Return to Mondo Kim’s

A couple of weeks ago, I sat with one hundred people in a poorly air-conditioned room in downtown Manhattan to watch a VHS copy of Mondo New York (1988). The screening was the first in a series culled from the vast stock of the long-defunct Mondo Kim’s. For those readers not from New York or too young to remember, Mondo Kim’s sold and rented video (and audio) media on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village from 1995 to 2009. Founded by one Yongman Kim, Mondo was the mothership of the Kim’s Video empire, which started in Kim’s dry cleaning business in 1987 before expanding to several rental and sales locations. The video store on St. Mark’s was a cinephilic pleasuredome stocked with 55,000 VHS and DVD rental titles: bootleg French New Wave; deep-cut wuxia; ’60s experimental films; legendary concerts; rare arthouse; Turkish rip-offs of Hollywood films; and singular oddities like the Heaven’s Gate initiation tape. The stock was arranged by country, genre, and then director—the last category serving as a snobby barrier of entry for the casual customer who didn’t know William Wyler from Billy Wilder. A lot of the stock was bootlegged, often by Mr. Kim himself, and it was rumored that FBI anti-piracy brigades made frequent appearances.