Did you see “Wedding Crashers”?
You remember: The 2005 movie in which two amiable goofballs, played by Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, show up uninvited at weddings to enjoy free drinks and meet women.
Maybe you saw it in the theater. Or maybe, it being 2005, you bought the DVD.
But we’re going to guess that if you did buy the DVD, you stopped at one.
Sable Adelaide did not stop at one. Over the course of four years she acquired 1,200 copies of “Wedding Crashers” on DVD. Now, she has decided it’s time to relinquish them, and she’s found a destination for most of them: the little library boxes found all around her city, Minneapolis.
How many were placed in these boxes? “Oh, I’m ashamed of myself, but probably 800, 900,” she said in an interview on Tuesday.
It started in 2021, when Miss Adelaide, a videographer and musician, was browsing in a pawnshop in Fargo, N.D., where she lived at the time. “They had 25 copies of ‘Wedding Crashers’ available for 25 cents apiece,” she said. “So I came home with a pretty good joke for $6.25.”
The joke was asking her roommate to pick a movie to watch. “He goes to the shelf and comes back, like, ‘What is wrong with you?’”
It didn’t end there. In an era when everyone was dumping their DVDs as streaming proliferated, she kept coming across copies of “Wedding Crashers” wherever she looked. And if 25 “Wedding Crashers” DVDs was funny, surely 100 would be funnier. Then 200. And so on.
She would search stores and look online for cheap copies — $4 was generally her limit. She talked about her quest on social media, and other people became fans, or allies.
“Stores throughout the U.S. would hit me up and be like, ‘Hey, between my three stores, I have 120 copies. You’d like them?’” she said. “So I just opened up a P.O. box, and that was when it really exploded. I had people out of Poland sending just boxes of Polish copies, and tons of copies from Asian countries.”
When she hit the 1,000 mark last year, Miss Adelaide rented a theater in Fargo to show the film. “People came from all over the world. I spent almost a grand renting out the theater, and I almost broke even.”
Even more remarkably, despite owning 1,200 “Wedding Crashers” discs, Miss Adelaide had never actually watched the film before that night. She gave it 3.2 stars out of 5, and said it would have been higher were it not for a “super uncomfortable” scene in which Vaughn’s character has, let’s say, a bad night while tied to a bed.
Miss Adelaide, who is trans, described the showing as “a real queer joy event, for absolute sure.”
“Trans folks haven’t had a lot of media of our own,” she added. “And the media that has been made to represent us isn’t good representation; a lot of it is really insulting. So I think a big part of this was just being able to take what is arguably one of the straightest movies ever made and turn it into something like this.”
“It was just in the absurdity of it. Queer humor often is just quite absurd by nature.”
But with the collection at 1,200 DVDs and counting, it was time to get rid of them. “I really barely had room to move them to Minneapolis with me when I moved here a couple months ago,” she said.
She held a rummage sale selling only the DVDs. “Mostly, I just wanted to see people’s looks as they walked by and, like, slowly piece together that the same thing was in every single box,” she said. She didn’t move many copies.
Little Free Libraries — small boxes, typically in residential yards, where people can take or leave books — are very popular in Minneapolis-St. Paul, where the nonprofit organization that promotes such installations is based. So they seemed a natural spot to dispose of the DVDs.
Dropping off the DVDs, perhaps 20 or so at a time, over five or six hours last month, was something of an art installation itself, she said. “I’m proud of being able to make something like this. I try to put a little bit of a ray of sunshine even in things that are really serious or dire.” Her project was previously reported by the local news site Racket.
“A lot of people were a little confused at first,” she said of residents’ reactions. But after learning a little bit more about her project, she said, “They’re like, ‘Yeah, this absolutely belongs here in this neighborhood.’”
She is hanging on to one shelf-full of her favorite copies — a Korean VHS with alternative cover art, for example, and some special edition copies.
And it all started in a pawnshop in Fargo that happened to have 25 “Wedding Crashers” DVDs for sale. But, she noted, they also had 21 copies of “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.”
“So fate was very close to having me collect Matthew McConaughey instead.”
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
The post How Does Someone Acquire 1,200 Copies of ‘Wedding Crashers’? appeared first on New York Times.
