Tim Cooper parlayed his lifelong passion for movies into one of the largest and most comprehensive DVD and VHS collections on the East Coast. Before taking over the Naro Video store in Ghent, he was a film critic.
“He put all of his knowledge and love of film into that store’s collection,” said his wife of 37 years, Linda McGreevy. “It was deeply personal to him.”
Timothy Bert Cooper died July 23 at a Norfolk hospital after a lengthy illness. He was 79.
For the Norfolk native, writing about and then talking with customers about movies was a dream rooted in everyday life. The same heady mix was in his favorite film, Federico Fellini’s “8 1/2.”
Cooper met McGreevy in 1979, soon after she moved to Norfolk to teach art history at Old Dominion University. They helped run a film society linked to ODU.
When the two went for coffee, Cooper’s first question was, “What’s your favorite film?” Fellini’s 1963 masterpiece, “8 1/2”, was her answer, too. The film is a stunning mix of fantasy and reality. They also named the same top artist, modernist Marcel Duchamp.
The simpatico duo was soon joined at the hip and married in 1988.
“We would go to art shows and to films, and every Sunday we would sit down and write our columns at the same time.”
An expert grammarian, he would always read and tweak her reviews, she said. For PortFolio magazine, he critiqued movies and she, art exhibitions. He later wrote for the Ghent and then City magazine.
His reviews were incisive and written for an intelligent audience. In a piece on “Howard’s End” in 1992, he wrote that “the Merchant Ivory oeuvre has become a necessary alternative to the domination of the increasingly expensive — and juvenile — Hollywood product. What connects the team’s disparate projects is a penchant for dramatizing the effects of cultural disjunction (and dysfunction) wedded to an exemplary sense of period detail and unforced psychological insight.”
In 1996, he and McGreevy took over an existing Naro Video store in Ghent. They built it into a valued community hub for film fans. Later, they moved the shop beside Naro Expanded Cinema on Colley Avenue, where it thrived for years, until streaming platforms stole too much business. They closed the shop in 2019.
The couple then shifted their focus to placing the collection where the community could still access the films. They gave it to ODU, which holds the entire collection in Perry Library and is available for borrowing with a library card.
“What Tim and Linda created is really a treasure trove,” said Tim Hackman, dean of the University Libraries at ODU. “It includes every genre, every era, dozens of countries, and many things not available elsewhere. It has the ability to expose students to entire worlds of cinema they would never encounter otherwise.”
McGreevy said it was primarily Cooper who ran the store and ordered the films. She was busy as a professor.
As a youngster, Cooper’s family lived near the intersection of West Little Creek Road and Hampton Boulevard. It was a short walk to Boulevard Theatre, one of the city’s many one-screen movie houses at that time.
Rob Copeland, his close friend and fellow film aficionado for 38 years, said he remembers Cooper talking about going to the Boulevard, which began showing foreign films and British comedies when Cooper was a teen.
Cooper attended Norfolk’s Williams School, then Norfolk Academy, McGreevy said. He studied French at Georgetown University, then went to the University of Virginia for advanced degrees in the language. He left UVA after one year, and told McGreevy it was because he saw professors berating women, she said.
Back in Norfolk, he worked as a bookkeeper for his optometrist father, she said, and continued to build his knowledge of movies however he could.
When Copeland met Cooper, he discovered the depth of Cooper’s knowledge about film. It was 1977 when Copeland managed a Hampton movie theater. That Halloween night, he showed a horror film.
Mid-screening, Cooper and a friend hunted him down and told him the first 20-minute reel of the film was “The Abominable Dr. Phibes,” but the second reel was from the sequel.
“Probably nobody else in the audience had any idea.”
Cooper soon contacted Copeland to join a film society at ODU, formed to show non-mainstream films on campus. McGreevy came to ODU the next year and got involved, too.
“Tim and Linda were unlike anybody else I knew,” Copeland said.
They were intellectual aesthetes with similar enthusiasms, including for kitschy early to mid-20th-century signs and tchotchkes, which pack their century-old red-brick home in Colonial Place.
The store was just as eccentric. All records were on paper, such as membership cards, kept in a box. Handmade signs tagged categories.
“He was the concierge of the video store,” recalled Patrick Taylor, who went to work there as a teen in 1999 and remained until it shuttered. “So many people who came in, he knew their names. He loved talking with them about movies, but also about their lives, politics, music.
“And he was somebody who loved getting a laugh, loved entertaining people.”
“Tim was not a business person in the least,” said Copeland, who also worked at the store. Even if there was a long line to check out, he might still spend 15 minutes with one person, he recalled.
And if a French-speaking person walked in, he spoke to them in fluent French.
Cooper conducted job interviews by discussing movies with the applicant.
Taylor got the job before he was out of high school. After yakking a while, Cooper told him, “We’ve never hired someone so young, but you have such great taste in movies.”
After 2019, Cooper got together and jawed with other film fans, including Copeland and Naro Cinema co-owner Tench Phillips, most weeks at the Naro. Copeland also visited him weekly for more film talk.
His decline started in the spring of 2024, shortly after the opening of the collection at ODU.
“He was able to live his entire adult life around film,” Copeland said.
Phillips wrote a tribute for the Naro website this week, which concluded, “We will all deeply miss Tim’s impish humor, keen intellect, and authenticity.”
Besides his wife, he is survived by his brother, William Cooper of Baltimore, Maryland. A private graveside service will take place later this month. A celebration of life event is planned for the fall.
