To honor the 10th anniversary of the seminal adult industry movie Boogie Nights and the upcoming release of SexZ Picture's The Real Boogie Nights, XFANZ will take a look back at Paul Thomas Anderson's classic. Bob Preston opens the discussion.
Not all movies age well -- not even great ones. Boogie Nights is aging very well.
The last time I saw Boogie Nights was when I was in college. I had about eight more years to go before I entered the adult industry. Needless to say, I had little idea of what the business was really like. Hell, I didn't even recognize Nina Hartley in her cameo as the horny wife who repeatedly cuckolds William H. Macy.
I'm rewatching the movie this week, and my colleague Vito Anthony has agreed to rewatch the movie and discuss his reactions to it after some time in the industry. Other XFANZ staff members may also join us in the discussion.
One clarifying note: We're not so much interested in how accurately Paul Thomas Anderson depicts the industry -- I for one have heard several disparate opinions on that point, ranging from slam-dunk to smear-job -- but we are interested in looking at an acknowledged classic from a new perspective, especially now that SexZ Pictures is releasing their own triple-X spoof.
But first let me mention an ostensibly "great" movie that didn't age well. I joined a friend of mine recently to rewatch best-picture-winner American Beauty. After two minutes of watching super-meaningful shots of upper-middle-class suburbia and listening to pretentious voice-over, we shut it off and replaced it with Star Trek II. We were pleased.
I was concerned that a fresh viewing of Boogie Nights would yield the same results, but so far I'm pleasantly mistaken. Let me start us off by offering praise in the most obvious place: the beginning.
The classic opening shot is as good as advertised, and as good as I remembered. Like any good storyteller, Anderson steadfastly refuses to tell us anything about his characters, instead relying on one good detail after another to dab watercolor on his canvas. There are dozens of nice details in the opening shot -- Burt Reynolds blowing off Luis Guzman, Guzman's confusion over Don Cheadle being "the cowboy" -- but I want to focus on one exchange that establishes how the movie will be populated by two kinds of people:
• Unlikely parents.
• Children who have grown into stunted men and women.
Here's the exchange:
Rollergirl (Heather Graham) skates in and Amber Waves (Julianne Moore) immediately asks her, "Did you call that girl today?"
Rollergirl answers: "I forgot."
Amber Waves: "If you don't do it tomorrow, it'll be the weekend and you'll never be able to see her."
If memory serves, this story point never comes up again (correct me if I'm wrong), but more important is to consider that Amber is probably reminding Rollergirl to call someone that she wanted to fuck, and it all happens in the back booth of a nightclub in the San Fernando Valley to the tune of a great soundtrack and against the backdrop of a flashy discotheque.
But if you close your eyes and listen to the dialogue, it sounds like a scene out of Leave it to Beaver. Graham speaks with the high-pitched cadence of a 10-year-old, with Moore as her lightly scolding mother.
This is a family, and the famous four-minute sequence ends with the introduction of its newest member: Mark Wahlberg's Eddie Adams, aka Dirk Diggler.
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