped into a data center and bring higher utility costs and greater air and noise pollution.

Yip pointed out that industrial developments make a lot of money for the City of Industry.

“But none of these surrounding communities receive any of those benefits,” Yip said. “Yet we have to put up with all the harmful effects and impacts from this city that does all this development without really reaching out.”