A lot has changed since film lovers “saved” Scarecrow Video. This time last year, Seattle’s flagship video store — home to the world’s largest collection of physical media accessible to the public — was doomed to shut its doors. Now, the Lynchian landmark has over a million dollars in donations and new executive leadership. They’re shifting the focus from heroic Hail Mary finances to long-term sustainability, and not a moment too soon.
“If indeed Scarecrow shuttered and went out of business, I would feel guilty forever,” said executive director Jonathan Marlow. “I would feel terrible about that. And it’s the sort of terrible that I wouldn’t get over, you know what I mean? It would be like the death of a close friend.”
Economic durability is a complex goal the entire entertainment industry is struggling to reach, but Scarecrow’s small team of roughly 20 staffers and volunteers sums it up tidily with the moniker “S.O.S.” The slogan, seen around the store and across the Washington city, is itself recycled. Last year’s Save Our Scarecrow campaign was about rallying people who love pop culture. This year’s Sustain Our Scarecrow is about serving that “relentlessly local” community amid a global media movement.
“You can only get saved once,” said director of development Tyler Mesman. “People talk about community spaces disappearing all the time, but it’s amazing to see just how busy we are on two-for-one Wednesdays. We’ve got more people behind us than ever before. Now, the focus is on what we do with all that enthusiasm and visibility and support.”
Located in Seattle’s University District, Scarecrow Video navigated a minor crisis last week when part of the building’s exterior crumbled. The damage to the facade appears mostly cosmetic, but the threat to the priceless VHS tapes, DVDs, Blu-rays, and more media locked inside was enough to close the shop for several days. Rich Grendzinski, one of Scarecrow’s longest-tenured employees, responded with the drama the collection deserves when he got a call from the fire department saying, “a wall had collapsed.”
“I thought of war movies with bombed out buildings,” Grendzinski said. “When I got there, I was actually relieved it was just the brickwork and everything looked fine, structurally.”
Scarecrow Video is a highly valued resource. Home to more than 150,000 movies and TV shows, the collection began in 1988, and the store became a nonprofit in 2014. Boasting famous clientele from Roger Ebert to Quentin Tarantino, it was later deemed a cultural museum. Scarecrow’s rarest titles require a significant deposit to check out. But if renters have $1,500 to put down, then they can borrow virtually unseen episodes of “Playhouse 90,” featuring Paul Newman and donated personally by director John Frankenheimer (“The Manchurian Candidate”). As a measure of its scope, moving the collection from the last address to its current location took months of planning. Back then, it was several thousand titles lighter.
“We were glad we were able to reopen quickly,” Mesman said of the recent incident. “Our first customer on Saturday clapped when they came in the door.”
Before joining Scarecrow leadership, Mesman was a patron who started searching through the shelves with his husband after the pandemic. He stepped up during the original S.O.S. effort, when his experience as an organizer for the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign dovetailed with the store’s dire need to rally public support. Even then, Mesman knew that keeping the lights on was just the beginning of a complex new chapter for the local institution.
“S.O.S. taps into this feeling throughout Seattle that our special places are disappearing, and that our city is becoming sanitized in a way,” said Mesman. Rezoned for higher housing density less than a decade ago, the U District is among the fastest-growing neighborhoods in a city squeezed by the tech revolution. Scarecrow Video’s current lease extends through 2026.
“If we’re building long-term support, then we can’t be in a cycle of boom and bust,” said Mesman. “It’s what we do with that funding and how we use it to spread our message in new ways that matters. That innovation, making relationships, is why Jonathan Marlow is such a good fit for executive director.”
“You can’t just make this stuff available,” said Marlow. “You have to make people care.”
When Marlow took over as top guardian for the Scarecrow legacy, he drew from his experience as a jack of many trades with a personal soft spot for the store. He volunteered at one of its earliest locations in his 20s and worked at Amazon when it was an online bookstore. A musician who found his way to movies by scoring silent films, Marlow left Seattle to spend the last of the ‘90s in Berlin. He sharpened his programming skills working for various Netflix competitors at the dawn of the streaming age, and armed with his knowledge of live events, Marlow brought his unique vantage point on the digital landscape to the position he holds now.
“If you take all of the streaming services, all the major services that are out there right now, so Netflix, Prime, Max, Apple TV+, Paramount+, everything, with all of that, they have less than the entirety of what we had when we first moved to our current location,” said Marlow. “All of that is less than 30,000 titles. We have five times that amount.”
Curation is easy when you buy everything, but organizing Scarecrow’s vast collection can be tough. The store doubles as an archive for film history that countless Seattle patrons call their “safe space.” In 2025, Marlow and Mesman say it’s also a touchstone for reality.
“I think about this job a lot in terms of who gets to be the arbiter of truth,” said Mesman. “Our job is to draw attention to things people might not know about. Unlike other public media libraries that are being pilfered right now, that are being censored, that are being torn asunder, nothing is going to leave our collection. These are films that deserve a place in the public, just like a library. We’re never going to conform to whatever the cultural headwinds are. We’re going to keep it here because it is a human creation that deserves to be seen.”
Despite a largely POC and queer clientele, many of them younger, Marlow said Scarecrow Video isn’t a strictly “liberal” store. When the nonprofit fell on tough times, its buyers didn’t “exactly rush out” to backfill ultra-conservative documentaries, Marlow admits. But that’s an issue of practical priorities, not politics — and they’ll get there. He remembered, as a younger Scarecrow visitor, wondering why the store carried a Japanese laserdisc version of Disney’s “Song of the South,” not released in the U.S. due to its racist content.
“Isn’t it worse to pretend it didn’t exist?” Marlow concluded. That notion informs many of the big-picture decisions he makes brooding over Scarecrow’s shelves. From its earliest days, the collection has relied on private and local funds, effectively sidestepping the restrictions now facing countless organizations using money from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). If they were a different kind of nonprofit, Marlow said, he “might be more worried” about backlash from the federal government. The revenge of the Trump administration has made Marlow’s job harder, sure, but it hasn’t shaken his commitment to championing voices on both sides of the movie aisle.
“In the right context, we need bullshit documentaries about chemtrails, even if it’s complete and utter nonsense,” said Marlow. “We need that because there’s a time when we’re going to look back on it and go, ‘What does that say about us? What were our preoccupations? Why were we so fascinated with such absolute garbage?’” In the world film department, Scarecrow’s decision to curate a section for Palestinian filmmakers speaks for itself.
Asked why saving history can feel so punk-rock, Marlow said, “Because you saw it. Because you were there. That’s where the so-called ‘punk’ aesthetic really comes from.”
“It’s people doing things for themselves and not feeling like somebody else has to give them permission to do it,” he said. “If you spend a few hours in Scarecrow, you’ll see it attracts the ‘other.’ We don’t have huge posters for blockbusters. We’re promoting the individual vision and diversity of taste. We’re not judgmental, but we can truly embrace that ethos as a whole.”
Mesman continued, “It’s one of the purest windows into seeing and understanding other people’s lived experiences in a world that’s really lacking in empathy. Scarecrow is a place where you walk in and it’s your inertia that leads you to the next discovery. We’re going to curate things in a very human way where you’re going to intrinsically discover things and make connections that are uniquely challenging to you.”
How audiences see themselves in media is a major force for its preservation and promotion online. When S.O.S. first took off, Scarecrow didn’t just raise money. It also spurred a boost in its digital following that social media manager Meghann Crafton is still trying to harness as a lifeline for the brand. The store’s Instagram account gained more than 8,000 followers in the past year — with supporters from around the world sharing how the collection and its caretakers shaped them.
“I feel like physical media is so important in a time where reality is changing, not always for the better,” said Crafton. “Scarecrow is more than just a place to come get a movie. This is an actual community, and we want it to be more of one.”
An enamel pin designer whose work is sold in the store, Crafton knows playing into personal identity is one of the fastest ways to make a film community grow. There’s been a huge influx of customers asking for Scarecrow’s spin on the Criterion Collection’s famous “Closet Picks,” a video series in which big-name cinephiles select their all-time favorite films.
Protecting as much genre schlock as it does serious cinematic fare, Scarecrow’s catalog is much larger than that. Bubbling with enthusiasm for a sexploitation section she curated herself, Crafton is determined to translate the store’s irreverent and organic feel to making recommendations on the internet. Rapidly approaching its 100th episode, “VIVA! Physical Media” is Scarecrow’s YouTube talk show dedicated to discussing the store through its eccentric cast of regulars.
“I feel like I’m seeing a lot of people on Letterboxd who are watching movies because they think they need to watch them,” said Crafton. “I saw one person who watched ‘Citizen Kane,’ and their review of it was, ‘Well, now, I’ve seen “Citizen Kane.”’ They have nothing else to say about it. That stereotypical pretentious Letterboxd persona is not a good thing. It’s making enjoying film seem holier-than-thou and more complicated than it needs to be.”
Comparing streaming to scrolling through a dating app, Crafton abandoned her subscription services when Scarecrow helped her realize she didn’t have to settle. Watching “Mad Fat Diary” on Hulu, Crafton was horrified to discover just how different the British dramedy felt without the U.K. music rights. Streaming platforms are often falsely accused of altering or censoring original material because of the various official versions they offer. But if Daryl Hannah’s digitally rendered butt wig — used to cut down on the already PG-rated nudity in “Splash” for Disney+ — tells us anything, that’s not always the case.
“Even with all this bleakness, I feel like there’s a silver lining in remembering why we love this material, why we love talking about it, and why we don’t want it to magically change,” said Crafton. Affordability is a major barrier for new physical media collectors, who often get stuck battling resellers explicitly intent on driving up the price. Rental stores circumvent that issue, finding bittersweet camaraderie in absence that makes the heart grow fonder.
“There are people who come in here every week, and I look forward to seeing them,” said Crafton. “When they don’t come in, I wonder where they are.”
Despite carrying many titles in multiple formats, Scarecrow can’t preserve what never gets a physical release. As a result, countless straight-to-streaming originals could still be lost to the kind of tax breaks Warner Bros. used to decimate the HBO Max catalogue in 2023. That’s a real obstacle facing cinephiles determined to preserve everything, but somewhat of a relief to Scarecrow manager Grendzinski.
When he’s not answering 9 a.m. phone calls from Seattle firefighters about the store’s structural integrity, he worries endlessly about the ever-expanding collection and its size. Strolling through the aisles, Grendzinski took IndieWire through the much-loved Psychotronic Room — a safe haven for the “weirdest of the weird” cinema has to offer — and pointed out what was once the 20-seat microcinema Scarecrow used to sell out. (That was before the Comedy and Drama sections overran it.)
The staff has curated countless special programs worthy of group viewings, and Marlow said he wants to bring screenings back. Meanwhile, the top brass is still hard at work pushing Scarecrow’s rent-by-mail service and launching the store’s return drop boxes across Seattle this summer. They’re also fighting the numbers to employ more folks full time, aligning themselves with other video rental stores (Marlow shouted out Vidiots in Los Angeles) to create a flourishing network of physical media defenders. It’s all a sign Scarecrow Video is finding the elusive sustainability it seeks, even if some cinephiles have the same fears as before.
“I’ll walk around town and sometimes people will be like, ‘Hey, it’s the Scarecrow guy!’ That’s always nice, knowing people have your back,” said Grendzinski. “The problem is I still don’t know where we’re going to put it all.”
