The late ’80s was all about those VHS and Beta video rentals. Aisles upon aisles, lining the walls of thousands and thousands of stores around the world, all filled with tapes promising to entertain, or better yet change your life in various meaningful ways: how to breakdance, how to quilt, how to psychically communicate with your cat.
“There's a video for everything,” Ben Hollis recalls thinking, as he was browsing his local rental store back in the day. “What if there was one for loneliness?”
At the time, in 1986, Ben was working for Career Dynamics, a startup producing tapes for corporate audiences. He had just wrapped up a video about retirement planning when the company told him there was enough money left over to make something small and personal. His then-dormant creative side came out.
Around that time, his first marriage was on the verge of collapse, which he admits may have quietly informed the project, even if he didn’t recognize it at the time. Rent-a-Friend was presented as a service, offering on-demand companionship. An aid to the down and out. But was it being genuine, or was this a gag gift? Watching it, you’ll find it settles somewhere between sincerity and performance.
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“It came out kinda puzzling to many people,” Hollis says. “Was I being serious or not? Well, I wanted it all ways.” Ben admits he thought it could serve as a piece to advance his creative career while helping those in need of company at the same time.
The friend on offer, “Sam,” feels more genuine than not. He’s clearly not just a character. With the specificity of his stories, it becomes evident Sam is telling much of Ben’s own history.
When I ask him about it, he confirms. “I didn’t make up anything about Sam. Just the name.”
The photos on the tape are of Ben’s family. The yearbook is his. The girl he points out, Nancy, the one he had a 5 or 6 year crush on - that was definitely Ben's old crush. It's pretty evident and it's all laid out for you, a friend in need, to take in. It establishes trust. This man really does want you to know who he is and where he's coming from.
The confessional moment near the end of Rent-a-Friend is a real one too, where he cringes at the thought of how manipulative he was once upon a time. The slightly awkward energy throughout the tape is real. The stuffed animal he kisses on two occasions, it's real. The gift he shows off from his grandparents. The story of his bigger brother laying on him. The exited noise he'd make as a child! That's all Ben. The whole tape plays like a first date; over-sharing, searching for what to say next, a quiet desperation to get a laugh from a potential new companion. There’s a vulnerability to it and that is definitely the project’s greatest strength.
During production Hollis worked from an outline on the floor, avoiding using a teleprompter, letting the tape unfold in one long, unbroken take. Nothing smoothed over. Nothing hidden.
“That’s how we wanted it,” he says.
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That desire to create something natural and earnest didn’t end there. Years later, Hollis became the host of Wild Chicago, a weekly local program where, dressed in a safari outfit, he highlighted the people and places of his home.
“It was a popular program, but I didn’t realize how much work it took to put up a half-hour series. I needed a break,” he says.
A few years later, an opportunity emerged to return to local television on his own terms, something that feels almost impossible now.
“I wanted to continue to explore Chicago and its suburbs without wearing the safari outfit. And I was enamoured with the idea of filming it all myself.”
What followed was Ben Loves Chicago, on Channel 50, a stripped-down evolution of his prior show. The series ran from 1996-1998 and became a kind of love letter to the people who made up his regional world - inventors of robots, alien abductees, Frank Sinatra impersonators, and passers-by on the sidewalk. There's a difference, as Ben puts it, between play and ridicule. There's a way of engaging with people without flattening them.
“I learned you ask questions and try to get out of the way,” he says. “It was basically me and the camera guy. We shot it on mini-DV, which was revolutionary. Very little supervision.”
The series would go on to win an Emmy Award (not his first.) At one point, Hollis showed me the statue - pretty damaged. “They’re brittle,” he said.
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Across his Emmy Award-winning programs, in Rent-a-Friend, and in the projects he continues today, the same question keeps surfacing: how do you connect to your fellow human?
Now, decades later, Hollis can look back on that question and on himself from a distance.
“I get to see my work from 30 years ago,” he says. “I get this opportunity to look at me as a young man and ask myself what was going on there. There’s a slight disorientation in that. The person on screen begins to feel like someone else familiar, but separate."
At the same time, there’s a gratitude Ben expresses. The work continues to circulate, finding new audiences and prompting reactions he never could have predicted: letters, phone calls, interviews, even a marriage proposal addressed to Sam.
“It’s an investment that’s paid off in ways I didn’t expect,” he says.
What carries through, and what we’re really happy to present on Eternal, is the feeling in these works. A tone that’s hard to pin down but easy to recognize: openness, curiosity, a light, playful warmth that feels increasingly rare in an era of endless content competing for your short attention span.
There’s a line Hollis remembers from a public speaking class: people don’t remember what you said, but how you made them feel.
“Connectivity is a big part of my work. I want to connect; a perceived deficit in my earthly life.”
Decades on, Ben Hollis’s work continues to do just that.
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