Jeremy has been ranked by the Guinness Book of World Records as the actor who’s starred in the most adult films. … After cutting just 40 seconds of material, the rating went down to the R that the producers wanted. In 1997, Boogie Nights hit theaters. Dirk’s history as a Marine is based on Holmes’ time in the Army. The role of Buck Swope, which went to Don Cheadle, was first offered to Samuel L. Jackson. While Paul Thomas Anderson was putting together the screenplay for Boogie Nights, he spent a year hanging out with porn legend Ron Jeremy.



A one-stop shop for all things video games. Having experienced hell trying to get his feature debut Hard Eight into theaters, Paul Thomas Anderson expressed very specific instructions when he was first shopping Boogie Nights around producers. The scary thing is, if you can write, you hold a lot of cards. Boogie Nights in Retrospect . Even though it was released a few months before the weirdly prudish/libertine USA lost its collective mind about Bill Clinton's Oval Office dalliances, the film's ultimate appeal doesn't lie in prurience, but in a heartwarming, "God Only Knows" scored depiction of a rag-tag group of misfits with a dream. Avant-garde satirical film director Robert Downey Sr. (yep, Iron Man's real-life dad) shows up in a cameo as the record label executive. One night at Chuck E. Cheese, a 19 year old male hid in the bathroom while five workers had to stay late. But I mean this movie made E.L.O. Like her character, Heather Graham (Rollergirl) seldom took off her skates, even when cameras weren't rolling. "Most people don't share my moral sense," writer/director Paul Thomas Andersonexplained in 1999, "which is, 'I'll masturbate, but I have to clean it up very quickly afterwards.'" Grantland has done the world a public service and pieced together an amazing oral history of the film (yes, haha) in which nearly every principal player recounts their memories of the movie, in a long piece full of fascinating information for any indie filmmaker, or just film fan. Set in 1977, back when sex was safe, pleasure was a business and business was booming, idealistic porn producer Jack Horner aspires to elevate his craft to an art form. Fred Durst--was criminally underused, known to most as the Library Cop from Seinfeld. In 2015, Reynolds said that, to this day, he still hasn't ever watched "Boogie Nights" all the way through, and that he turned down an offer to appear in Anderson's follow-up, "Magnolia." According to Anderson, in that same interview with Roger Ebert: I did enroll for a couple of days at NYU, but I went into it with a bad attitude. "You know," Anderson joked, "Mark came to me and said, 'I've got an inch on Leo.' It's amazing that the film was made in the first place, given the subject matter and frankness with which it's handled. His new film, an adaptation of reclusive author Thomas Pynchon's shaggy-dog, hazy California detective novel Inherent Vice, is his seventh feature, and Anderson, still a young man (he was 27 when Boogie Nights was made, and two years younger when he helmed his first feature, Hard Eight) is in the enviable position, like his peer and fellow Anderson, Wes, of being a 'Hollywood' director who can pretty much do what he wants. "Boogie Nights" had a famously fraught production history, including some life-imitates-porn moments and a near-fistfight between Reynolds and Anderson. DiCaprio suggested Mark Wahlberg for the role, so Anderson offered it to him. Anderson initially wanted Leonardo DiCaprio to star as Dirk Diggler, but the actor begged off, citing his commitment to star in "Titanic." Boogie Nights is also a love letter to filmmaking, in the same vein as Truffaut's Day For Night, another film about the crazy kids who, despite the schlock they are churning out, are in love with film itself (cf. Boogie Nights is based on a mockumentary short film that Anderson wrote and directed while he was still in high school called The Dirk Diggler Story. This was a prosthetic made of biodegradable rubber, and after filming was complete, Mark Wahlberg was allowed to keep hold of it as a keepsake. (It seems quaint now that they called it "electronic," considering that in 1997, skip protection on a CD Walkman was a pretty big deal.) Wahlberg was hesitant at first, since Showgirls had recently failed at the box office, but he changed his mind after reading the script. Boogie Nights is Paul Thomas Anderson's epic movie about the height of the adult film industry in the 1970s. In addition to writing for Screen Rant and Comic Book Resources, covering everything from Scorsese to Spider-Man, Ben directs independent films and does standup comedy. At one point, Reynolds threw a punch at Anderson, but according to first assistant director John Wildermuth, it didn’t escalate into a fight. (He’d later work with Anderson on The Master and Inherent Vice.) Anderson had to submit the film to the MPAA 18 times, cutting a few frames each time from scenes the ratings board found too risqué, in order to avoid an NC-17 rating and earn the R rating he was contractually obliged to deliver. Before hiring Burt Reynolds, Anderson considered actors as diverse as Albert Brooks, Harvey Keitel, Bill Murray, Jack Nicholson and Sydney Pollack. Then, the part was offered to Leonardo DiCaprio, and he liked the script, but the shooting clashed with his commitments to Titanic. So, here are 10 Behind-The-Scenes Facts About Boogie Nights.

Wahlberg also whipped it out during the sequence where Dirk and Amber are shooting a sex scene; it doesn't appear on camera then, but Wahlberg wanted to get a rise out of Moore. The propmakers left the stocking in a warm trunk, where its seeds started to sprout, so they had to make another one. Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Christian Bale, and Ethan Hawke were all considered to play Dirk Diggler. 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.

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.

It was shut out of all three categories.21. Anderson got Philip Baker Hall to appear in the short by walking up to the actor on a set where he was a P.A. The NC-17 version went on to be pirated and widely spread before the actual movie was released. With Downey's permission, Anderson cribbed the kid setting off firecrackers from Downey's 1969 movie "Putney Swope," as well as Buck Swope's last name.17. The main character of Dirk Diggler was however loosely based on adult film star John Holmes 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).3. himself might be in the house. The original short that Boogie Nights was based on, The Dirk Diggler Story, was a parody of the documentary Exhausted: John C. Holmes, The Real Story. I said, 'Really?' Horner discovers Eddie Adams, a... Read More, 'Shithouse' Interviews with Cooper Raiff & Jay Duplass. He's currently in pre-production on his first feature film, Hunting Trip, and has been for a while because filmmaking is expensive. Anderson is a bonafide No Film School filmmaker, famously attending and then dropping out of NYU's prestigious Tisch School of the Arts before he'd even really unpacked. "I'd done my picture with Paul Thomas Anderson, that was enough for me," he said. After that, they were stuck in his head and he was able to sing along to them in the scenes that required it. 14.

Paul had this Academy Award poster right in front of his bed. His response to the script, Anderson recalled, was "What the hell is this?"

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. 4.

Despite Anderson's showbiz lineage (his father, Ernie, was a prominent voice-over actor, frequent late-night talk show guest, and the voice of ABC's T.G.I.F.