Boogie Nights
Writer and director Paul Thomas Anderson
and actress Heather Graham
The full title of writer and director Paul Thomas Anderson's second film, Boogie Nights: The Life of a Dreamer, The Days of a Business and the Nights in Between, is as ambitious as the end result. Weaving together the lives of a dozen characters — each one intrinsically linked to the others in a hedonistic morality tale — Anderson brings an epic sweep to the story of a distinctive subculture: the southern California porn film industry, circa 1977-84.
"It is ambitious," says the 27-year-old Anderson at the 1997 Toronto International Film Festival where Boogie Nights tied L.A. Confidential as the critics favorite film, sharing the Metro Media Award.
"I just went for it," he adds, "I'd rather sink with trying to tackle all of these things and a great idea than just swim with trying to keep it simple."
Like his first film, the little-seen gem Hard Eight aka Sydney (1996), about a mysterious professional gambler and his protégé, Boogie Nights is character-driven. Anderson began writing this fictional look at the porn industry "as a kind of documentary, not as a straight narrative."
"I had all these lives mapped out pretty extensively," he explains. That first script formed an detailed "book of information" which he then adapted into the shooting script.
The two hour and forty minute running time of Boogie Nights encompasses a few heady years in the porn industry, which is portrayed as a mirror image of Hollywood, complete with a star system hierarchy and fawning award shows.
Anderson theorizes that in 1977, the sexual revolution and the pleasure principle had filtered into American culture to such an extent that porn was on the verge of going as mainstream as disco. By 1984, however, this enthusiastic future "was snuffed out by a technological advancement called videotape."
"Something that video did, not just in porno but in the other side of the business," he continues, "is it took away the certain mythology of the movie star. With video, anybody can make a porno movie now for nothing."
The time when porn stars like John Holmes, Marilyn Chambers and Linda Lovelace were household names — even to people that didn't actually see their movies — was replaced by an anything-goes glut of amateur videos, turning the emphasis from mythology to mechanics.
"One of the things that I like about the movie is that it's not judgmental," says actress Heather Graham, who plays nubile porn star Rollergirl in Boogie Nights, "but at the same time it's realistic about the ups and downs of that industry."
Rollergirl begins the film as Brandy, a high schooler who's been branded a slut. Creating a persona from her ever-present roller skates, she becomes a porn actress and finds herself rewarded for the same behavior she was once scorned for.
In one of Boogie Nights's key scenes, Rollergirl cruises around in a limousine with a camera crew, picks up a frat boy for a filmed quickie, and comes face to face with a few harsh realities.
"It's a little bit dangerous and kind of scary," said Graham, "because this guy comes in and it's not one of the friendly friends who's in the same boat with you and cares about you and knows you. This guy — this outsider who doesn't respect them — is like, 'You're shit'."
For Paul Thomas Anderson, this scene highlights one of the most intriguing aspects of the porn world. In the cloistered and protective world portrayed in Boogie Nights, the characters involved in porn have already gone beyond the pale of conventional morality, but they are constantly drawing their own moral lines in the sand.
When one character is arrested for child pornography, he is shunned by even his closest friend. "Certainly that's a line for all of them," says Anderson, whose characters react to this transgression with: "We have to turn our back on you."
"The thing in the business is you meet these girls," Anderson explains, "and they'll say, 'Yes, I'll have sex with six guys at one time,' and that's fine, that's perfectly acceptable, but they won't have anal sex. You think this is somehow twisted, but they have to set some boundaries for themselves just to survive. They have to set up that sort of little moral boundary where they go, 'No, that's the thing that I cannot do.' Because otherwise they could just get lost so quickly."
Another thing that can get easily lost is the real identity behind a persona. "They're required to make up a name and make up a personality," Anderson says about porn actors, "and there's that wonderful blurry line between inventing a stage name and being the person who you really are."
Ultimately, Paul Thomas Anderson portrays the porn world as a kind of circus, where an invented reality replaces the norm. It's no coincidence then that composer Michael Penn's haunting theme is called "The Big Top," or that Boogie Nights is dubbed a "P. T. Anderson Picture." It's the work of a compassionate Barnum, a true showman in the best sense of the word.
© 1997, Serena Donadoni. All rights reserved.