I read this a few months ago but forgot the title or where I read it - probably a library
book. I don’t know the author’s name, so I don’t think it was a major science fiction writer or I’d remember it. Here’s what I remember of the plot:
I think it takes place in Hollywood. A man goes into a video store and sees a copy of the director’s cut of Orson Well’s The Magnificent Ambersons. He doesn’t have money, or ID or something so he goes home to get it. When he comes back the video store is gone. The next night he comes back and the stores there, he gets his video but it won’t play in his VCR. He eventually realizes that the video store exists in an alternate world
and only exists in ours for a few hours each night. He comes back night after night to watch movies that don’t exist in our earth, with the clerk at the video store.
I remember seeing a similar idea used with Beatles albums. A guy found a collection of all the albums the Beatles would have made if they hadn’t broken up in 1970.
And both Stephen King and Robert Charles Wilson have used the idea of books that crossed over from alternate universes.
There is another speculative fiction book about further works from the Beatles, The Beach Boys and other groups thyat a guy hears on the radio(I believe), and he finds that he can travel to those periods of time to stop the deaths and/or breakups that stopped the music from existing. Any ideas?
Similar to the OP, I read a story about a movie buff that somehow got into a world where all of the “original” movies were made. Buddy Ebsen as the Tinman in “Wizard of Oz”, Ronald Reagan as Rick Blaine, etc.
Alan Moore did a comic where Sideways Scuttleton – “Sideways by name, sideways by nature, know what I mean?” – did this trick and then some.
I mean, sure, he sells Van Gogh paintings from a parallel reality where the one-eared street artist never got famous. But for bonus points, he also off-loads worthless stuff from our world – “you couldn’t give the things away” – to rich folks over there.