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Boogie Nights: Dirk Diggler
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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 ... 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."
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The great thing about Boogie Nights is that it captures, perfectly, the naive insanity of the late 1970s. This is all new -- sex, drugs, disco, fame, money -- and Diggler, Amber Waves, Jack Horner and his crew are completely taken with it. While Anderson shows that there is already corruption surrounding them (and more moving in) he presents the people and their time as basically good and well intentioned. There is no glossing over the fact that sometimes someone ODs on coke, or that sexual experiment has its downside (a key member of the group kills his wife and then commits suicide because he can't deal with their open marriage) but at heart Anderson views and celebrates this period as a time of freedom. Given the pervasive moralism that has been creeping into every aspect of American life over the past thirty years, it is amazing to see a movie that presents sex and drugs without overt condemnation or a sense of outrage.
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After Anderson had completed the dismal experience of writing and directing his first feature film Sydney (renamed Hard Eight by the studio) he went to work writing Boogie Nights with The Dirk Diggler Story as a starting point. The script eventually became a gargantuan 185 page story that featured many interweaving character plots about individuals in the pornography industry, almost all of them being inspired by real life accounts that Anderson had researched over the years. Anderson was very frank with studio executives when he pitched the film around Hollywood, stating up front that it would be three hours long and rated NC-17 due to its subject matter. Although he knew that this would alienate the vast majority of executives to whom he tried to sell the project, Anderson did so in order to limit the potential intervention that had resulted in Sydney being taken away from him by the studio.
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Dirk Diggler