Well into the run of Seinfeld (8th season) there was an episode that is probably more memorable for the Elaine’s rather exotic dance moves but which includes a subplot of Jerry becoming a movie bootlegger, making a video, at Kramer’s and his friend’s Brody’s insistence (Brody happens to have a gun), of Death Blow. Brody sells the tapes on the streets. Jerry has quite a knack for the genre, as Brody tells him: “I’ve never seen such beautiful work. You’re a genius. The zoom-ins, the framing. I was enchanted.”
(This digression can be skipped. Consider: The director of Death Blow created a finished product, having worked with a director of cinematography. All of the zoom-ins, framing, pans, long shots, over the shoulder, etc. A finished product. Yet Jerry takes that work and applies his own craft to it. This isn’t a case of sampling, as it is the entire work that is still being presented, albeit in modified form. It isn’t an annotation because nothing, except for selection, is being added. It isn’t analogous to Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album because there isn’t actual reimagining of Death Blow, but simply a change of point of view. So what is the Seinfeldian version of Death Blow? As Brody is something of a savvy street hustler (remember the gun), he clearly knows what the market is interested in, so the Seinfeld cut of Death Blow evidently has something that the original lacks.)
Long before there was digital file sharing of music there were physical bootlegs. While there were an array of vinyl products, making records requires a pressing plant, and while back in the 1960s and ‘70s there were more of them around, it was still something of a feat, although owners of pressing plants knew that the capital equipment they had wasn’t making them money unless they were pressing vinyl, so there were opportunities for the audio Brodys. The development of cassettes facilitated the creation and distribution of bootlegs in the same way that the ungainly video camera that Jerry wielded did for bootleg videos.
But now, with the exception of those who are collectors, the physical media bootlegging has waned and given the vast catalogs of streaming services, so, too, has the digital.
Perhaps.
