r/FaithNoMore • u/_Freedom2020 • 8h ago
Billy Raw Footage
Billy Gould didn't just "randomly stumble" onto Roberta Findlay's Raw Footage in some adult shop clearance bin, and anyone still regurgitating that press-kit myth has clearly never run a basic Bayesian update on late-1980s video distribution. By 1988, North American retail and rental pipelines held a baseline catalog of at least 50,000 active commercial adult and exploitation VHS titles (N = 50,000). Under the naive null hypothesis H_0—where Gould is an innocent civilian who walked in and bought exactly one random tape on a whim (n = 1)—the likelihood of pulling that specific release is P(E | H_0) = 1/50,000 = 0.00002, or a flat 0.002% statistical miracle. But Gould was embedded in late-80s San Francisco, right when the Tenderloin and lower Market Street grindhouse corridor (the Strand, the Presidio, the Center, the Mitchell Brothers orbit) was dumping two decades of worn-out 35mm and 16mm celluloid prints onto cheap magnetic tape duplications, fueling an aggressive bootleg-swapping subculture where underground musicians and noise heads traded multi-generation dubs out of car trunks and rehearsal spaces alongside issues of RE/Search. In that specific countercultural sub-manifold, the relevant population collapses from 50,000 retail tapes to an active cult/sleaze canon of roughly N = 1,000 titles. Inside that network, circulation wasn't uniform; it followed a standard Zipfian power law concentrated around notorious 42nd Street exploitation directors like Roberta Findlay, who was already a household name in bootleg circles for Snuff. With a power-law exponent s = 1.0, the harmonic sum over 1,000 titles is approximately 7.485, meaning an unhinged oddity like Raw Footage sitting at cult rank k = 25 had an initial single-draw probability p_k of (1/25) / 7.485, which comes out to roughly 0.00534 (0.534%). If Gould maintained an absolute bare-minimum floor of just half a dozen sleaze tapes (n = 6), the probability of him holding that specific tape under H_1 is 1 - (1 - 0.00534)^6, which equals 0.0316 (3.16%). Dividing that by the null probability yields a Bayes factor of 0.0316 / 0.00002 = 1,580, meaning the physical evidence is over fifteen hundred times more probable under the stash hypothesis than the retail accident myth. Even if you slap an aggressively hostile prior on Gould and assume a 99% baseline probability that he was completely clean and owned zero exploitation media (Prior Odds = 0.01 / 0.99 = 0.0101), multiplying that by the Bayes factor of 1,580 produces posterior odds of 15.96, which updates the posterior probability that he was sitting on a curated stash of underground sleaze to over 94.1%. To hit a 50% median probability of discovering it entirely solo without trading partners scouting for him, he would have had to churn through 78 to 130 tapes, but even at the hard mathematical floor of half a dozen, the "serendipitous accident" narrative is completely dead. Gould didn't walk into a shop and hit a 1-in-50,000 lightning strike; he was an active tape hound who had a cardboard box of tracking-damaged Tenderloin filth sitting on the Faith No More tour bus.
