4 minute read
Fact or Fiction? You Be the Judge
People in Places Feature by Sheila Turner-Hilliard
There once was a time when hunting down a Hollywood classic movie or watching the latest summer blockbuster in December meant going to the local video store. For those lucky enough to bear witness, Ardmore’s Viva Video made that trip down memory lane a reality up until just a few months ago.
And if you stopped in out of sheer curiosity or to rent a movie, you probably saw Newtown Square resident Bryan Way behind the counter. He said he had been asked more than a few times, “Why hang onto a job that won’t be there for much longer?” Bryan’s response: “When I find something I’m passionate about, I stick with it.”
Originally from Upper Darby, Bryan moved to our area in grade school. He went to Marple Newtown Senior High School and graduated from Temple University. He spent a brief time working in Los Angeles before returning home and taking a job at TLA Video in Bryn Mawr. When the video rental industry began to slump, TLA folded, and Bryan was out of a job.
His long-time manager Miguel Gomez asked Bryan to join him at Viva Video, where he grew into a management role. “No reasonable person believes a dying industry like that could afford many opportunities,” Bryan said. “But the shared passion of the Viva staff made an impression on the right people, and we made it work.”
As it turns out, not giving up on the DVD rental industry had its advantages. In 2019, Viva Video was the subject of a television pilot on the SYFY Channel. Aired as Midnight Rewind, the program featured Bryan and his coworkers cut into John Carpenter’s cult classic They Live. “If nothing else, the pilot taught me a lesson about perseverance,” Bryan said. “All we can do with the time we have is find something we love and dedicate ourselves to it passionately. That’s what I did with Viva.”
Bryan Way’s last day at Viva Video
Photo courtesy of Roxy Snavely
Though clips remain on the internet today, the pilot was not picked up or re-aired. Viva Video was ultimately priced out of the Main Line storefront market and closed this past September. So, where does Bryan put his passion now? “I write,” he explained. “When I was a teenager in the ’90s, I fell in love with zombies.” That fascination endured, and he decided to embark on a new adventure. Bryan said that he hears all the time that you should write what you know. He said, “Put simply, I know zombies, and I know Newtown Square.”
The setting of Way’s debut self-published novel, Life After: The Arising, is Newtown Square circa 2004. He described his work as his vision of an undead epidemic, with adolescent angst and self-aware pop culture references. The story is inflected with horror, action, and humor instead of the usual cheap scares, thin characters and mundane carnage. He asks, “What if the collapse of society is just a metaphor for growing up and struggling to find your place in the world?” Bryan was raised with the idealistic notion that life is there for the taking. “But like many in my generation, I learned the hard way that it is not.” In Life After: The Arising, he said that zombies are the embodiment of that challenge.
What possessed Bryan to conjure the living dead in his hometown? “I love it here!” he chuckled. “I spent my youth in Marple Newtown at the Gauntlett Center, in Granite Run Mall, and gazing fondly at the Springton Reservoir. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a nostalgic love letter began to merge.” Maintaining his good humor and appreciating the irony of being a recently deposed video store clerk writing in an outdated genre is not lost on Bryan.
Following Life After: The Arising, Bryan self-published a sequel, Life After: The Void. He also recently debuted three new short stories. His most recent, Life After: The Line of Duty, imagines the local police department scrambling to contain the havoc wrought by the undead in Delaware County. While a resurrection of the zombie genre seems as likely as the dead rising in Newtown Square, that does nothing to tarnish Bryan’s passionate dedication. “Maybe zombies are passé, but this series is my “Game of Thrones” and I’ll never run out of stories to tell. If people keep reading, I’ll keep writing.”
Fact or Fiction?
Pennsylvania’s last video store clerk calls Newtown Square home? That’s a FACT!
But is it fiction or fact that Newtown Square was the epicenter of a zombie outbreak in 2004? That’s FICTION!
But if you’d like to see that world, Bryan Way’s “Life After” series and his other fictional works, often using local references, are available to purchase online at Amazon.
