Research on Iranian cinema privileges film as a medium and the movie theater as a site of spectatorship, and the very theoretical underpinnings of Iranian film studies assume that most viewers encounter moving images on 35mm film in a movie theater. This paper challenges that assumption by writing video technology into the history of the Iranian film industry. Specifically, I study a network of underground rental clubs that emerged between 1982 and 1993 as a result of a ban on the personal use of video technology. Other historians of Iranian cinema understand the Islamic Republic’s first decade through the policies that overhauled film production at the time. Such a vantage point, however, provides limits our view of broader movie culture during this transformative period. My research reveals that Iranians were more interested in watching Hollywood, Bollywood, and prerevolutionary Iranian movies that were available to rent underground than the films shown in theaters at the time. I argue, therefore, that underground video rental clubs transformed movie culture in Iran by facilitating robust viewership that was not necessarily limited by state control and by fostering a space wherein the commodification of movies as material objects became possible. Following the Revolution of 1979, control over film in Iran was relocated to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. As part of its consolidation of power, the Ministry banned the use of all video-related technology, including cameras and cassettes, and later VCRs and movies. As a result, videos became the domain of a black market, and bootleg videotapes and VCRs were rented alongside the sale drugs, alcohol, and illegal music. Over time a visible economy of underground video rental clubs emerged. Drawing on newspaper editorials, trade publication reports, and oral history interviews, I reconstruct this economy and explore how they shifted viewing practices. When the ban on video was lifted in 1993, the government admits that during the ban, the underground sale of bootleg movies was prolific. I argue that this underground economy became the model for the legal video clubs that developed in the mid-1990s. Because people across the Middle East acquire movies through means like illegal downloads and video stores that specialize in bootlegs, writing histories of informal distribution is urgent as a way of globalizing our view of media industries and as a way of off-setting the American and European experiences that often dominate the history of world cinema.