("I think he was joking and not joking," Anderson mused.) 7. Warren Beatty expressed interest, but he ultimately acknowledged he just wanted to be associated with the project because the 59-year-old star saw himself more as Dirk. Before hiring Burt Reynolds, Anderson considered actors as diverse as Albert Brooks, Harvey Keitel, Bill Murray, Jack Nicholson and Sydney Pollack.Ħ. The role of Jack Horner, the porn filmmaker who becomes a surrogate father to Dirk and an ad hoc family of cast and crew members, was hard to cast. And then I hired him." Years later, DiCaprio would cite turning down "Boogie Nights" as his "biggest regret."ĥ. "You know," Anderson joked, "Mark came to me and said, 'I've got an inch on Leo.' I said, 'Really?' And he showed it to me. Anderson initially wanted Leonardo DiCaprio to star as Dirk Diggler, but the actor begged off, citing his commitment to star in " Titanic." But he recommended his " Basketball Diaries" co-star Wahlberg. They decided the director's phone-book-sized script about a guy with a 13-inch penis was edgy enough, as long as he agreed to keep it under three hours and keep the rating down to an R.Ĥ. After seeing Anderson's first film, " Hard Eight," they thought he might be it. New Line wanted to be the next Miramax, and they needed their own Quentin Tarantino. There's Holmes' rise to fame via the series of "Johnny Wadd" thrillers (echoed in Dirk's "Brock Landers" movies), his biographical documentary directed by a colleague ("Exhausted," the inspiration for the movie that Julianne Moore's Amber makes about Dirk), and his alleged involvement in the Wonderland drug murder case (the inspiration for the whole nightmarish sequence involving Alfred Molina's Rahad Jackson).ģ. The Dirk Diggler of Anderson's "Boogie Nights" screenplay bears a strong resemblance to legendary porn actor John Holmes, and not just in terms of length. In addition to the protagonist, several other characters and much of the dialogue would find their way into "Boogie Nights" a decade later.Ģ. He was still in high school when he made his first movie, a 32-minute short called "The Dirk Diggler Story," a "Zelig"-like mockumentary about a fallen porn star. Anderson (above, right) grew up in the Valley and was, as a teen, obsessed with the porn industry existing all around him. Here are some of the things that, uh, went down.ġ. "Boogie Nights" had a famously fraught production history, including some life-imitates-porn moments and a near-fistfight between Reynolds and Anderson. These days, "Boogie Nights" evokes double nostalgia, both for the disco 1970s, lovingly recreated in the movie's costumes and soundtrack, and for the 1990s, when Hollywood studios still nurtured indie directors and let them realize their visions instead of plucking them fresh from Sundance and assigning them to direct CGI blockbuster franchise sequels. Nonetheless, it earned three Oscar nominations, made a serious leading man out of Mark Wahlberg, gave Burt Reynolds his best role of the last 35 years, put Anderson on the map, and gave early career boosts to Philip Seymour Hoffman, John C. "Most people don't share my moral sense," writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson explained in 1999, "which is, 'I'll masturbate, but I have to clean it up very quickly afterwards.'" No wonder "Boogie Nights" wasn't exactly a hit. The subject matter was still too skeevy to draw mainstream or even art-house audiences, yet not nearly explicit enough to draw the trench coat crowd. In the age of HBO's "The Deuce," " Boogie Nights" looks like a time-honored masterpiece, but when the sprawling period epic about the golden age of porn filmmaking opened 20 years ago this week (on October 10, 1997), moviegoers didn't exactly embrace it.
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