colin grant
WHEN COLIN GRANT was 18, he had an idea for what he says was intended to be a hobby. He thought it might be fun to hire out videos, so he gathered together 85 and made them available to a local sports club. Technically, he wasn't an adult member and he needed a grown-up partner to facilitate matters, but he was already used to playing doubles. At the time, he was spending most of his life on tennis courts in Southeast Asia and the video-supply idea was just another game.
Now he's 35, an ex-Davis Cup player for Hong Kong, where he has lived since he was 10, and he has a company called Movieland with 53,000 videos. It isn't a juggernaut: he has seven stores and, as he points out, Hong Kong at its video-hiring peak (which has apparently passed, of which more later) had more than 700 outlets. But he is a specialist. Each of his stores stocks every film that has won a Best Picture Oscar since the first Academy Awards in 1928 (when the winner was a little-known epic called Wings) until last year (when it was won by another epic featuring planes,The English Patient). This year's winner, Titanic, should berth in a couple of months. He believes that his are the only stores in the world that can claim this achievement.
He has almost all of the films that have won Best Foreign Film since the category was introduced at the Oscars in 1956; he's currently negotiating with a private collector to complete the set. And he has cult television programmes. He has every episode of Star Trek: the original series, the Next Generation series, Deep Space Nine and Voyager. So popular are these that Movieland has a 'Trekie Card' which entitles viewers to 12 tapes for $100. 'We have some pretty wild Trekies with outrageous demands,' explains Grant about this concession. 'They usually want 12 tapes for a Star Trek party. They're good customers.' We met in the Lan Kwai Fong store, where a video was playing episodes of Friends above the popcorn machine from which shameless customers have been known to fill Tupperware containers prior to a night's viewing. Given this enjoyable ambience, I was hoping Grant might be unavoidably detained but he turned up exactly on time. That seemed characteristic. He's a polite, affable, regular kind of chap, the sort of sportsmanlike individual you could happily bring home to your family.
The last governor certainly thought so: Grant was his tennis coach and when Chris Patten was asked what he would miss about Hong Kong one of his comments was that 'Colin was everything, friend, coach, therapist'. During the weeks before the handover, the pair could hardly play a game without a posse of camera crews standing by, sporting puns at the ready to sum up the loss of the British Empire.
'Now I realise how much fun I had going up there,' said Grant quietly over iced tea in California's. 'Breakfast on the verandah, dinner on Sunday nights often, going out on the Lady Maurine. Hong Kong has changed so much since then.' Perhaps the most striking change took place on Legco's last Friday of business under British rule, when the Government passed a law effectively preventing parallel imports. Grant briefly explained the situation thus: 'I have a niche market, I cater for expats. The reason we've been successful is that we have a non-subtitled product which is what our customers want. Now it's a criminal offence to import those videos from England or the States instead of buying from the agents here. For my market, that's pretty bad.' He sighed. 'Because there's less supply and releases are being delayed, everyone's losing out. Forty or 50 video shops have gone bust. Okay, blame the economic downturn, but in a downturn this sort of business should be better, right?' Right, I agreed. He looked up from the sugar packet he was fiddling with, smiled and apologised for ranting on. 'But the last six months ... you wouldn't believe it. I was in a simple business a year ago. It used to be easy. Now this is taking up 90 per cent of my time.' I thought the films themselves might prove to be some kind of solace but apparently not. Quentin Tarantino used to work in a video store and I've been to some (especially in the US) where you just know that the guys behind the counter are going home to carve out screenplays of angst and mayhem, but Grant isn't like that. He enjoys films, and he's the kind of person you'd want on your team if you were playing cinema charades, but I wouldn't say he's passionate about them. 'For me, it's a business. One which has changed a hell of a lot. When you realise that you might commit a possible criminal offence, it's worrying.' Mind you, he became much more cheerful when I began to question him about his stock. 'Ask me, ask me,' he cried, thumping the table (so the tennis has left its legacy of competitiveness, even though he described himself as 'a boring player, I waited until my opponent fell asleep or collapsed, I'd be out there for hours'). A Clockwork Orange? 'Yes. Each shop has that, it's a good film even though it's banned in England.' Natural Born Killers? 'Yes. Lousy film.' The Goalkeeper's Fear Of The Penalty? 'Yes.
Hmm, wonder if that went out during the World Cup.' Is there anything he wouldn't stock? 'Well, we're not strong on Adult. We're more of a family store.' Still, he said he'd order any film requested by one of his 15,000 members. 'Even if it doesn't rent well, if one person wants it, it's worth having.' His own tastes are entirely middle-of-the-road. He likes Sean Connery (early or late? 'Late'), Meg Ryan and The Shawshank Redemption. And travel documentaries. When I asked him what he'd like to be doing in 15 years' time he immediately answered, 'I'd just like to travel the world. That is a passion. I have a group of friends and we like planning where we go a year in advance. And if you can focus on that, it's quite nice.' And the Oscars? 'Oh yes, I'd like to go to the Oscars one day.'
