And here in the heart of Houston, I couldn't rent it either.
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/07/3036/Dixie Chicks Get ‘Checked Out’
Impossible To Rent & Difficult To Buy - ‘Shut Up & Sing’ At Last
by John Young
WACO, Texas —
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One problem is that I no longer knew how to contact my friend Jerry. He’s the one-time convenience-store employee who supplied for me a copy of Martin Scorcese’s “Last Temptation of Christ,” in a brown envelope, back in 1988.
That controversial film was stopped at every port in our landlocked city - not shown in theaters; couldn’t rent it; couldn’t buy it; the cable company blocked it on Showtime.
Three summers ago when Waco theaters weren’t showing “Fahrenheit 9/11,” I tried to hook Michael Moore up with Jerry so that we in Waco could see what all the fuss was about. Moore liked my idea but took my middle man out of the equation. Sorry, Jerry. He sent the film to peace groups who cued it up in the Crawford High School football stadium parking lot before some 3,000 people.
Now here we are in 2007 with a similar problem, and no Jerry to facilitate. So deeply did I feel about the right of people in our community to decide for themselves on matters like “Shut Up and Sing” that I said to myself, “OK. I’m going into video rental.”
I would buy the video for $16.99, and then would rent it to you and yours to recoup my investment.
I’m so happy to tell you I didn’t have to do that. I didn’t because I made one more call. I should have thought about it first:
The public library.
The Waco-McLennan County Library has a copy of “Shut Up and Sing.” It will loan you that copy for free if you have a library card. This means I won’t have to rent it to you. That’s a relief. I already had enough on my hands leading various tribes out of the wilderness.
I told reference librarian Sean Sutcliffe about my problems renting the video. We speculated that this might be a problem elsewhere in America’s heartland. Then he did a computer search for the title in other libraries in the country. Publicly supported beacons of free inquiry popped up on his screen by the hundreds.
What a country.