Preteen Maggie Mackay discovered the little-known film Hope and Glory at her local New York City video store in the 1980s. The film, which follows a family living in suburban London during World War Two, might not have been the average tween’s first choice, but thanks to the unbridled access the video store offered young Mackay, she fell in love with the art form of film.
“It was not really a hospitable neighborhood that I grew up in, for kids,” Mackay said. “I always say suburban kids had bikes. I had the video store and my local movie theater.”
Now, she’s the Executive Director of Vidiots in Los Angeles, a 40-year-old women-led institution whose Movie Den program introduces young Angelenos to a wide variety of films, and to the community they can find at the cinema.
“I could be in those spaces with autonomy, with agency and by myself. That’s a really big deal for tweens and teens,” Mackay said. “I’ve always known that I am myself because I had those spaces when I was a teenager. We knew that Vidiots had been that space for a long time.”
Vidiots, the video store, movie theater and nonprofit organization, has a legacy in Los Angeles, both in its first iteration as a Santa Monica video store, and now with its expanded operations at Eagle Theatre. According to Mackay, it has served the same purpose for many teenage Angelenos as her beloved video store: a place of community gathering and cinematic education.
In the wake of the Palisades and Eaton fires last year, Mackay said she reflected on the great loss that the nearby Altadena community was experiencing, and decided to begin Movie Den, a repertory matinee film screening series aimed at a tween and teen audience, to create a space where kids could get off of social media and come together.
After a successful first summer, Movie Den is back with screenings of coming-of-age films at Vidiots’ MUBI Microcinema every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Movie Den will run June 15 through August 5, offering curated afternoon screenings including Sunset Boulevard, I Was Born, But…, Rope and The Last Dragon.
Thanks to the program’s sponsor, Golden Globe Foundation, tickets are only $2, giving patrons a classic moviegoing experience down to the affordable original pricing — with free popcorn.
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“We’ve done everything we can to remove the barriers, so that any kid could just walk in the door,” Mackay said. “We kept it intentionally low lift for our team, but big impact for the community.”
Mackay said third spaces like Vidiots — video stores, record shops, comic book stores or libraries — can provide a community gathering space that is welcoming, affordable and equitably accessible for young people.
“If you build it, they will come,” she said.
Sales of DVDs have indicated that Gen Z has been increasingly gravitating towards physical media in recent years. According to the Los Angeles Times, in January of this year, Vidiots said it had its biggest month ever, renting an average of 170 movies daily and 500 titles in one day. Vidiots rented about 22,000 discs the year of its reopening in 2023; in 2024, the number doubled to about 50,000, and hit 1,000 movies a week in 2025, according to the L.A. Times.
Mackay said part of the appeal of the video store for young people is that, as opposed to a digital algorithm that curates recommendations for users based on their existing preferences, the video store offers seemingly endless aisles to discover and expand your horizons.
“That led to me, at 10, 11 years old, discovering the great concert doc Stop Making Sense,” Mackay said. “Stop Making Sense was not made for a 10 year old. It was not marketed to a 10 year old. So you’re basically breaking down all these barriers and creating absolute total unfettered access.”
While it may seem that streaming services offer a similarly expansive catalog, Mackay said the idea that streaming services hold all of the history of the over 100-year-old art form is a myth.
“It’s just not feasible to recreate in any world a comparable point of access to a video store that is filled with physical media and is not basing their choices on box office reports,” Mackay said. “And it’s as much as we can possibly fit in that physical space, and so [Vidiots’ collection] is always growing. It’s always changing, but it’s also totally reliable.”
With the power of curating a selection of films to show to impressionable young minds comes great responsibility, as Vidiots introduces the next generation of moviegoers to film history. When choosing the films they show, Mackay said they try to both give the kids what they want, and encourage them to watch films they might not immediately gravitate towards.
“We know that everything we’re feeding them is dessert, but some things look like broccoli, and so you have to figure out how to make the thing that looks like broccoli look like dessert, because that’s what it really is,” Mackay said.
Mackay attributes the uptick in attendance at arthouse cinemas nationwide to people realizing the value of human interaction around film, both in the small moments between a renter and a clerk, or two strangers standing in the same section looking at the same title, and in watching a movie together.
“You cannot beat the experience of watching a laugh-out-loud comedy with other human beings,” Mackay said. “It’s also the catharsis of doing something together, of seeing a movie the way that it’s meant to be seen and heard.”
Vidiots’ accessible screenings don’t end when school starts up again. Vidiots is a Teen Tix partner, which means 13- to 19-year-olds can sign up for a free TeenTix Pass they can show at the box office to see a film for just $5. Video rentals at Vidiots are only $3 per title, maintaining an affordable price to encourage the next generation of cinephiles to pick up a disc.
“The experience of making a discovery in the video store, not because some robot thought that you should see it, but because another human being said, ‘Oh, I love that movie. Have you seen this?’ That’s magic,” Mackay said.