Over 11 years and 570 episodes, John Rabe and Team Off-Ramp scoured SoCal for the people, places, and ideas whose stories needed to be told, and the show became a love-letter to Los Angeles. Now, John is sharing selections from the Off-Ramp vault to help you explore this imperfect paradise.
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UPDATE: 10:30pm Friday, 1/30/2015: The LA Times reports that film producer Megan Ellison and Vidiots customer Leonard Lipman have given an undisclosed amount to "keep the store open for the foreseeable future," according to Vidiots co-owner Cathy Tauber.
Journalist Elina Shatkin has a great piece in the latest L.A. Weekly lamenting the impending closure of Vidiots, the Santa Monica video rental store.
Shatkin graduated from the UCLA School of Film and Television, but as she writes, "my real education began the moment I stepped behind the counter at Vidiots."
At UCLA, I’d seen "Citizen Kane," "The 400 Blows," "Raging Bull," and "Rear Window." At Vidiots, I was on a steady diet of everything else. Aquatic monster movies. Post-Vietnam vigilante flicks. Busby Berkeley musicals. British kitchen sink dramas. Perverse Czech animation. At Vidiots there was no shame in loving a slapstick fart comedy as much as you loved a French existential drama.
It was an "aha!" moment.
It wasn't a conscious choice but that egalitarian ethos became the basis of how I approached everything I now do as a journalist. Whether I’m writing about an upstart taco truck or a world class chef, a dude who organized bathroom graffiti crawls or the head of a multimillion dollar arts organization, I treat them with the same consideration.
Elina reads the whole piece for us this week on Off-Ramp.
Learn more about Vidiots in this video produced by the Academy:
Editor's note: This piece has been edited to reflect the good news.