REEL LIFE / FILM & VIDEO FILE : Independent Rental Stores Are Falling by Wayside : Chain outlets and high operating costs make competition tough. Pay-per-view TV doesn’t help either.

Several storefronts that once featured posters of the latest videos are now sporting “for lease” signs as chain competition and increased operating costs force many independents out of business.

Video Super Shop was a local chain before its nine stores were sold to independent operators three years ago, said Elaine Anderson, manager of the Video Super Shop on Telephone Road in Ventura. She said independent operators find it difficult to stay in business with new release videos costing as much as $70.

“You can’t buy in volume the way Blockbuster can,” Anderson said. As a result, the nine Video Super Shops have been reduced to three, she said.

Camarillo has also seen a major shakeout, according to Judy Nay, co-owner of Carmen Video. Nay said that six years ago you could count 12 video stores in Camarillo. Now there are five.

“A lot of it has to do with the major video stores. Blockbuster plays a real big part,” Nay said. “When you’re competing against stores with 10,000 titles, you can’t compete with 450.”

Nay said she doesn’t see the picture improving. In addition to chain competition, the video rental industry is losing ground to pay-per-view television.

“I have customers tell me all the time that they order video on the TV. It costs about $3 and they don’t have to go anywhere to get it. I don’t think it’s going to get any better (for independents). We’re planning on staying here, but we wouldn’t want to get started in the business today.”

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It’s tough being in the movie business, too.

While working on a small role in the current Warner Bros. release “Just Cause,” 10-year-old Barbara Kane of Camarillo was struck blind, lost her hearing and was rendered speechless.

Fortunately she didn’t have a talking part.

Kane plays the murder victim, Joanie Shriver, in the story about a man wrongly imprisoned for the crime. On the way to the filming location in Florida, an ear infection temporarily impaired her hearing and a case of laryngitis made her a couple of hours late for the first day of filming while a doctor checked her throat.

“There’s a scene with me leaving school and getting into this car,” Kane said of the roughly five minutes of screen time she has in her first movie role. “But when they find me in the swamp, it’s not really me. It’s a mannequin they made.”

Making the mold for the mannequin was the scariest part of playing a murder victim. Technicians put two breathing tubes in her nose and covered her head to toe in a substance Kane concisely described as “gross”

“It lasted about five minutes,” she said. “Now I know what it feels like to be blind.”

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If you missed Jessica Lange’s Oscar-nominated performance in “Blue Sky,” you’re probably not alone.

On its way to earning Lange the L.A. Critic’s pick for best actress and her fifth nomination for the best-actress Oscar, the movie sneaked through theaters earning just $2.5 million. Lange plays an emotionally unstable Army wife married to Tommy Lee Jones.

The 1990 picture was released late last year, three years after it was made. The production studio, Orion, kept the film on the shelf while the company went through bankruptcy proceedings. Orion is now out of Chapter 11 and has re-released the film in a handful of theaters. The Ojai Film Society will feature the film at its 4:30 p.m. Sunday screening at the Ojai Playhouse, 145 E. Ojai Ave.