Independent production: a successful business lawyer teams up with a tattooed dissident to save a video store but finds a happy ending is hard to come by.

• Author: Campbell, Spencer

Mickey Aberman will probably work 60 hours this week at his law office. He'll work two more each night after he gets home. Right now, on this weekday morning, his desktop is buried under thousands of pages of case files that he should be scrutinizing, but he's seated at a conference table, trying to explain why he spent $100,000 to buy a video store. Finally, he gives up- "I'm not sure why I did that. It was pretty stupid."

Aberman, 55, practices business law at James McElroy & Diehl PA in Charlotte. During his 28 years there, he has developed hard-and-fast rules for clients who want to buy something. Among them: Avoid dying industries, partners you're not familiar with and haste. Know the numbers, not just howl' much you'll need to buy the business but keep it going. "And I proceeded to disregard all that."

When he bought it last year, VisArt Video was having a store-shuttering liquidation sale, its Durham-based owners battered by giant Netflix Inc. Aberman's partner is Gina "Twiggy" Cerniglia, a fervent Occupy Charlotte supporter whose skin is a mural of Homer Simpson tattoos and piercings. He agreed to buy the place in just minutes, closing the deal in two weeks. He did make a cash-flow projection--afterward--and his investment paid for the inventory, but he can't afford marketing. Or ransom. (More on that later.)

VisArt distributes a pamphlet touting that it's one of Video Business magazine's top 100 chains in the nation, but it isn't a chain anymore, and Video Business ceased publication in 2010. Video rental peaked in 2001, according to Encino, Calif.-based Entertainment Merchants Association, when it hit $8.6 billion. By 2010, that had dropped 28% to $6.2 billion, and Los Gatos, Calif.-based Netflix and Redbox, a subsidiary of Bellevue, Wash.-based Comstar Inc., generated $3.4 billion, up from $1.3 billion three years earlier. The technologies they use for distribution--Netflix's online and mail-distribution model and Redbox's unmanned kiosks--have made brick-and-mortar retailers bit players. The share of industry spending at stores dropped from 92% in 2004 to 36% in 2010.

VisArt is the lone survivor of a small, once-successful North Carolina chain and employs roughly the same business model its first owner unveiled in the mid-1980s. Customers roam its red-wire shelves in search of movies, which they can rent after showing a membership card. If a patron is tardy returning the movie, he is charged a late fee. In fact, most everything about VisArt is old-school, from the "staff picks" its four employees make to its "adult" section. It didn't even have a website until recently. And as opposed to the McDonald's-like conformity of Blockbuster, VisArt is fiercely independent. A sign taped to the front counter reads: "Please don't let your kids run wild,"...