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Night fever >> Paul Thomas Anderson on creating the porn epic Boogie Nights by MATTHEW HAYS
But here it is: Boogie Nights, an utterly entertaining, brilliant examination of a dysfunctional family in the San Fernando Valley as they cling to sanity and sobriety while churning out porn movies. Burt Reynolds is astutely cast as the porn patriarch, leading a sublime ensemble that includes Julianne Moore, Don Cheadle and William H. Macy. The real standouts here, however, are Mark Wahlberg (aka Marky Mark), who delivers a surprisingly nuanced performance as well-endowed porn stud Dirk Diggler, and the man behind the film, Paul Thomas Anderson, who despite a skimpy CV (with merely one feature film--Hard Eight--under his belt) has made a stylish, confident and intelligent movie about a very tricky topic. Originally conceived of as a three-hour movie, Boogie Nights' final cut stands at under two-and-a-half. With its sprawling cast, plenty of long tracking shots, gritty representations of violence and the effects of drug addiction and a retro top-of-the-pops soundtrack that won't stop, Anderson's style has led more than a few critics to draw comparisons to Scorsese (my title for the movie: Goodfuckas). Boogie Nights has enough of its own edge to be more than just a Scorsese knockoff, but Anderson's style is carefully predicated on a balance between realism and expressionism, or anti-realism. "That's a trick that sometimes you get right, about when to show off a bit and when not to," says Anderson, "when to plant the camera and not fuckin' move the thing at all." Despite some pretty racy scenes, including one staging of an actual porn shoot with a lust scene between Moore and Wahlberg, Anderson says he received very little interference from his producers. One of the principal problems, he says, was with a corporation that doesn't even have any money in the movie. "Blockbuster are the reason I couldn't make an NC-17 movie. They're 30 per cent of the video market, so that's why you can't make an NC-17 movie. It's not so much because of theatre chains. I've heard of people renting Scarface and getting a chopped-up version thanks to the staff at Blockbuster. Either stock it or don't stock it, but don't cut your own version of it. That's bullshit." While Boogie Nights manages to pack a lot of testosterone, Anderson does broach the feminist arguments about porn, and appears to give them some credence. "Some of the stuff I have people saying is directly from what I've heard real porno stars say. However that comes out politically is how I feel. Someone asked me, 'Does porn cause child abuse?' and I was like, 'Well, no, sexual abuse causes porn.' There's that saying that no one in show business had a happy childhood. Well, absolutely no one in porn had a happy childhood." Ultimately, Anderson feels he's striking a blow for gender equality by having the sex symbol Wahlberg go the full monty in Boogie Nights (too often only women have to bear all on the big screen). "Most filmmakers are horny young devils who aren't interested in seeing their leading men naked. I think I was just as interested in seeing my leading men naked as I was my leading women." Wahlberg's member, as seen in the film, hangs halfway to his knees. Numerous reviews have stated it was prosthetic, but Anderson claims absolutely no special effects were used in that scene. "Don't believe the rumours. That's the real thing." Opens this Friday, Oct. 24. See film listings for showtimes
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Who'd have thought that the year's biggest cinematic surprise would come in the form of a two-and-a-half-hour epic about the porn business in the late '70s and early '80s? After big-studio blunders like The People vs. Larry Flynt (suffering from terminal whitewashing) and Showgirls (suffering from unintentional non-stop hilarity), it would seem Hollywood might stay well away from depictions of the sex trade.