Synopsis
In the San Fernando Valley of 1977, busboy Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg) catches the eye of Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds), maker of “adult films, exotic pictures” at the nightclub where Eddie works. Jack lives in Reseda with Amber Waves (Julianne Moore), a coke sniffing adult film star whose line of work has cost her custody of her son.

After Jack sends another one of his performers - the legendary Rollergirl (Heather Graham) - to inspect Eddie’s stuff up close, the troupe takes him for a cup of coffee. Jack expresses his vision to make an adult film where the story is so compelling, the audience can’t get up and leave until they find out how it ends. Once Eddie’s spiteful mother (Joanna Gleason) kicks him out, Eddie finds a home with Jack.

Eddie’s new family includes actor/stereo salesman/cowboy Buck Swope (Don Cheadle), the exuberant Reed Rothchild (John C. Reilly), a grip named Scotty (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who develops a crush on Eddie and The Colonel James (Robert Ridgely) who puts up the money for all of Jack’s films and urges Eddie to think about changing his name, “some name that makes you happy, or something with a little pizazz.”

Coming up with the handle “Dirk Diggler” while lounging in Jack’s hot tub, Dirk makes his film debut having sex with Amber. His physical endowments and his charisma propel Dirk Diggler to the top of the adult film world, a position he solidifies with the character of Brock Landers, super agent and super lover whose debut Angels Live In My Town prompts Jack to declare, “This is the best work we’ve ever done.”

Dirk’s good fortune takes a detour in 1980, after Amber introduces her “baby boy” to cocaine and the adult film industry transitions from film to the much less expensive format of video tape, ushering in an era of amateurism in the industry. Dirk’s drug use effects his acting and his ego gets him tossed off Jack’s set.

Dirk and Reed take a shot at becoming rock stars, but shoot so much cash up their noses that they can’t pay the recording studio to retrieve their pathetic master tapes. On his way to rock bottom, Dirk falls in with desperado Todd Parker (Thomas Jane) who hatches a scheme to rob a wacked out smuggler named Rahad Jackson (Alfred Molina) who has a fondness for mix tapes and firecrackers. Reaching a new low in life, there’s nowhere to go but up for Dirk Diggler.

Production history
The Dirk Diggler Story was a short film Paul Thomas Anderson made when he was 17. Shooting on video and using two VCRs to edit, he was inspired not only by the porn he was watching, but by fictional documentaries like This Is Spinal Tap. Anderson used that format to chronicle the rise and fall of a porn star he based loosely on John Holmes, as well as a performer he’d seen profiled on A Current Affair named Shauna Grant.

Anderson recalls, “There was some humor that I saw in it, I guess in a sick twisted way, maybe because it was the first time I was recognizing that a lot of these people in this story on A Current Affair were people I’d seen peripherally around the Valley, just in an area where I grew up, which is not a real shady area or anything, but there’s a lot of kind of goofy characters. So maybe it was just kind of being tickled by that.”

A couple of years later, Anderson wrote a feature length script based on The Dirk Diggler Story that ran 300 pages. Financing for his first feature film – ultimately titled Hard Eight – was secured when Samuel L. Jackson agreed to join the cast, but after turning in his cut to Rysher Entertainment, Anderson became locked in a stalemate with the studio over the running time, among other things.

In the summer of 1995, Anderson went back to The Dirk Diggler Story, abandoning the documentary approach and honing the script to a straightforward narrative of 180 pages. One of the first people to get a look at the script was the president and chief operating officer of New Line Cinema, Michael De Luca, who recalled, “There was a real sweetness on the page, and a sardonic humor which really tempered the edgier aspects of the source material.” De Luca put Boogie Nights into development.

Anderson met with Leonardo DiCaprio to play Dirk Diggler. The rising star ultimately decided to do Titanic, but recommended one of his co-stars from The Basketball Diaries - Mark Wahlberg - for the part. The first actor Anderson seriously considered casting as Jack Horner was Warren Beatty. The screen icon phoned Anderson after reading his script and flirted with the project. “I think what I eventually, I started to figure out was that Warren wanted to play Dirk Diggler, you know? ‘You don’t really want to play Jack Horner. You want to be the kid on this movie. He said, ‘Yeah.’”

Anderson felt Beatty’s reticence also had something to do with the script. “I think what he might have been looking for, which maybe some other people were looking for, was a clear kind of moment or a clear moment when someone stands up and says, ‘What we are doing is wrong,’ you know?” Burt Reynolds accepted the role.

Much of the cast was filled with Anderson’s friends – John C. Reilly, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robert Ridgeley - or actors he was eager to work with, like Julianne Moore or Don Cheadle. Budgeted at $12 million, Boogie Nights commenced filming July 1996 in the San Fernando Valley. The production found the perfect house for Jack Horner, but it ended up being in West Covina, a 45 minute drive. The shoot was far from a breeze.

Producer John Lyons recalls, “It was very hot and we shot so many days where it was 104 or 105 degrees. We shot a lot at night, which was really exhausting. When we made that movie, there was a lot of talk about workers in the sex industry and how it was a liberating thing. The reality was that I think we all got sort of depressed during the making of the film. It was intense and the reality of the lives of those people were leading are far from glamorous.”

Anderson and editor Dylan Tichenor spent twelve months tweaking the film. Lyons adds, “The only problems between Paul Thomas Anderson and Mike De Luca were on cutting the film. De Luca thought it was too long. I remember there was one very tense meeting at New Line where I think Mike De Luca was half kidding when he said, ‘Why don’t we just leave it the length that it is and we’ll put an intermission in it?’ Paul’s eyes lit up and said, ‘God, yes, that would be great. It will be just like the 1960s when there were all those epics and we’ll have an intermission and a curtain will come down at the end of Act One.’ We all know that never happened.”

New Line supported Anderson’s decision to release Boogie Nights with an NC-17 rating, but he cut the film to win an R-rating from the MPAA anyway. Anderson recalls, “Ultimately, only 40 seconds had to come out, which was basically of Mark Wahlberg’s ass, humping. That was fine, since it didn’t interfere with the storytelling.”

Boogie Nights premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 1997. It also played the New York Film Festival and by late October, opened nationwide to nearly universal acclaim from critics. Janet Maslin wrote in the New York Times, “Some of the most distinctive American films of recent years - Pulp Fiction, The People vs. Larry Flynt, L.A. Confidential and now this one - have invoked a sleaze-soaked Southern California as an evilly alluring nexus of decadence and pop culture. Boogie Nights further ratchets up the raunchiness by taking porn movies and drug problems entirely for granted, and by fondly embracing a collection of characters who do the same.”

Marjorie Baumgarten in the Austin Chronicle commented, “From the second it begins, Boogie Nights seizes your senses and pulls you right in: no turning back, no time for debate, no regrets,” while Emmanuel Levy summed up the film for Variety: “Darkly comic, vastly entertaining and utterly original.” Far from a blockbuster – the film grossed $26.4 million in the U.S. and another $16.7 million overseas – it received three Academy Award nominations (Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore and Anderson’s script were up for Oscars) and cemented Anderson next to Quentin Tarantino as the most exciting young filmmaker in the country.

Anderson responded to a criticism of Boogie Nights and his work in general by stating, “There’s people that say this movie is too long. It might be. You know, maybe some of it, whatever. But the bottom line is that no one has to watch this movie more than me. You know? In editing it, in mixing it, in going to the screenings and to previews and this sort of stuff. And I think the second you realize that, you just go, ‘Well, fuck. I gotta entertain myself first and I hope that maybe accidentally some other people are gonna be entertained.’ I think that’s the way to approach it.”

Opinion
Boogie Nights is 155 minutes long and each of those minutes looks, feels and sounds almost exactly how I’ve imagined that a movie should look, feel and sound. It dazzles on a technical level. It strikes deep on an emotional level. It tackles challenging subject matter and takes on big ideas, all this while continually swinging back and forth between darkness and light.

If it has a flaw, it’s that the characters come across as two dimensional; speaking, acting but very seldom it seems, thinking. The character of Rollergirl typifies how full the glass is here and how empty it is at the same time. Great insight is not a service Anderson promises the audience. Where the movie succeeds masterfully is as a document of a moment in show business history and how, like any show, the loneliness of the players is what binds them together after the circus has left town.

This is a marvel no matter how you need to engage a movie. As pure entertainment, it features plenty of ‘70s kitsch, a consistently twisted black wit, a ceaselessly mesmerizing visual palette, and one of the most ass kicking retro soundtracks ever (Karyn Rachtman also served as music supervisor for Pulp Fiction). Musician Jon Brion pitches in a sparse but wonderfully kooky musical score.

The cast – which includes William H. Macy, Luis Guzman, Melora Walters, Philip Baker Hall, Nicole Ari Parker, Joanna Gleason and Ricky Jay – is one of the finest groups of character actors ever brought together under one tent. The film’s credentials as an arthouse epic lie in the way Anderson pulls up short of making a comedy or a crowd pleaser to explore the demons inside each of his characters, before redeeming the ones still left standing.

Joshua Hornbeck at Christian Spotlight on the Movies writes, “What most people will find offensive and downright repulsive about Boogie Nights, strictly by content, is how ambivalent and ‘hands-off’ the director takes towards these characters. The only character I really sympathized with was Amber, and that’s because she has children inadvertently exposed to her lifestyle, each time they call … Nonetheless, AVOID Boogie Nights like the plague unless you’re familiar with film-school cinematography like ‘tracking shots’ and ‘long takes.’ That’s the only potential audience for this material.”

Harold Gervais at DVD Verdict writes, “Well, no one can ever accuse Paul Thomas Anderson of working small. Boogie Nights has eighty speaking roles, twelve of which could be called main characters. Needless to say, this is one ambitious movie. From the opening scene with its brazen tracking shot to the coup de cinema with which Anderson ends his tale, everything about the film is like one big blast out of the darkness. There is so much confidence and audacity in the making of this movie that after experiencing it several times I still found myself shaking my head in disbelief.”

© Joe Valdez