On a Sunday afternoon in Eagle Rock, a few dozen patrons wander into the Eagle Theatre at Vidiots, stopping to chat by the bar while they sip wine and securing a bag of popcorn before the movie begins.

They’re about to see “Cisco Pike,” a little-known crime drama starring country musician Kris Kristofferson in his first leading role. He plays a weed-dealing, down-on-his-luck musician who becomes entangled with Gene Hackman’s crooked cop. After debuting in 1972 to mixed-to-negative reviews, “Cisco Pike” became extremely difficult to find for decades, until the American Cinematheque helped revive it in the early 2000s, leading to an eventual DVD release. But the film still remains a hidden gem, which is exactly what one can expect to find whenever you walk into Vidiots.

Vidiots’ journey to its current iteration as a repertory theater and community hotspot for the celebration of the arts required immense determination to transform the beloved Santa Monica video store into a one-stop shop for cinephiles, casual and fervent alike.

Patty Polinger and Cathy Tauber founded the original Vidiots in 1985 after an Esquire magazine article about the rise of independent video stores that carried more hard-to-find indie and foreign films piqued their interest in the concept. They felt inspired to try their hand at it.

“We just started educating ourselves,” Tauber said. “We started going around and talking to people that had these independent video stores, and everybody was really nice and open and didn't see us as competition … but people also thought we were crazy."

At the time, Polinger worked for MGM and Tauber in the music industry, but neither had any prior retail experience. But once they identified Los Angeles’ lack of a video store carrying rarer titles, they couldn’t be stopped and worked toward opening Vidiots.

Their concept was always intended to be different from the other video stores popping up in the 1980s. The focus on independent cinema and hard-to-find titles was central to Polinger and Tauber’s mission, and as two women trying to start a small business, Tauber recalled that the banks they visited to try and get a loan “were basically telling us to go to our fathers.”

But the duo managed to scrape together enough money to start the business, and it didn’t take too long for Vidiots to find its clientele and start growing.

“We opened with 800 VHS tapes, and then we grew to 50,000 [titles],” including DVDs and Blu-ray discs, Tauber said, and they expanded the space three times over the ensuing decades to make room for their growing collection.

The late 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s treated Vidiots well, but by around 2006, a confluence of factors had begun to affect their flow of customers. Netflix’s mail-delivery service and the growth of HBO had already begun to change people’s viewing habits before streaming platforms even existed, making it easier to watch quality films and TV without leaving home to pick up a disc.

“Santa Monica was changing,” Tauber said. “People used to drive from far to come to us, and then, [they were] like, ‘No, I’m not going to do that, traffic’s too bad.’”

The shifting landscape forced Vidiots to change tack. In 2010, they added a screening room — a spiritual precursor to today’s set-up — and started hosting mini film classes and community events with filmmakers. In 2012, Vidiots became a non-profit at the suggestion of Oscar-nominated director David O. Russell, but that shift didn’t ward off the financial stress forever.

“In 2015, we were like, ‘We can’t do this anymore,’” Tauber said. “We were so burnt out and so exhausted.”

Some benefactors in the industry were dedicated to keeping Vidiots open and contributed financially to the cause, but with rent rising and people turning away from physical media, Vidiots had to close its original location in 2017. At the time, the Los Angeles Times reported that, according to Tauber, rentals had dropped 60% from the store’s early 2000s peak.

Robbie McCluskey, now the director of Vidiots’ video store, noticed the aftermath of that decline when he joined the store’s staff in 2013. And as streaming services like Netflix and Hulu became prevalent, Vidiots’ customer base had changed dramatically.

“We only had, like, a niche, core group of people that would come in, usually older, from the community, and we rented a lot of British TV shows and documentaries,” McCluskey said, referencing the kinds of titles that were still hard to find on streaming. “The average age of the customer was probably over 50.”

The situation seemed bleak, but Vidiots’ soul remained intact.

As Tauber and Pollinger were ready to step away and considering the store’s closure, the founders were connected to Maggie Mackay, a former film festival programmer who became Vidiots’ executive director in 2016 and has helped give the foundation a second life.

“You will never meet a more passionate, dedicated, determined person than Maggie,” Tauber said.

McCluskey, who stayed a part of the team through the 2017 closure to keep looking after the physical media collection, also felt confident that Vidiots would find a way to stay alive under Mackay’s stewardship.

“I knew, just from the short time working with her, that she was not the kind of person that was just going to give up on this,” McCluskey said.

Mackay knew that in order to give the new Vidiots staying power, they had to find a more hospitable location.

“The human beings that were most interested in Vidiots at that time happened to have migrated east,” Mackay said. “And I know that because I’m one of them. I’ve lived on the east side of Los Angeles for all but four years of my time here and and in each move, I moved further east … and I did very much what Patty and Cathy did in the ‘80s, which was to look for a gap in the culture.”

Before Vidiots’ revival, the east side was a “cinema desert” between Silver Lake and Pasadena, in Mackay’s description, and that a theater operation would offer revenue streams that could augment the video store.

So Mackay got to work on figuring out how to revive Vidiots. In the years between closing down Santa Monica and reopening in Eagle Rock, Annapurna Pictures, a Vidiots benefactor and the production company that connected Tauber and Pollinger to Mackay in the first place, paid for the storage of Vidiots’ collection, which remains over 50,000 titles strong and growing, and Mackay put together a new board of directors and advisory council to create a business plan.

One of those new board members was Claudia Puig, a longtime film critic for USA Today and NPR’s Film Week who eventually transitioned to working for film festivals herself. She currently serves as the programming director for the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

A hallway connecting the Eagle Theatre to the video store displays some of Vidiots' history

“Frankly, at the time, I was never sure it was going to happen,” Puig said, referring to the plan to re-open Vidiots. “There were times when it felt like it wasn’t going to happen at all.”

But Mackay and others persevered, assessing every possible location that might suit a new-look Vidiots. They considered auto body shops, empty warehouses and even outdoor spaces, before identifying Eagle Theatre, which had previously operated as a movie theater for 70 years, as a possible home. Except, there was one issue: the space had become a church in the early 2000s.

“Typically, in Los Angeles and other parts of the country, defunct movie theaters are often co-opted by churches, and once that happens, it’s pretty hard to get them back to their original purpose,” Mackay said.

Miraculously, though, the landlords who had purchased the building were Vidiots customers at the original location, creating a will to make something work on both sides.

“They very much liked the idea of having a female-founded business in their location, and they very much wanted the building to be something that would give back to the community and would be sustainable,” Mackay said.

Not long after the lease was signed, the COVID-19 pandemic struck, halting momentum, but Vidiots still launched a fundraising campaign and the landlords and architects stuck by Mackay and company.

“And quite frankly, the pandemic meant that we had a very attentive audience to speak to, because everybody was bored out of their minds. And they were scared, they were very scared that we were losing things. People stopped taking things for granted,” Mackay said. “Honestly, if it hadn’t happened that way, I don't know that we would have opened.”

Since Vidiots re-opened on June 1, 2023, that faith in and commitment to the vision has clearly paid off. Attracting around 40 patrons to attend a screening of “Cisco Pike” on a sunny Sunday afternoon in April is no simple task, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. In just the last couple months, Vidiots hosted director Rungano Nyoni for a screening of her recently released, A24 co-produced film “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,” and presented indie film screenings for the Los Angeles Festival of Movies as part of Vidiots’ ongoing collaboration with Mubi, the production company and streaming service operator that sponsors Vidiots’ “microcinema,” a smaller screening room adjacent to the main theater. Plenty of these showings, which cost $13 for an adult ticket, sell out online well in advance, such as a screening of 1984’s original “Dune” film directed by David Lynch, whose filmography has seen an increase in interest following the director’s passing in January.

When you go to Vidiots, “You’re just surrounded by people who are so impassioned by movies, they know their movies,” Puig said, and “[it’s] people of all ages, which is really nice. You know, a lot of times there’s demographics for certain movies. That doesn't happen here. This transcends that. You can go to a classic old movie and people of all ages will be there.”

Repertory screenings have surged in popularity for younger people in particular. One such frequent attendee is Brennan Ryan, 27, a cinema and media studies masters student at the University of Southern California, who caught the Vidiots bug after being struck by its combination of programming and community.

“The people that go there, they’re like regulars and they just love all different kinds of movies,” Ryan said. “And for someone like me, who has pretty wide-ranging taste … it’s just great and they have great events, they have a bar and they have the video store. There's really nothing like it.”

And while the theater may have been the main attraction that has driven Vidiots’ newfound success, the video store has thrived as well, somewhat to Mackay’s surprise.

A shelf in the directors section

“I did not anticipate the immediate return to the video store,” Mackay said. “The video store is not a museum. It is not something that just sits there, sort of giving people a good, nice, nostalgic feeling. It is an active and thriving business.”

The goal isn’t to maximize revenue from video rentals, having deliberately set a fairly low price — just $3 per title — to check out any DVD, Blu-ray or 4K UHD disc.

“We don’t want to profit on the video store if it means [not] keeping people in the video store and bringing new people in,” Mackay said, a sentiment McCluskey echoed.

“I just want everything to be available for as long as possible to as many people as possible,” he said. And perhaps to their own surprise, the demographic of people renting videos has gotten younger.

“This is not just a handful of film nerds that have come back to the video store. We’re talking about an entire community with a new generation of kids who are just growing up … they have no idea that this is an anomaly,” Mackay said.

Part of Vidiots’ success can certainly be attributed to the space’s family-friendly, all-are-welcome atmosphere.

“There are aesthetic decisions — like the color scheme of the logo, and the branding, and the energy, and the carpeting and the chairs and all those things — that are not overtly masculine and bro-y,” said Sean Fennessey, host of The Big Picture movie podcast for The Ringer and a founding member at Vidiots.

“The unconventionality to some of the programming and the expectation that you don't really know [what will play] … They’re still trying to feel around at what it could be. And that openness and that sense of inclusivity, I think, makes what they do special,” Fennessey said.

Mackay has also noticed that Vidiots’ theater audiences skew younger than she expected.

“Most art house theaters really struggle to bring younger generations in. We do not have that problem. In fact, there are days where I’m like, ‘Is anybody over 40 in this building?’”

As one of those under 40s, Ryan also appreciates that, in a turbulent time for the film industry writ large, Vidiots is simultaneously a platform for rediscovering older movies and showcasing new releases and filmmakers.

“Having theaters that can do both, it’s so important to keeping the medium alive and keeping people interested in it,” Ryan said. “They play everything, and it’s always fun.”

So, with the two-year reopening anniversary fast approaching, what does Vidiots’ future hold? Just continuing to survive and helping the filmgoing ritual thrive would be more than enough, especially in our current climate.

“Running a nonprofit in economic downturns is really frightening,” Mackay said. “We have to really figure out what we’re going to do if a lot of funding goes away. But I don’t anticipate that our audience will disappear on us. That's not going to happen.”

If anything, in Mackay’s eyes, Vidiots becomes even more essential in turbulent times.

“They’re going to need it more, definitely, and the fires have proved that,” she said, referring to the wildfires that swept through parts of Los Angeles in January.

In that sense, it’s fitting that a monument to the love of movies occupies the remains of an actual church.