About

Five years as a staff rock critic at the Toronto Sun in the 70s and 80s didn’t prepare Jonathan Gross for the home entertainment industry, save for one chance meeting.

“In 1981 the first VHS duplication facility opened in a back room in a studio called VTR and I covered the media event to launch it,” says Gross from his Toronto office. “Four years later, I had moved back from a freelance stint in New York to work for my father who was importing Korean VHS tape in a trading company. “I mentioned that I knew a potential customer and managed to sell a container to VTR with one meeting.”

Four years later, Gross was back writing for television in LA when he got a call from a former tape customer at Video Entertainment Corp. in Kitchener, Ontario, explaining that the fellow who bought his company was in deep trouble and if Gross would fly up with a cheque he could buy the assets for ten cents on the dollar.

“It was a flyer and truthfully had the earthquake not sent us packing out of California, it would have been a bad deal,” adds Gross. “However, the assets proved marketable in the budget VHS business and from there Gross used his critic’s eye to source some cult hits on his way to mainstream success. “‘The whole Air Farce Yearbooks arose from a writing gig I had on a Gemini Awards show in 1989 with the Farce’s Roger Abbott. “I called him years later with the idea and we got it done. “Sometimes, it works out.”

VSC’s greatest success however was selling over a million season sets of Canada’s all-time favorite sitcom Corner Gas. “Behind that were hundreds of thousands of copies of cult fave Kenny vs Spenny and the legendary DVD “Russell Peters’ Two Concerts, One Ticket.”

Now as Unobstructed View Gross hopes to turn on some dormant creative juices as the cost of producing original content comes down. “We need to control all the windows and making your own movies and shows is the future,” adds Gross, a former contributor to Rolling Stone, who also has a story credit on Seinfeld’s The Fusilli Jerry episode.