Eddie Addams/Dirk Diggler: When I close my eyes, I see this thing, a sign, I see this name in bright blue neon lights with a purple outline. And this name is so bright and so sharp that the sign – it just blows up because the name is so powerful… It says, “Dirk Diggler.”
Paul Thomas Anderson has been one of the most acclaimed directors of the 21st century. There Will Be Blood (2007) marked its arrival on the mainstream market and was his highest-grossing film to date. The performance of Daniel Day-Lewis as a ruthless oil prospector garnered the British native his second victory as Best Actor at the 80th Academy Awards.
It was in the 90s, though, that PTA established himself as a masterful story-teller. His first feature film was Hard Eight (1996) a crime drama that went through an odyssey of cuts and delays. The movie was originally titled Sidney, but the company that financed it ( Rysher Entertainment) changed its original title and threatened the director to take its movie away from him several times.
This were the times were independent film-making was blossoming thanks to the incredible success of a movie like Pulp Fiction (1994). Every movie with a small budget and with the capabilities of making a lot of money was greenlit. That’s how a cable company like Rysher Entertainment, that came from a tradition of Baywatch-like television, decided to finance the movie after having read the screenplay. After various cuts, the movie got last financing and Anderson finished it. With the money he made from the tumultuous adventure with Hard Eight, he embarked on the journey for his second movie.
In 1988 Anderson directed a mockumentary on the life of Dirk Diggler, a porn-star loosely based on the real-life actor from Golden Age Porn era John Holmes. This mockumentary was later expanded years later and became Boogie Nights. The story begins in the 70s when in the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles. Porn is a flourishing business and movies are screened in theaters, almost equaling regular cinema.
The idea for the script came to Anderson from his real-life experience. Being a Valley native, he remembered very clearly those years when porn was in constant expansion. In an interview with Marc Maron on his podcast, Anderson recalls that when he was a teenager near his grandmother’s house there was a huge villa with amazing cars parked outside. The house was obviously used for shooting porn movies and had a huge bay window. Anderson reveals how he used to look for that bay window in every porn movie without any luck.
Eddie Addams, soon to be renamed Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg), is a high school dropout who works as a dishwasher in a Valley nightclub when gets recruited by director Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds) to star in a porn movie. Horner’s partner is renowned porn actress Amber Weaves interpreted by an incredible Julianne Moore, nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the 69th Academy Awards.
Dirk quickly becomes the best actor in the game, winning every possible award, but its success will have to face highs and lows, as the porn industry goes through dramatic changes that will shake the entire game.Even though the movie contains comedic aspects, necessary when you have to tell a story about porn, the tone of the entire story maintains a dramatic intensity. Dirk is recruited and has success thanks to his incredible “qualities” that in many occasions are used as comedic device, for example when his being asked to take off his pants by the producer of Horner’s movies ( Robert Ridgely) so he can check his natural gifts.
Leonardo Di Caprio was the first choice for Anderson to interpret Dirk Diggler but the actor went on to make Titanic (1997) and so Wahlberg was cast. The role helped establishing him as an actor, and was the perfect match for the character written by Anderson due to his naivety and boldness as a performer in his first roles. Burt Reynolds was an American icon from the 60s and 70s but had to face a career decline in the 80s and early 90s. Anderson recalled that working with Reynolds was very hard because the actor did not trust a young director like him. Sharing a trailer with then-unknown actors was very frustrating for an actor that, 20 years before, was the go-to man in Hollywood. In the end, the movie helped Reynolds in reviving his career.
The movie is a majestic effort of representing the porn industry subculture of the 70s and 80s. Anderson creates a plausible and human portrait of people that were rejected by the post-war puritan American society. The actors, directors, cameraman had no contact with the outside, “normal”, world. Anderson create a microcosm that is insulated by society but that represents its same contradictions and dynamics.
Ironically, one of the underlying themes of the picture is family. Before Dirk starts its new path into the movie industry, he is rejected by his real mom and dad and finds a surrogate family in the figures of Jack and Amber. This aspect is constantly highlighted by Amber’s behavior towards Dirk. Julianne Moore confers incredible humanity to a character that is, at the same time, a famous porn-star and a loving mother that has lost his real child to a legal battle finding a surrogate son in Dirk.
The greatness of Boogie Nights is the ability to create a collective work that depicts primary and secondary storylines with the same power. John C. Reilly, frequent collaborator of Anderson,is Dirk’s wing-man, a porn actor that secretly longs to become a magician. The most touching character is Buck Swope, interpreted by Don Cheadle, the Iron Patriot of the Marvel Universe. Buck is a porn actor that on the side works as salesman for a hi-fi store. Buck’s dream is to open his own store but his hope is broken when the bank decides not to finance his business because of his job in the porn industry.His storyline gives us a glimpse of how hard must have been at the time for people in the porn business, or misfits in general, to integrate in a society that despised them. In one of the scenes that didn’t find space in the final cut of the picture, Buck and his girlfriend (Melora Walters), both porn-actors, try to have sex “like normal people” instead of enacting the usual performance as characters in a porn movie.
This scene would have been a great addition to an already strong material because it contributes to the powerful narrative of the outsider, a struggle towards a sort of redemption that may never be achieved.