At the Old Video Store

I watched the documentary Val the other night. It’s a rather good nostalgic look back at Val Kilmer’s life and career, seen through the lens of Val’s own camera, as he was an early adopter of home video. Since his childhood, he has been shooting home movies and video in his personal life and on set. So the documentary features biographical and behind-the-scenes content from the past 50 years.

I’m not sure his life would make for an interesting enough story to be the subject of a documentary without the original footage. But with it, the movie was very good. I think that speaks both to the power of primary sources and the importance of good visuals.

The section of the documentary that covered the Jim Morrison biopic The Doors reminded me that when that movie came out on VHS, I was the dry erase marker artist for our local video store, and I drew a picture of Kilmer as Morrison in dry erase marker to tease the movie’s release

It was based on the image from the movie poster.

I was 16 years old, and I spent a lot of time at the video store. It was called Absolute Video, in the same little strip mall as our local grocery store. I rented a ton of movies and Nintendo games there.

Every month, I would erase the previous month’s drawing and make a new one, along with a list of upcoming movie releases. In exchange, they gave me free rentals.

Drawing in dry erase marker is hard. I only had something like five colors. So I relied a lot on stippling to try to create some variation in tone. Here’s another example:

I credit my father for taking photos of the drawings. I never did. I considered these ephemeral. But he used to go into the store with his camera and take pictures of my artwork. Unfortunately, these are the only two I have. I think somewhere there are photos of my drawings for The Little Mermaid and The Silence of the Lambs, probably others.

Sometimes, he went in with a video camera to shoot the artwork. The video camera didn’t have very high resolution, so the image ends up looking muddy like this:

He would zoom and pan to capture more detail, but you can’t see it all in one shot:

Looks like this was right around the time I graduated high school. So it was probably one of the last ones I did before going off to college.

My Signature

Seeing my signature on those is a little embarrassing. This is what it looked like:

I signed all my drawings that way as a teenager. I was inspired by the signature of my then-favorite comic book artist, Todd McFarlane, whose signature looked like this:

Of course, his big stretched out lines make sense. Mine, not so much.

And on the topic of embarrassing things related to Todd McFarlane, here is a photo of the two of us at Comic Con in 1988:

Keen observers will recognize the Comic-Con badge and X-Men pin from my autobiography in buttons.

That’s it for this week. If you haven’t seen it yet, go watch Val! And if there are any other recent documentaries you recommend, leave a note in the comments. I’m always looking for a good documentary.

Until next time, thanks for reading!

David