Hollywood Video Stops Collection Activities

Hollywood Video — that place you used to go to with your parents on those awkward Wednesdays before Thanksgiving to pick out a movie the whole family would enjoy — declared bankruptcy in February 2010 and shut down all of its stores across the country three months later^*.

What to do, then, with those people who kept I Am Curious (Yellow) out a little too long and now have a substantial late fee on the books for Hollywood Video? Or what if you lost a copy of The Avengers? Those accounts had been turned over to National Credit Solutions, based in Oklahoma. However, after a series of complaints from Hollywood Video customers, Hollywood Video’s parent company, Movie Gallery Inc., decided to pull those delinquent acconts.

Customers complained that NCS was reporting their allegedly delinquent accounts to credit reporting agencies without first notifying them of the debts or giving them an opportunity to deny the debt. Movie Gallery Inc., in a move known as “throwing up the hands,” not only pulled the accounts, but also “agreed not to report any more delinquent Hollywood video accounts to the bureaus.” Going the extra mile (for reasons that don’t make a lot of sense to this reporter), Movie Gallery also agreed to give consumers a free pass on both late fees and replacement costs for late or lost items like Bunny Lake is Missing or that movie where Melanie Griffith tries to disguise herself as an Hasidic Jew because someone else had already rented Witness.

^* It’s possible that there are a few malingering Hollywood Videos still left in abandoned strip-malls across the country next to derelict TCBYs and those portrait places where you can get your head superimposed in a brandy snifter with a single elegant rose.