A still from Jim Henson’s made for TV movie The Cube

Depending on your perspective, in the 1930s, bootleggers were either a blight or a blessing upon the American landscape, ducking the Feds to provide the public with a product that was not otherwise legally available. The same is true in the 21st century. Although wares differ, bootleggers are still making available something that is by all accounts illegal. Stakes are different, and the legal arguments more convoluted, but ultimately the game remains the same. Instead of bathtub gin, however, one of the biggest black market contraband nowadays is film.

There is a clear hierarchy in place when it comes to film piracy. At the top are the major Chinese, Taiwanese, and Balinese operations: mass-producing DVDs of Hollywood blockbusters that somehow make their way to the sidewalks of Times Square the day before the films officially open. It’s a billion-dollar business that also involves bribery, computer hacking, smuggling, and murder. Over the past decade the major studios have been working hand in hand with the FBI to put a stop to it, with about as much success as the G-Men had eighty years ago.

Below that is the online world of YouTube, file sharing, and BitTorrent downloads. The common mantra is that everything is out there—you just need to know where to look for it. But online behavior often leaves a distinct and easily traceable electronic trail, and officials tend to have very little trouble tracking down, say, a nostalgia-crazed 39-year-old accounts receivable manager who’s downloaded the entire episode run of Lidsville.

Far below the bright and often too-public world of high-tech video piracy there is a dim and shadowy world of basement hand-to-hand transactions—of collectors, obsessives, paranoids, geeks and shut-ins. Despite the ease and accessibility of computer downloads and online trading, most dealers in this lower tier remain adamantly lo-fi, preferring videotapes and discs—things they can hold—to digital files viewed on a screen. They rarely advertise their offerings online, content instead to stick with mimeographed printouts and word of mouth.

The films they’re dealing are not the blockbusters, not sleeper hits, and not cult TV shows. These bootleggers are after the forsaken and the lost—films nobody else wants. It’s not a billion-dollar industry, but in legal terms what they’re doing is just as illicit as what any mob is up to. And without them, film historians and archivists would be lost.

Up until 2005, any New Yorker who was looking for an obscure, experimental, or otherwise unavailable film knew that Kim’s Video (later Mondo Kim’s) was the place to go. Kim’s shelves were loaded with bootlegs ofincredibly rare films (noirs, Italian gut-munchers, Westerns, pre-code comedies). The...