mageddo: Adventures in Lo-Fi. - video recording review

Film Comment, May, 2001 by Edward E. Crouse

Sampling bootleg videos bought on New York's streets

Here's the opening of one of my more elusive viewing experiences of last year:

Blue screen. White text that reads: "TO SET SPECIFIC REC TIME PLEASE PUSH REC KEY." The words are repeated in French, and then the image clears to: "LECTURE." Cut to: a silent subjective camcorder pov of a woman lounging in bed, leading into a lyrical home-movie-ish montage of the same pretty blonde on a carousel, sitting in the park, etc. Cut to: a hospital room. A heart read-out monitoring an old codger's vital signs, while a male nurse looks on, wagging a thin tube in front of the grimacing patient. Sound starts to register, wavering between mule and inaudible, with occasional hissing. The images palpitate between bleached brightness and murk. The film's last opening credits read as follows:

A post-structuralist video meditation on mediatized glamour?

Actually, it's a bootleg videotape of a film labeled The Contender, purchased for $5.00 on the corner of Canal Street and Broadway, New York City. Your memory of Rod Lurie's film probably doesn't match the preceding description, but by the time I recognized Ben Stiller's simian brow, I realized that the movie I was watching was actually Meet the Parents. Both box and tape are nonetheless marked The Contender, with a reasonably good copy of the movie's poster art, although Joan Allen's shuttered eyes are a tad vertically stretched. There's even a bogus FBI warning sticker on the cassette window. On the reverse side of the box, the blurb rhetorically demands, "At what point does the public have the right to know the absolute details of one person's life?"

At what point did I have the right to know where this tape came from? Or why it wasn't what it claimed to be? Or why I found it far more remarkable than either The Contender or Meet the Parents? As a "journalist," I couldn't resist stepping up to the plate. Now that DVD is the new bully on the block, the latest digital gladiator set to slay everything in its path, videocassettes are fast becoming an embarrassing relic, about to go the way of the 8-track: it's just a matter of time before this eminently copyable and ever-unstable format disappears forever. Let others grow dewy-eyed over the Death of Cinema. I want to solemnly dance The Death of Videotape, as I hold hands with video's bastard child, the bootleg.

For the purposes of this article, the term "bootleg" refers to videocassettes of major theatrical studio releases obtainable on the street. This leaves aside various "collector" versions of movies -- for instance, the original Hong Kong version of Jackie Chan's Drunken Master 2 before Miramax/Dimension dubbed and retitled it -- that you can purchase over the Internet or from stores like New York's Karate Video Center, as well as the pirate Video Compact Discs, or VCDs, ubiquitous in Asian cities and American Chinatowns, which are the digital cousins of the bootleg videotape.

The World According to Che, a real live bootlegger

Getting the facts about where bootleg tapes come from is tough, for obvious reasons. They're created in secrecy, reproduced and then sold from portable stands or bedsheets on the sidewalks of New York and in 99-cent stores. My first question went out to a Chinese woman who had just sold me Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. She either pretended not to hear me or really didn't, responding with a headshake. An African-American guy was also tight-lipped, dismissing me and my questions ("Hey man, how do you get these so fast? Didn't these just hit the theaters?") by walking away and spitting orange peel into a plastic bag. Five more attempts -- after buying tapes of Charlie's Angels, The Mexican, a correctly labeled Meet the Parents, The Legend of Bagger Vance, and Pay It Forward -- yielded identical results.

"Che" was the only bootleg street-hawker who would talk. For the right price and under condition of anonymity, he sang me the details of his trade.

"They got two types of films. The first type is called the bootleg. Regular camcorder. They shoot through a bag. The best ones [are] where they bribe the theater and shoot when no one is there. $500-$600. At $2 per tape, you make that back pretty fast."

What if the bribe doesn't take?

"Then they go into a preview screening, sit close to the middle, the camera's in a case with a hole in it. That hides the lens sticking out. They do the cover art on a computer."

In other words, the negligible costs get passed on as savings to the consumers, who nab these tapes on the street for the democratic sum of $5. The more Che gabbed, the more his rationalizations recalled those of film producers, video distributors, or drug dealers. Holding up tapes of Little Nicky and The Mexican, he intoned, "One of those big ones is all you need to make your costs back. And this business never fails because people are in need of them."

Despite the occasional police raid, the bootleg business thrives because the people who manufacture the tapes are as secretive and mobile as the street vendors. "The top people are basically the Arabs, who own a chain of stores. They put the bootlegs into the stores -- especially 99-cent ones -- and sell them to the vendors. It seems like you can't get into the top rung of this business unless you're a Muslim."