(Note: Copywronged is a 13 part blog of the backstory behind the 2019 Orphan Works Trial. You have come in the middle of story. Click back to beginning for the FULL story )
The year was 2006, and EDGE Video in Brewer was booming. While the store/online combo was an almost instant success, I was a little bored. My original idea was to build a chain of stores, but not in the conventional way. One thing that bothered me about working at other big chains was how uniform they were, regardless of location. No originality or creativity. And I don't care how good your metrics are: what works on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills won't necessarily fly on Main Street in Bangor.
One of the Brewer EDGE customers, Fast Tony, told me about a shop next to his downtown Bangor pizzeria that was closing down. He said everyone called him Fast Tony because he moved, talked, and thought fast. He also carried a gun on his hip everywhere, for reasons I never quite understood, but eventually, I stopped caring.
The shop he mentioned was called "Needful Things." Aside from having a cool name, it was some kind of catch-all collector's resale shop. I'd never been inside, but I knew of the owner, whom I'll call "Johnny Pockets" for now.
I knew of Johnny Pockets because of another guy named Anthony Berry, a frequent customer at the Movie Gallery where I used to work. I know this is starting to sound like a bad Bangor version of Goodfellas, but thankfully, as far as I know, no one ever got whacked. And again, "I know of" is the important part of that statement.
I had spoken to Mr. Berry several times at Movie Gallery because I'd heard he sold things online. We compared notes, and I mostly picked his brain. He often mentioned his best friend and partner, "Jonathan," who I later found out was Johnny Pockets.
So I called Mr. Pockets. He said, "Yeah, yeah, I got some stuff I want to sell. But what I really want is to sell the whole store. I'd give you a GREAT deal, and I'm locked into a sweet rental price. If you buy my store, I'll make sure the landlord gives you the same deal."
He told me the price, and although I thought it was ridiculously high, I brought the cash with me. You never know, I thought, there could be $50,000 or $60,000 in saleable products there. But I should have known better. Since Johnny Pockets sold stuff online, he probably wasn't sitting on much of value.
Walking into the shop, I immediately fell in love with the location: large front windows, high ceilings, and a cool little loft-like nook at the back. The place reeked of Bangor history. I could feel the spirits of generations of shopkeepers, and my mind raced with the types of businesses that had occupied the space before Needful Things. That name definitely fit the location... until I met the current shopkeeper, Johnny Pockets. After five minutes of talking to him, I knew two things: we were probably never going to make a deal, and his street name fit him better than "Needful Things" fit the location.
He was straight out of central casting for The Sopranos: gold chain, probably expensive clothes, even the mobster way of talking. The shop had a little bit of everything, but not much of anything. Records, clothes, sports memorabilia, comics, signed Stephen King books (which I later found out Johnny probably signed himself), and... wait for it, Star Wars stuff. The only thing I really wanted was a huge Millennium Falcon hanging from the ceiling. It was ten times bigger than the toy sold to kids across America in the 1970s. Apparently, it was from one of the local movie premieres of the prequels that had been released years earlier.
As I listened to Johnny's pitch about what a great deal this would be for me, and wondered if he had ever actually broken anyone's kneecaps, I noticed the shop had a ton of foot traffic. Most people just came in, looked around, and left, because the place was as well-stocked as a week-old yard sale. But the traffic flow was impressive.
I was still on the fence about making an offer when I said, "I don't know if I would keep the Millennium Falcon here or move it to Brewer. I was thinking of having a Star Wars section over there."
Johnny Pockets looked up at it, then back at me, and said, "Oh, that's not part of the deal. The Falcon is coming with me."
That was it. I thanked Johnny for his time and said I'd be in touch (which I never was).
After Johnny closed down and moved out, I called the landlord of 32 Main Street and expressed my interest in the location. Edge Video 2, the downtown store, was up and running the next weekend.
I'd always felt like the Millennium Falcon had saved me that day, just like it saved Luke at the end of the original Star Wars. Nearly twenty years later, I started to realize that the ship had set my life on a path toward a bigger battle with the dark side. But that's another story...
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