The footage has the graininess of something recorded on a 1980s video camera. The man captured by the lens appears middle-aged and his name is Doug. He is wearing a striped sweater and wide glasses.
He speaks in halting sentences and looks uncomfortable to be on camera.
“How would it feel to be in love?” he says, with a deep sigh and pause. “Well, that — how would it feel to be in love is like — I really — I would really, really, really like to know.”
The clip comes from VHS Dates, an Instagram account with nearly 900,000 followers.
The people behind the account describe the origin story for the undated footage: “The box of VHS tapes was found in the basement of our office in Downtown L.A.” They are estimated to be from the “mid 80s to the early 90s” and from a company called “VHS Dates” that “existed in Van Nuys, California.”
The clips show the kind of videotape dating service some people used in an era when no one had imagined swiping left.
Viewers, including some celebrities, were touched by the onscreen vulnerability, as well as the outfits and hairstyles that looked like something out of an old Sears catalog.
I, too, found it compelling. I scheduled an interview with the two filmmakers who said they had been digitizing the footage. Their publicist explicitly told me these were “real” dating tapes.
But when I showed up to meet them at a cavernous studio near downtown Los Angeles, they said, “This is where we shoot the videos.”
The clips, they revealed, are not found footage from a lost era. The videos are staged.
VHS Dates is the creation of Lee Citron and Trevor Worley, both 39, who met at the American Film Institute and have collaborated on comedy projects. They run a production company, Podhead Studios.
For the videos, they hired actors, who were asked to keep their participation secret. The performers read bits conceived by Citron and Worley, and the actors themselves. “Doug,” for example, is portrayed by the actor Ryan Gaul, a member of the Groundlings improvisational theater company.
“I had actually been tricked by it and thought they were real,” Gaul said about getting approached by Citron and Worley.
The posts come across as a sort of museum exhibit of one way of finding love in the days when Blockbuster was ascendant and people wanted their MTV. In some ways, such videos were a prototype of contemporary online dating. In others, they are an unfamiliar time capsule.
The videos are shot against a green screen. A 1980s Ikegami tube camera helps give the videos a retro look.
“There’s a lot of people out there who have never touched a VHS tape in their entire life that are still drawn to this,” said Charisse L’Pree Corsbie-Massay, an associate professor of communications at Syracuse University who studies how media affects identity. “So it is not even their nostalgia. It’s cultural nostalgia. Because it’s not just the tape, it’s also the hair. It’s all of the clothes. It also the slang. It’s a desire for what we envisioned as a simpler time.”
In recent months, the duo have begun dropping the facade, in part because some actors — mostly Los Angeles-based sketch comedians — began to be recognized. At a Tribeca Festival event in New York in June, they dropped the pretense and even invited some of the actors to appear with them.
“We kind of think of it like kayfabe,” said Worley, using a term that describes how pro wrestling audiences suspend their disbelief.
At a time when everything is “potentially fake online, it was interesting from an analog perspective to create something in that world,” he added in an interview at the studio where the tapes are filmed.
“We’re all so comfortable to be on camera now and perform,” Citron said. “But,” he added, “back in the day, you were awkward.”
Citron and Worley said they never expected the project to take off. While Citron said they have made about $10,000 selling VHS Dates merchandise, including VHS tapes with the filmed sketches, the account is a “labor of love.”
The meticulous costuming — featuring the wide range of ’80s looks, including larger-than-life curls, wide-frame glasses and horrifying sweaters — is mostly from Western Costume, a Los Angeles warehouse that supplies television and film productions. To research the looks, Citron and Worley in fact turned to old Sears catalogs.
“What people connect to with these characters is that they are lonely,” Citron said. “They are looking for love, and people looking for love is very relatable, very primal and very human.”
One of the characters was performed by Allison Dunbar, who, like Gaul, is a Groundlings cast member with credits that include the streaming series “For All Mankind” and “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.” She portrayed “Tina Terranova.”
Tina describes herself as a “M-80 firecracker with generous hips.”
When Dunbar first discovered VHS Dates on social media, she, too, thought the tapes were of real people. Then she spotted a friend, the actor David Crabb, as one of the characters. She wanted in, and even had a character in mind. The shoot took 45 minutes, and included improvised bits.
“There’s a vulnerability to putting yourself out there, and sharing your deepest wants and desires on a friggin’ VHS tape and hoping that someone sees it,” Dunbar said.
The actress Ashley Bell, who starred in the 2010 horror film “The Last Exorcism,” played “Marlene,” a woman who dresses conservatively, but who took up karate as a way to “get out some aggression.”
“If excellent is a choice, why would you want to wake up and be anything else but that?” Marlene says.
Enough people found the character so convincing that the top autocomplete suggestion when her name is typed into Google is “Marlene Dubois now.”
“Whether you currently found the love of your life or you’re still looking for somebody, we’ve all been at that awkward moment of searching,” Bell said.
Many followers of the VHS Dates account have long thought the videos were real, or wondered at the very least.
That includes a number of celebrities. Citron and Worley said the musician John Mayer once messaged the account. “You gotta tell me,” he wrote. “Are these: new fake, old fake, old real (though I believe this the least) I won’t tell a soul. Entertainer to entertainer…”
Citron and Worley — entertainer to entertainer — told Mayer the truth. Through a representative, Mayer declined to comment.
“It’s true because it feels true. It’s real because it feels real,” Corsbie-Massay, the Syracuse professor, said, adding, “If you told fans, ‘Hey, this isn’t real, this is all recorded,’ I don’t think they would like it less.”
I decided to test that out by speaking with some people who had written directly to Citron and Worley, and were wondering if the supposed cache from the Los Angeles basement might connect with their own personal histories.
The parents of Sara Gauthier, 31, met on a video dating service in the 1980s. She explained in an interview that she has long hoped to find the tapes because they would be “validation that the story that they had told us about our lives wasn’t a lie.”
She was stunned by the truth.
“I hate that,” she said.
As the news set in, she said she was “heartbroken.”
Allen Davoren, 63, sent an email to the filmmakers, too. He recorded a tape in the mid-1980s in Sunnyvale, Calif., he said. The cost to take part was $1,500. In an interview, Davoren recalled making a joke during his recording.
“At the time, there was a commercial on TV about ‘It’s 10 o’clock. You know where your kids are?’” he said in an interview. “I remember it was my chance to say, ‘It’s 10 o’clock. Do you know where your parents are?’”
It never led to a successful match, and Davoren ended up getting billed for only $400.
“Once they saw that I asked, like, a couple dozen girls out and they all said no, I think they felt sorry for me and just gave up,” Davoren said.
Like Gauthier, he was also caught off guard by the truth.
“Really?” he said. “They look just like the real thing back then.”
Joshua Eisman, 43, wrote the creators to say his grandfather, Edward, had co-founded a video dating service and had videotaped some of the interviewers of the would-be daters featured in the tapes decades before.
At the start of our interview, he said he was convinced that he could hear his grandfather’s voice off-camera asking questions of the subjects in some of the VHS Dates videos, and that his brothers heard it, too.
He said he didn’t mind learning the truth.
“I’m kind of happy in a weird way,” he said. “I just like the truth. I mean, my grandpa would be, too. He wouldn’t want me going around telling a story that’s a little inaccurate.”
