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Boogie Nights

This article is about the 1997 film. For the Heatwave song, see Boogie Nights.

Boogie Nights is a 1997 American drama film written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Set in Southern California in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the screenplay focuses on a young nightclub dishwasher who becomes the popular star of pornographic films and finds himself slowly descending into a nightmare of drug abuse when his fame draws him into a crowd of users and abusers.

Plot

Handsome but dim-witted high school dropout Eddie Adams, emotionally abused by his domineering mother, is discovered by porn director Jack Horner at a suburban club owned by Maurice Rodriguez, who aspires to perform in Horner's films. Eddie is transformed into Dirk Diggler, whose extraordinary endowment and youthful charisma make him an instant award-winning star in the adult entertainment business. His success allows him to buy a new house, an extensive wardrobe, and his most prized possession, an orange Chevrolet Corvette.

Aware of Jack's goal of making films that draw audience members with their plots as much as their sex scenes, Dirk and fellow porn star Reed Rothchild, who aspires to be a magician, suggest a series of action films starring themselves as Brock Landers and Chest Rockwell. The films become a runaway success.

Assistant director Little Bill is married to a porn star who constantly humiliates him by having sex, frequently in public, with other men. At a New Year's Eve party marking the start of the 1980s, he shoots her and her lover and then turns the gun on himself in front of the guests. This marks a major turning point in the movie, as most of the characters' lives take a turn for the worse as the new decade begins.

The film moves from one character to another, showing their attempts to make lives for themselves in the adult film industry and their failures when they leave it. Jack's porno empire flounders after his main source of funding, Colonel James, is imprisoned for possession of child pornography. His new financier, Floyd Gondoli, insists on cutting costs by shooting on videotape, a format Jack detests. He also is unhappy with the lack of scripts and character development in the projects Gondoli expects him to churn out as quickly as possible. He tries to revitalize his career by having Rollergirl ride with him in a limousine while they search for random strangers to have sex with her in the back seat while a crew tapes it. When the man they choose recognizes Rollergirl as his former high school classmate Brandy and insults her, Jack severely beats him and leaves him bleeding and half-conscious and on the street.

Leading lady Amber Waves, who took Eddie under her wing when he joined Jack's stable of actors, finds herself in a nasty custody battle with her former husband. The court determines she is an unfit mother due to her involvement in the porn industry, her prior criminal record, and her addiction to cocaine, leaving her distraught.

Buck Swope marries fellow porn star Jessie St. Vincent, who shortly thereafter becomes pregnant. After being denied a bank loan to open a store specializing in stereo equipment, Buck stops at a donut shop and finds himself in the middle of a holdup. The clerk, thief, and a gun-wielding customer who tries to stop the robbery kill each other, and Buck escapes with the money the thief had stuffed in a paper bag. He uses it to finance his store and becomes a successful businessman.

Now addicted to cocaine and methamphetamine, Dirk finds it increasingly difficult to achieve an erection and frequently falls into violent mood swings. He has a falling out with Jack during a film shoot, and he and Reed decide to pursue their dream of rock and roll stardom, a move supported by Scotty, a gay, nebbishy boom operator who adores and emulates Dirk. Their addictions lead them to squander all their money, leaving them unable to pay the recording studio for their demo tapes. Dirk tries to prostitute himself with a man but is assaulted by a gang of thugs. Dirk, Reed, and their friend Todd attempt to scam Rahad Jackson by selling him a half-kilo of baking soda disguised as cocaine for $5,000, and Todd is killed in an ensuing gunfight. Frightened by his brush with death and weary of his wasteful existence, Dirk reconciles with Jack and returns to the adult film industry.

Production

The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and was shown at the New York Film Festival before opening on two screens in the US on October 10, 1997. It grossed $50,168 on its opening weekend. Three weeks later it expanded to 907 theaters and grossed $4,681,934, ranking #4 for the week. It eventually earned $26,400,640 in the US and $16,700,954 in foreign markets for a worldwide box office total of $43,101,594 .

Principal cast

Mark Wahlberg ..... Eddie Adams/Dirk Diggler
Burt Reynolds ..... Jack Horner
Julianne Moore ..... Amber Waves
Heather Graham ..... Rollergirl
John C. Reilly ..... Reed Rothchild
Don Cheadle ..... Buck Swope
William H. Macy ..... Little Bill
Thomas Jane ..... Todd Parker
Philip Seymour Hoffman ..... Scotty
Melora Walters ..... Jessie St. Vincent
Robert Ridgely ..... Colonel James
Philip Baker Hall ..... Floyd Gondolli
Alfred Molina ..... Rahad Jackson
Luis Guzmán ..... Maurice Rodriguez

Soundtrack

Two Boogie Nights soundtracks were released, the first at the time of the film's initial release and the second the following year. Although the two albums encompass nearly every major song featured in the film, they did not include "99 Luftballons" by Nena, "Lonely Boy" by Andrew Gold, "Fat Man" by Jethro Tull, and "The Sage," a cello piece by Chico Hamilton.

Critical reception

Janet Maslin of the New York Times said, "Everything about Boogie Nights is interestingly unexpected," although "the film's extravagant 2-hour 32-minute length amounts to a slight tactical mistake ... [it] has no trouble holding interest ... but the length promises larger ideas than the film finally delivers." She praised Burt Reynolds for "his best and most suavely funny performance in many years" and added, "The movie's special gift happens to be Mark Wahlberg, who gives a terrifically appealing performance."

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times observed, "Few films have been more matter-of-fact, even disenchanted, about sexuality. Adult films are a business here, not a dalliance or a pastime, and one of the charms of Boogie Nights is the way it shows the everyday backstage humdrum life of porno filmmaking ... The sweep and variety of the characters have brought the movie comparisons to Robert Altman's Nashville and The Player. There is also some of the same appeal as Pulp Fiction in scenes that balance precariously between comedy and violence ... Through all the characters and all the action, Anderson's screenplay centers on the human qualities of the players ... Boogie Nights has the quality of many great films, in that it always seems alive."

Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle stated, "Boogie Nights is the first great film about the 1970s to come out since the '70s ... It gets all the details right, nailing down the styles and the music. More impressive, it captures the decade's distinct, decadent glamour ... [It] also succeeds at something very difficult: re-creating the ethos and mentality of an era ... Paul Thomas Anderson ... has pulled off a wonderful, sprawling, sophisticated film ... With Boogie Nights, we know we're not just watching episodes from disparate lives but a panorama of recent social history, rendered in bold, exuberant colors."

Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times called it "a startling film, but not for the obvious reasons. Yes, its decision to focus on the pornography business in the San Fernando Valley in the 1970s and '80s is nerviness itself, but more impressive is the film's sureness of touch, its ability to be empathetic, nonjudgmental and gently satirical, to understand what is going on beneath the surface of this raunchy Nashville-esque universe and to deftly relate it to our own ... Perhaps the most exciting thing about Boogie Nights is the ease with which writer-director Anderson ... spins out this complex web. A true storyteller, able to easily mix and match moods in a playful and audacious manner, he is a filmmaker definitely worth watching, both now and in the future."

Peter Travers of Rolling Stone said, "[T]his chunk of movie dynamite is detonated by Mark Wahlberg ... who grabs a breakout role and runs with it ... Even when Boogie Nights flies off course as it tracks its bizarrely idealistic characters into the '80s ... you can sense the passionate commitment at the core of this hilarious and harrowing spectacle. For this, credit Paul Thomas Anderson ... who ... scores a personal triumph by finding glints of rude life in the ashes that remained after Watergate. For all the unbridled sex, what is significant, timely and, finally, hopeful about Boogie Nights is the way Anderson proves that a movie can be mercilessly honest and mercifully humane at the same time."