The meticulously planned ‘Boogie Nights’ shot derailed by a fart: “You didn’t hear that?”
There is a lot of pressure to get things right when making a film. Time and money constraints, a large cast and crew, and pressure from the powers above (also known as demanding studio heads) can create an intense atmosphere where you really don’t want things to go wrong.
Sometimes, there’s nothing you can do to stop mistakes from happening, though – that’s just life. While mistakes are inevitable in life, so is farting. A pesky case of flatulence actually had the power to derail a scene from Boogie Nights, which director Paul Thomas Anderson had meticulously planned out, leaving the crew to have to reshoot the entire sequence a few more times. But who was the smelly culprit?
Boogie Nights was Anderson’s second film, and it truly marked him out as a vital new voice in cinema. Inspired by Robert Altman, the director quickly became known for his ensemble casts, and Boogie Nights is one of the greatest examples of his ability to command a large cast of actors. With Mark Wahlberg in the lead role as Dirk Diggler, who rises from being a pot washer to an adult movie icon during the 1970s’ Golden Age of Porn, many iconic stars accompany him in supporting roles, including Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore, Don Cheadle, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman.
However, it was frequent PTA collaborator William H Macy who was responsible for the scene-derailing fart, which occurred when they were shooting a very important sequence. The actor played Little Bill, an assistant director who kills himself after shooting his wife and her lover, bringing some extreme darkness to the comedy.
Talking to Vulture, the actor described the process of shooting the scene, which involved his unfortunate error. “I’ll bet you there were a hundred extras in this house — and it wasn’t that big a house — so everybody had to be really cagey about not getting out of my way, making me force my way through the crowd, but melting back seamlessly so it didn’t show on camera that they had to open up.”
“I find my wife fucking this guy, and then I go back out through the front door, to my car, I get a gun out of the glove box, and then I locked the car, which made Paul laugh. That was a spontaneous thing; he loved that and left it in,” he added.
Continuing, “To be candid, the first time we did it, I was stepping over this ottoman and I farted. I was going to just keep going because it’s a rough shot, but I started giggling. Paul said, ‘What happened?’ and I said, ‘You didn’t hear that?’ The sound guy said, ‘I heard it!’”
The second time around, there were no farts, but Macy did mess up the moment in which he had to shoot himself, resulting in an extensive clean-up operation to rid the set (and his costume) of the fake blood and gore that he accidentally released before he was meant to.
Shooting a film is far from easy, and even the smallest mistake, such as a fart, can evidently result in several more hours on set in the hopes of achieving the perfect scene.
