Boogie Nights

Toronto International Film Festival Program Book
1996

Boogie Nights
Paul Thomas Anderson
USA, 1996
147 minutes Colour/35mm
Production Company: New Line Cinema
Executive Producer: Lawrence Gordon, Michael De Luca, Lynn Harris Producer: Lloyd Levin, John Lyons, Paul Thomas Anderson, Joanne Sellar, Daniel Lupi
Screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson
Cinematographer: Robert Elswit
Editor: Dylan Tichenor
Production Designer: Bob Ziembicki
Sound: Stephen Halbert
Music: Michael Penn
Principal Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Julianne Moore, Burt Reynolds, Don Cheadle, William H. Macy, Heather Graham, Nicole Parker, Philip Seymour Hoffman
Production: New Line Cinema

Paul Thomas Anderson has created nothing less than an epic portrait of the United States of America at a turning point in its history. Spanning the late seventies and early eighties, Anderson’s film follows the exploits of a hardcore adult film outfit, and especially its most famous star, from the troupe’s magical beginnings, through its meteoric rise and to its inevitable decline and fall. The various stories within the film—much like Altman’s Nashville—point to larger, grander philosophical ideas about society’s self-perception. And Anderson pulls it off with just so much style. (Says one character: “Do you know what this is? Real Italian Nylon.”)

Proceedings begin in a classic seventies disco, where Eddie Adams—in an astonishingly nuanced performance by Mark Wahlberg; a true manchild here—is “discovered” by producer Jack Horner (the great Burt Reynolds). Horner plucks Adams, soon renamed Dirk Diggler, out of his Orange County life and makes him the newest star in his pantheon, joining his wife Amber Moore (Julianne Moore of Safe), Reed Rothchild (John C. Reilly of Georgia) and Rollergirl (Heather Graham of Drugstore Cowboy). Horner believes that the adult film can be made into an art form that can both titillate and entertain, and his loyal crew, led by the cuckolded Little Bill (Bill Macy of Fargo), follow him down any path.

It is Diggler/Adams, though, who comes up with the greatest concept of them all—a porno James Bond, complete with action sequences and explicit rolls in the hay. The series is huge and makes Dirk Diggler a household name. But drugs and the bizarre mechanisms of this dysfunctional family take their toll and the family that literally fit so very well together begins to break apart.

Anderson covers a lot of ground here and, underneath all the bell bottoms, cum shots and lines of crystal meth is a powerful, incisive exploration of what happened to decent people when the greedy eighties took control.
—Noah Cowan