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Boogie Nights

While most everything shown in Boogie Nights occurred frequently in porn in the '70s and '80s, the movie focuses on the negative.

"I was prepared to have a really brutal picture painted of all of us," Jane Hamilton told the 10-02-97 Las Vegas Review-Journal. "But he [Anderson] put the humanity into who we were and what we were trying to do.

"As cute and pathetic as we were, we really meant it. We weren't model types. We were more like the girl next door. The films were more indicative of women and sex. In the larger scheme of things, (our pretensions) were pretty funny."

When Jane first read the script for Boogie Nights, she thought, "this is terrible. All they're doing is drugs." Then she thought about it, "all we did was drugs."

Boogie Nights sloppily recreates the '70s, showing, for instance, widespread use of platform shows when they had been out of fashion for years. Eight track stereo and the Shaft look in mens wear were similarly out of date. "From the very first shot this crappy movie demonstrated how lazy the filmmaker was going to be when it came to veracity." (R. Geoff Baker)

"I didn't care enough about the characters to find it heartbreaking," writes Larry Rosenhein on the internet newsgroup rec.arts.movies.current-films. "But I do find it depressing to spend so much time with such dim people…. It's commonplace to make films about dim or dysfunctional people, about hoodlums and avaricious white collar goons. It's the equivalent of "good copy"… What I'd like to see are some films about smart, well-intentioned people who have conflicting interests…"

Among the porn veterans appearing in Boogie were Nina Hartley, Veronica Hart, Tony Tedeschi, Summer Cummings, Skye Blue, and Little Cinderella.

Pornographers point out the following elementary mistakes in just one sequence. The director, played by Burt Reynolds, smokes a cigar next to the camera lens while filming Dirk's first sex scene entirely in long shot. He allows Diggler to ejaculate inside the female, instead of demanding the customary pop shot.

Also, the camera equipment the pornographers used in the film was ten years out of date, says Bob Chinn. "By 1975 we were shooting in 35mm Panavision on sound stages with full crews."

Porn veteran and pro-porn idealogue Juliet Anderson says, "It's one of the most awful movies I've ever seen in my life. I feel like I've been assaulted."

Juliet hated the movie's depiction of porn-world figures as "losers and weirdos who couldn't make it any other way -- which is totally untrue. The vast majority of people I knew behind and in front of the camera had regular lives.

"They have the man who shoots his wife, the pedophile, the token black guy, the underage guy, the drugs, the violence. Every cliche. I'm surprised they didn't bring in bestiality."

"There were a lot of people doing drugs," Wesley Emerson told the San Francisco Chronicle, "but it had nothing to do with the porn industry -- it had to do with the world at large. I'm not defending it, but drugs were rampant.

"It's about America. Pornography just happened to be the vehicle in which it's carried; it's a secondary factor. That's the whole trick." (San Francisco Chronicle, 10-23-97)

Bill Margold wants to destroy the film. "Dirk Diggler? You've got to be kidding? It's inane. Why not Peter Heater? If I'd known my beloved industry was this dysfunctional, I would've joined the priesthood."

Marilyn Chambers told the 4/8/99 New Times of Los Angeles: "It was ridiculous. I thought it was stupid. If it was accurate at all, it certainly wasn't accurate to my--experience. In talking to a lot of people in the porno business who are still in it as producers or directors and were in it then, they feel the same way. It wasn't one big, happy family. I never went to
parties. I didn't socialize with people I worked with. I didn't feel that was professional. I mean, there was a lot of cocaine and booze and that stuff around -- that was accurate -- but for me it was way more professional than that."

"Neither The People vs. Larry Flynt nor Boogie Nights honestly deals with the real-life porn industry," writes Camille Paglia for Salon magazine, "which they condescendingly show as overrun by dimwitted buffoons. Neither movie comes close to capturing the sizzle of outlaw sexuality…

"Far from pornography becoming mainstream, popular culture is showing less and less ability to create and sustain an erotic charge…

"The best pornography depends on a strict sense of social limits and norms, which the picture or story violates…

"Porn has paradoxically gotten weaker in the 1990s, after my side in the culture wars defeated the Catharine MacKinnon-Andrea Dworkin anti-porn feminist/Christian conservative coalition that ruled the 1980s."

During her screening of Boogie Nights, sex journalist Susie Bright wanted to yell: "Stop rolling! That's not how it happened!"

According to Bright, Anderson "has made an awful big pile of baloney. It's stylish and energetic and melodramatic, but he either doesn't know what he's talking about or he doesn't care…

"The biggest influence on the porn tribe is how they've been treated by the rest of society…

"In "Boogie Nights," a Big Porn Producer is shown suffering in jail because he's a pathetic opportunistic pedophile. But in the real porn business, a producer -- and his wife, and his secretary, and his shipping clerk -- are more likely to be sitting in a penitentiary because they sold a mail-order tape to an undercover cop in Tennessee. The tape probably featured nothing more criminal than an interracial buttf---ing scene between enthusiastic adults.

"The reason the porn world is such a tight-knit family is that only people on the inside understand how their biggest handicap isn't that they're committing vice, but that they've been ghettoized into a third-rate division of the entertainment business." (Salon magazine)

The Burt Reynolds character in Boogie Nights is an amalgam of several pornographers including Bob Chinn. An interview in the porno masquerading as a documentary, Exhausted, between Chinn and John Holmes, appears almost word for word in the Paul Thomas Anderson film. "It was the part where Holmes is saying that I allowed him to do his own blocking for his scenes and I turn to him and say, "What are you talking about John? I don't allow you to do your own blocking." There were also cuts taken scene for scene from my movies," Chinn told the magazine Cult Movies.

"Boogie Nights is an entertainment film, not a documentary.

"I don't think it is an accurate portrayal of the era…"

Film critic Roger Ebert called Boogie Nights "an epic of the low road, a classic Hollywood story set in the shadows instead of the spotlights, but containing the same ingredients: fame, envy, greed, talent, sex, money. The movie follows a large, colorful and curiously touching cast of characters, as they live through a crucial turning point in the adult film industry.

"In 1977, when the story opens, porn movies are shot on film and play in theaters, and a director can dream of making one so good that the audience members would want to stay in the theater even after they had achieved what they came for. By 1983, when the story closes, porn has shifted to video and most of the movies are basically just gynecological loops. There is hope, at the outset, that a porno movie could be "artistic," and less hope at the end.

"…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. "You got your camera," Jack explains to young Eddie. "You got your film, you got your lights, you got your synching, you got your editing, you got your lab. Before you turn around, you've spent maybe $25,000 or $30,000."

"Jack Horner is the father figure for a strange extended family of sex workers; he's a low-rent Hugh Hefner, and Burt Reynolds gives one of his best performances, as a man who seems to stand outside sex and view it with the detached eye of a judge at a livestock show. Horner is never shown as having sex himself, although he lives with Amber Waves (Julianne Moore), a former housewife and mother, now a porn star who makes tearful midnight calls to her ex-husband, asking to speak to her child. When Jack recruits Eddie to make a movie, Amber becomes his surrogate parent, tenderly solicitous of him as they prepare for his first sex scene.

"In examining the business of catering to lust, "Boogie Nights" demystifies its sex (that's probably one reason it avoided the NC-17 rating). Mainstream movies use sex like porno films do, to turn us on. "Boogie Nights" abandons the illusion that the characters are enjoying sex; in a sense, it's about manufacturing a consumer product.

"By the time the final shot arrives and we see what made the Colonel stare, there is no longer any shred of illusion that it is anything more than a commodity."

Boogie Wonderland

Giles Whittell

01/10/98

The Times of London

Marky Mark's character in Boogie Nights sums up what was great about Seventies pornography - or so one of the real-life stars tells Giles Whittell

Bill Margold was in love once. The object of his desire came to LA 11 years ago, at the tail end of what he calls the Golden Age of porn . She was determined to get into "adult" films after being thrown out of the marines for fraternising with her senior officers. She was hooked on crystal meth and had a tattoo of a snake winding from her pierced left nipple to her clitoris. Her name was Viper.

Bill is fond of nicknames, too. He is a veteran of 300 movies and 500 sex scenes who calls himself the Papa Bear of porn and talks with grand nostalgia about his last, lost love: "I didn't know I had a heart until she broke it. She was tall, thin, titless... magic." For five years he and Viper shared a shambolic Hollywood flat he still calls home, hugging and having ordinary sex - but mainly hugging - as an antidote to the anatomy-defying coital combat she went through for the cameras by day.

She made 70 hardcore films, with names like Voodoo Lust and Mystery of the Golden Lotus. In something called Loose Ends NoNo4, says Margold, her body exceeded its design limits far enough to make her "a cult figure in perpetuity".

Things started to go wrong when she decided breast implants would earn her more work. "I want to get breasts because then they'll think I'm stupid and maybe they'll use me," she said. Instead she went crazy and left town W X without warning. Margold's diagnosis was "implant schizophrenia". He last saw her in 1991, anorexic and 40lb below her fighting weight. He says there have since been Viper sightings all over the world, but has no idea if she is still alive.

So Viper came and went, like most porn starlets. But for her ex she was a reminder of the pioneering days of hardcore, when an on- screen erection was shocking, rare, rebellious - and illegal.

Those were the days before video made pornographers of every enterprising voyeur with a Handicam, and Aids made the exploding porn industry police itself with blood-testing and rubber. They were the years between Haight-Ashbury and full-blown Reaganism (1972-1984, says Margold, an avid historian of the genre) when sheer experimentation could make porn professionals feel special if not rich. Cult porn films such as Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door were shot on film then, not video, and shown in full-size cinemas to guys who dared. They were rare enough for aficionados to have seen them all, and new enough to be reviewed by The New York Times.

This was also the age 26-year-old director Paul Thomas Anderson chose to recreate in Boogie Nights, which tells the story of one Dirk Diggler's rise from staggeringly well-hung teenager to reigning porn stud. (The "filmmaker" who gives him his start is played by Burt Reynolds.) Dirk Diggler is based on a real woodsman - as male porn stars tend to be called - John Holmes, aka The King, who died of Aids in 1988. Many have suggested Margold was the inspiration for the Reynolds character. He hopes not. He says he doesn't like the film, calling it an adolescent wet dream, but it may simply be too close to home.

As Boogie Nights brings new meaning to Seventies chic, the huge, slick industry that hardcore has since become will gather in Las Vegas for its biggest annual jamboree, the Adult Video News Awards. These are the Oscars of erotica, and among the firms likely to dominate them this year is one called Vivid Video.

From a one-storey warehouse five miles north of Beverly Hills, Vivid turned out 125 productions last year. For genre virgins they all look startlingly similar: five sex scenes per hour, most including some lesbian, anal and group action, strung together with dull words badly acted.

Still, Vivid has especially high hopes for Bad Wives and The Zone at the Las Vegas ceremony. Both had "big" budgets of about $150,000, although Seventies titles could cost twice that much.

For 23 hours a day, seven days a week, dubbing machines and digital edit suites churn out product for distribution on five continents via video stores, mail-order houses, the Internet, hotel chains, pay-per-view, satellite networks and, especially lucrative just now, the European cable market. In 1996, according to Adult Video News, 8,000 new titles hit the market, with Americans clocking up 665 million rentals (nearly a ten-fold increase in ten years) and spending $8 billion on porn altogether - twice what they spent at mainstream cinemas.

Vivid epitomises the modern porn operation of low overheads, high volume and high profits. How high? Steve Hirsch, 36, the company's founder and managing director, prefers not to say, but his annual turnover is more than $20 million. "The most important thing is having a good, strong script," Hersch says with a straight face. Still, his top-selling title last year was The World's Luckiest Man, in which one man has sex with 101 women in one weekend.

That man was Jon Dough, 34, the star of 800 titles who pumps his way through them with a fixed scowl to cover the concentration required for his task, which is to get hard, stay hard and climax on cue. Only about five of every 5,000 wannabes can do this day in, day out, under hot lights, with women they don't necessarily fancy in front of people they don't necessarily know.

Margold is dismissive of the new generation of stars, the identikit "natural born drillers", as one writer put it, with big dicks, big pecs, and precious little charisma. Their job, after all, is to focus attention on the women, and Vivid's chief asset is a stable of ten exclusively contracted Vivid Girls. Like everyone in the business these days, they cannot perform without a negative HIV certificate less than 30 days old. Unlike many, they make good money: $100,000 to $200,000 a year depending on their popularity and work rate. They can choose their partners, within reason, and they can insist on condoms (neither Dirk Diggler nor Bill Margold would have been filmed dead in one).

Meet the contract girls. There is Janine, who has no surname and a stipulation that she will not be penetrated by men on screen. She does everything you can imagine and more with herself and other women, though. There is Dyanna Lauren, star of Bad Wives, who has a tattoo'd crotch. There is Kobe Tai, known for her authentic-sounding love grunts. And there are dozens more, strenuously promoted all across the Valley by rival firms cottoning on to the contract idea and aiming for porndom's version of the big time.

In all the mainstream ink on the new porn industry, a constant theme is that Janine and Co are now stars in their own right, never mind the medium. In so far as the mainstream always needs a freak show, this is true. Porn stars have become regulars on Howard Stern's notorious morning drive-time radio show, often appearing naked in his studio for him to describe their jiggling bodies and delight in their alleged libidos. They also appear frequently, albeit clothed, on the Jerry Springer talk show, which last month overtook Rosie O'Donnell as the second-highest rated in America after Oprah.

In one respect porn has changed little since the Seventies: few porn stars make the leap to Hollywood. Nina Hartley has a cameo in Boogie Nights, but most don't attempt the transition, either from justified fear of being stigmatised or because they cannot act.

Margold is known as the Papa Bear for his weird brand of paternalism. He calls the troubled women of the hardcore scene his children, and with his performing days behind him - he refuses to be tested for Aids - he spends much of his time looking after them. "These are the cubs in the tree of X," he says. "When they fall down on their heads I put them back in the tree so eventually they can crawl down on their own." Those he has helped give him teddy bears, and scores of them sit around the grubby, porn -strewn flat he calls The Cave.

Some women fall into his makeshift safety net via a helpline called PAW - Protecting Adult Welfare - which he set up after a star called Savannah shot herself in 1994. (PAW came too late for Shauna Grant in 1984 and Megan Leigh in 1990, and could not help Cal Jammer or Alex Jordan in 1995. All were suicides.) Other women are passed along to the Bear by word of mouth. A few he personally adopts as their informal agent, flatmate and, occasionally, lover.

For all his scorn about the alleged mainstreaming of the business, Margold is in a sense the most mainstream person in it. He lectures, twice a year, at a respectable Orange County college as part of a course on Advanced Human Sexuality. He made his mark on porn history writing a series of hardcore scripts that got their producer, Hal Freeman, arrested and convicted under California's prostitution laws. When the state's supreme court overturned the conviction in 1984, the floodgates opened. Although the US Supreme Court did not formally ratify the Freeman decision for four more years, the decision effectively legalised hardcore pornography by classifying its protagonists as performers rather than prostitutes.

In Boogie Nights, the villain is video - the quick, cheap medium that opened the industry to all-comers. In Margold's memory, the villain is legality. "When it was against the law only the strong survived," he says. "It's lost its special quality, its flavour, and I don't think it will regain it until it's made illegal again."

"You have to step into the realm of the forbidden to shock, which is what everyone's trying to do," says another porn -ographer, John T.Bone, a transplanted Mancunian and former art dealer. "Whether people want to admit it or not, pornography is about degrading people."

Bone is infamous for turning out some of the hardest hardcore around. When I met one of his stars, Jasmin, at Bone's studio last month she was chatty, if somewhat brittle-sounding. She spoke unnervingly in one breath of her dream of opening a language school to topple Berlitz, and in the next of her sexual preferences. "I like to be choked to death," she said. "No guy has ever choked me hard enough."

If nothing else, Jasmin, 25, was making good money and did not seem to be in physical discomfort. Neither of which could be said of Crystal. Puffy-eyed and dressed in loose white dungarees, Crystal, 24, had just finished her third long scene in three days. It had been her first experience of hardcore filming. She had come to his studio from Florida by bus after a five-year relationship with a boyfriend had gone sour, leaving her with a baby son and virtually no money.

The bus ride had taken three days. Shooting the scenes had left her in severe pain and in tears. Still, she was determined to go through with her new "career". So determined that she planned to use the six-week cooling-off period Bone gives all his new girls to think things over, to dance at a Puerto Rico club to earn the $4,000 necessary for a boob job. It would normally be $4,500, she said, but a man she used to dance for could get her a discount.

"Right now money is what makes the world go round for me," said Crystal. "D'you notice that when your bills are paid and you have money all your problems seem to dwindle away? My mother was a dancer too. Now she's a biker, a low-life. I don't want to be like her."

Guardian 1/9/98:

With all its razzle-dazzle and surface kitsch, Anderson's multi-stranded story of the f----film subculture and its murky, neo-Runyon denizens - names like Dirk Diggler, Jack Horner, Amber Waves - could have been pure cartoon. But Anderson knows their world too well for that, having been raised in the San Fernando Valley, LA's capital of porn production.

"It was always there," he remembers. "Bunker-type warehouses with no sign on them near my high school. You'd see people coming in and out and you knew there was something going on. I guess that speaks to anyone's effort to get back to their childhood - what was that shit I was witnessing when I was 11 years old?" The young Anderson knew perfectly well what was going on: he had his first taste of porn aged nine, when he sneaked a look at his father's video of a popular item called The Opening Of Misty Beethoven. He admits he is too fascinated with the genre to have much journalistic detachment. "I've been into it as a consumer, but not as some freak who's masturbating his life away. Probably more of a fascination with the film-making of it than anything else." Boogie Nights has been criticised for romanticising its subject matter - the Modern Review has already attacked it as "Porn Kitsch" - but the film derives its considerable ambivalence from its portrayal of a lost hedonist utopia that crumbles in an apocalyptic final act. Anderson's take on porn is, he admits, equivocal.

"On one hand, I love the camp of it, I love what can be sexy about it. Then you've got this other side, which is just a general kind of disgust and sadness. If you've ever watched a real hard-core porno film, if you're a human being at all, your first instinct is to think, 'Who is that person? Where is their mother?' But that's not to say that 20 seconds later I won't be thinking, 'Wow, she's kinda hot!' That's just something I'd own up to."

Anderson visited some 20 hardcore sets in researching the film, and had a highly qualified consultant in the form of Ron Jeremy, aka 'the hedgehog' - a rotund, buffoonish character who is currently Hollywood's most implausible blue-movie attraction. But Boogie Nights is really about the late seventies sex industry, before video made it harsher and trashier. Connoisseurs of that era see the film as a thinly-disguised roman-a-clef, and Anderson admits that Amber Waves, played by Julianne Moore, was inspired by real-life names such as Seka and Marilyn Chambers, an actress who briefly went legit in David Cronenberg's film Rabid. Another reference was Shawna Garrett: "The standard Girl from Iowa who gets on the bus, comes to Hollywood with dreams of stardom, becomes porn star, becomes drug addict, commits suicide. This is such a cliché - you think, 'You're not telling me the girl-on-the-bus-from-Iowa story over again?' But you hear it over and over again, and it's like a goofy movie."

Anderson's ingenu-stud Dirk Diggler is loosely based on the priapic actor John Holmes, who became a porn legend for his outlandish proportions, before dying of Aids in 1988. Dirk's own physical distinction is made clear in Boogie Nights in an already notorious scene that presents an audacious combination of absurdity, poignancy and prosthetic wizardry. "It's just like, 'Duh?'," says Anderson. "There's nothing sexual about it. John Holmes would talk about being a kid and taking the shower in gym class and really having a hard time, people just laughing at him. It's like having a third arm. What can you do except say, 'I am the Elephant Man, I'll go to the circus'?"

Boogie Nights's nostalgia for a supposed pre-Aids Eden of disco-fuelled sexuality may be tinged with considerable circumspect irony. But the film does genuinely mourn an era when American porn was, if not exactly idealistic, at least more ambitious. Seventies porn had aspirations to infiltrate the mainstream, and movies like Deep Throat, Behind The Green Door and The Devil In Miss Jones were fashionable talking points at Californian dinner tables. This 'Golden Age' ended, Anderson says, with the advent of video.

"Any kind of dignity or effort in the film-making is gone now. Shooting on film is more expensive, so you've got to go in there with a plan - what's the best place to put the camera to make this sexy? That results in a story and a basic structure. Video comes along and it's five dollars for an hour worth of tape. It's like music-video thinking - 'We'll shoot a bunch of shit and edit it together later.' "

Boogie Nights is generally agreed by cognoscenti to be pretty accurate about its subject. Laurence O'Toole, author of a forthcoming book on pornography, Pornocopia, feels that the film captures that period's "sense of making an alternative genre, rather than a parallel culture, which it became." Where Anderson goes too far, he argues, is in "the drugs, the level of excess and the violence - people have said that they'd never have stayed in the industry if it had been that cocaine-infested. The film also doesn't reflect the fact that it was against the law to make porn in California then - sets were being busted all the time." What Anderson does get right, says O'Toole, is the strange surrogate-family structure in which Dirk lives with his porn cohorts. "Everyone in porn has problems maintaining contact with people who aren't involved in it, so they develop a myth of the forgiving, accommodating family structure." This theme gives Boogie Nights its most troubling emotional subtlety, which presumably helped Anderson attract such prominent performers as Moore, Burt Reynolds and Twin Peaks ingenue Heather Graham to roles that most Hollywood names would run a mile from. (Reynolds, however, was reputedly unhappy with the film and Leonardo DiCaprio dropped out of the Dirk role at an early stage). Anderson admits, "A couple of people did say, 'OK, it's a really good script, but how do I really know that this isn't Showgirls?' I said, 'You can't.' " For the record, Boogie Nights is most definitely not Showgirls, a film Anderson considers 'f---ing despicable'.

Anderson's off-beam take on Hollywood may be in his genes. His father, actor Ernie Anderson, was known in the sixties as TV horror host Ghoulardi, famous for his hipster goatee and catchphrase "Stay sick". The Andersons were not well connected in the media, but Paul managed to talk himself into production assistant jobs on TV game shows, rather than go to film school, and made his first short on camcorder - a half-hour Boogie Nights prototype, The Dirk Diggler Story. His first feature, Sydney, was a low-key, claustrophobic vignette pitched somewhere between David Mamet and Paul Auster, about a gambler who sells his soul to an enigmatic mentor. The producers hated it.

"They'd seen all these genre elements - a guy, a girl, a gun - and they hadn't really read the script, which was basically this slow little chamber drama. I think they were kind of shocked when they saw the movie. 'Nothing's really happening - can we get Gwyneth Paltrow a little bit naked? Can he shoot him 20 times instead of four?' " After much wrangling, Sydney was released under the producers' title, Hard Eight. It made hardly a ripple on its British release last year, but no doubt Boogie Nights fans will seek it out, misled by the title to expect another porn epic. "And they're gonna be real disappointed!" Anderson says.

No one could have guessed from the cool, controlled Hard Eight that its director would make such an explosive follow-up, but Anderson was already writing Boogie Nights while filming his debut. "I remember on day two of shooting, calling my agent and saying, After I've finished this movie, I wanna go right away and make Boogie Nights, 'cause I'm here with four actors and I LOVE IT! But I need more! I need f---ing more! I need 80 of them!' I knew it would be cool to consciously make a small movie - and a big f---ing epic sloppy huge movie." On the strength of two remarkable films, Anderson looks like Hollywood's best hope for the millennium. He certainly has the distinction of now being cinema's most famous Paul Anderson - the 'Thomas' in his name is to avoid confusion with British director Paul Anderson, who made Shopping and Mortal Kombat. He shouldn't be confused either with Paul Thomas, a leading porn director who last year made a bid for respectability by trying to get mainstream Hollywood critics to review his film, Bad Wives. That Paul Thomas's style, according to Laurence O'Toole, is "the LA aesthetic - a bit of Lynch, a bit of Kathryn Bigelow, a bit of Michael Mann." Don't be surprised if, before long, the porn Paul Thomas is cribbing from his legit near-namesake too. This could get confusing.