                             THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT 
              Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Friday, July 12, 1996                 TAG: 9607120681
SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA 
SOURCE: BY JENNIFER MCMENAMIN, STAFF WRITER 
                                            LENGTH:  125 lines

SOME PUT VIDEOS IN THEIR SURVIVAL KITS EVERYTHING'S A HIT, SAY EMPLOYEES AT LOCAL VIDEO STORES

People braving the bombast of Bertha took home some ``Sense and Sensibility.'' They also picked up ``Heat,'' ``12 Monkeys,'' ``Broken Arrow,'' ``Mr. Holland's Opus'' and ``Dead Man Walking.''

Those were the most popular movies making their way out of video rental stores Thursday by people who didn't join the exodus from the Outer Banks.

``Everything is going today,'' said Kathleen Morgan, owner of Movies Movies in Kill Devil Hills.

``They're renting everything they can get their hands on,'' agreed Alata Gray, an employee with Village Video in Hatteras Village.

Although Gray said business there was lighter than usual since most tourists had gone, video rental stores across the northern beaches reported brisk sales.

``A lot of locals are in renting four, five, six movies at a time,'' said Cameron McCown, an employee at Video Andy in Nags Head. ``You can always expect the cable to go off if nothing else.''

Tabitha Springer and Ginger O'Neal - both employees at Movie Gallery in Kitty Hawk - said the most-asked question of the day was, ``What do we do to fill out a membership?''

By 2 p.m., the store had run out of membership cards, and employees were telling customers to present driver's licenses for their next rentals.

Springer and O'Neal also handed out free movies to anyone who found a movie in the store with the words ``Bertha'' or ``hurricane'' in the title or the story line.

``It's just one of those days when we felt like being nice,'' O'Neal said.

Most employees said they planned to continue policies of kindness when it comes to video returns, too.

``We're not real sure what's going to happen,'' O'Neal said. ``But in a disaster, we don't expect people to get them back on time.''

Morgan at Movies Movies agreed. ``I've been here 11 years, and we've been faced with that problem before. We understand that it's hard to get out and about after a storm happens. We usually give them a break.''

But Richard Wescoat, manager of Buxton Under the Sun, stopped renting movies - and everything else in his supply store - at noon on Wednesday.

``During the last hurricane, we had 600 houses that were lost,'' he said. ``Do you think those people were worried about returning a movie?''

Wescoat estimated he lost 20 to 30 movies that year, which he said cost him $1,400 to $2,100.

``I won't rent anything to anybody until after the hurricane is over,'' he said.

Marcy Brenner, a 33-year-old part-time Southern Shores resident, relinquished $18 for her stack of finds: ``Get Shorty,'' ``Money Train,'' ``Pulp Fiction,'' ``Diodome,'' ``Nine Months'' and two packs of Sour Patch Kids candy.

Brenner, who has vacationed in the Outer Banks since she was a girl, was not too concerned about the approaching hurricane.

``We're not taking it lightly, but we're not freaking out, either. I just hope we have enough power to watch a ton of movies.''