The porn movie that inspired ‘Boogie Nights’ “scared the piss” out of Paul Thomas Anderson
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights was born from a myriad of inspirations, but the initial seed was planted when the future filmmaker watched his first porn movie at an age where he was far too young and impressionable to be watching anything of the sort.
Obviously, he wasn’t the first young man to become enamoured and obsessed with skin flicks, and the feature-length story of Mark Wahlberg’s Dirk Diggler becoming an adult film superstar was based on a mockumentary short he’d written and directed when he was still in high school.
When most of his peers were probably spending their free time watching the real thing and making sure their doors were locked, Anderson was being much more productive with his hands. The Dirk Diggler Story was itself influenced by a documentary about John C Holmes, creating a rare porno-related trickle-down effect that doesn’t require a towel or an old sock afterwards.
From the second Boogie Nights first hit cinemas on October 10th, 1997, it was a nailed-on awards season contender. Critics were falling over themselves to praise Anderson’s poignant picture, which earned three Academy Award nominations and won Burt Reynolds a Golden Globe for ‘Best Supporting Actor’, even though he’s about the only person who hated the movie.
Anderson was only 26 years old when shooting started on his sophomore film, but the genesis of Boogie Nights dates back much further. 17 years, to be precise, with the auteur confirming to Grantland that his first eye-opening experience with porn came (pun at least half intended) when he was still a nine-year-old nipper.
“It’s true, my dad was the first guy on the block to have a VCR,” he proudly declared, and then immediately hinted that one of the first things he did with the new technology was watch porn. “The Opening of Misty Beethoven. Very, very, very well made, one of the best. It terrified me at the time, really scared the piss out of me. A blow job was a blow job, but the sex stuff was confusing. I was trying to figure this out: is that in her butt or what?”
Having never seen it, it’s impossible to verify whether or not it was, in fact, in her butt or not, but having gained his first exposure to porn, the first domino toward Boogie Nights had been toppled. Almost a decade later, Anderson recalled “sitting on my bed, I was 17 years old, I was watching TV, and I swear to god, it was just like, bang! Dirk Diggler. Hey, that’s a good porno name.”
It’s probably best not to know what he was watching on TV while daydreaming of porn star names, but he nonetheless wrote it down on an index card so he wouldn’t forget. Nine-year-old Anderson watching The Opening of Misty Beethoven was his introduction to porn, and by the time he’d finished high school, he’d created Dirk Diggler, which would lead him to Boogie Nights, which definitely isn’t the worst outcome to befall someone who was seeing things they shouldn’t be seeing at that age.
