Odd Obsession Movies is underground in more ways than one. The rental store and screening room, which specializes in unreleased, foreign, and extremely rare films, is squeezed into the small basement of an old house across from Steppenwolf Theatre.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“I think a lot of people think Brian’s quirky and kinda weird,” says Melina Paez, his 29-year-old girlfriend, who quit a marketing job to help with the store. “He is pretty obsessed with film. I think he’s obsessed with the character Ferdinand from Godard’s Pierrot le fou.” The Odd Obsession Web site features a picture of Chankin in blue face paint as Ferdinand, a character Chankin describes as someone “just searching for his ideals,” at a Halloween party last year.
“The French New Wave is my baby,” says Chankin, who grew up in New Mexico. “I rented 10 to 15 movies a week from an indie video store in Albuquerque. I’ll be impressed if you can get me to talk about anything other than movies.”
He moved to Chicago in 2002 after earning a BFA in photography from the University of New Mexico. He managed Antique Resources on Belmont for a while, then about eight months ago he got the idea of turning his vast movie collection (about 4,000 titles) into a video store. But he admits the store is mostly an excuse for him to get his hands on even more movies. “I know this is nothing that’s gonna make me a rich man,” he says. “Just as long as I have the money to keep on buying movies, I’m content. That’s basically my whole philosophy. I can’t just borrow movies. I have to have everything. It’s a personal thing.”
The fact that Chankin is the only person making management decisions should work in his favor, according to Mojica. At Big Brother, he says, “there were three partners, and each person had their own ideas about how things should run.”
Odd Obsession Movies
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Bruce Powell.
