aNewDomain – The video bloggers at Everything is Terrible! say they will be opening a 1990s-themed.video store in Los Angeles next week. The store, they say, will be stocked with nothing but “Jerry Maguire” videos . – more than 14,000 of them.
EIT plans to enshrine every available copy of the 1996 Tom Cruise movie in a giant pyramid in the California desert. Profits from the video store exhibit will be applied toward the building costs for the video pyramid.
Jerry Maguire was an enormously successful 1996 film that jumpstarted the careers of Tom Cruise and Renee Zellweger. It also is the movie responsible for inserting into the American idiom such phrases as: “You complete me,” “Help me help you,” “The key to this business is Winnipeg,” “the Kwan” and “You had me at hello.”
EIT’s video collectors noticed a decade ago that every used video shop seemed to have copies of Jerry Maguire, dozens of them. So, they began collecting them, then EIT asked the public to begin sending their copies to the group, then EIT decided to amass the world’s largest collection of Jerry Maguire videos, and finally to amass all available copies.
As their collection topped 10,000, the group began wondering what they’d do with all these videos. The group eventually decided that they should be used as the bricks for a giant pyramid. Having developed a plan, the group then needed to raise funds for the structure. The group’s current funding goal is a modest $400,000.
EIT is a Chicago-based video blogging site that features unusual, dated, and odd clips of VHS tapes from back in the day when that’s all people had for watching videos at home. The project was founded in 2000 by a group of friends while at Ohio University. The group would search at thrift shops, garage sales, and bargain bins for tapes to share. The website was launched in 2007 in Chicago.
The group’s finds include massaging cats and Yogi Oki-Doki (below), along with thousands of other clips that have now been collected and organized by theme on the EIT website:
The Jerry Maguire Video Store will be installed at the iam8bit Gallery at 2147 Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. The group aims for a perfect re-creation of a 90’s video store, except that instead of carrying racks of slasher movies and Ernest comedies, this store will carry just one tape which can’t be rented or sold.
However, EIT has arranged for eight performances involving more than 20 artists and performers.
Tickets for the installation, which will run from January 13 to January 29, range from $95 to $16 with a few free events.
For aNewDomain, I’m Tom Ewing.
Cover photo: Jim Newberry, courtesy Everything is Terrible!; “This is Real” photo: Jim Newberry, courtesy Everything is Terrible!.
