When I started volunteering at Odd Obsession Movies as a 23-year-old in early 2006, the store was in its first location on Halsted Street, sitting snugly in a basement storefront opposite the Steppenwolf Theatre. I discovered the store by accident before going to a play one evening, and after that, I began stopping in about once a week. I couldn’t resist the lure of movies that, until then, I’d only dreamed of watching: video works by Jean-Luc Godard never released on Region 1 DVD, features by lesser-known directors of the Japanese New Wave, hard-to-find cult classics like Stephanie Rothman’s The Velvet Vampire (1971) and John Byrum’s Inserts (1975), and experimental films by the likes of Andy Warhol, Pat O’Neill, and Rob Tregenza. And then there were all the movies I hadn’t even heard of; I wanted to spend hours in the store just browsing the collection.
I made other great friends through the store, whether customers or fellow volunteers. The list would be too long to present in full here, but deserving special mention is Darnell Witt, who started a free cine club at his loft showing rare movies, many rented from Odd Obsession, around the time I started volunteering at the store. In 2007 several people who attended these screenings started the website Cine-File.info (now CineFile.info), where I first started writing about movies and where I continue to contribute today. A lot of the writing that appeared on the site in its early days feels like it grew out of conversations that happened at the store; even though Brian never contributed, I feel like he influenced the site’s policy of not publishing negative reviews. The attitude fostered by Odd Obsession was inclusive—André Bazin’s dictum “All films are created equal” could have served as the store’s motto.
