The actual sex that took place during the making of ‘Boogie Nights’
The attention to detail that Paul Thomas Anderson put into every frame and line of dialogue in his 1997 magnum opus Boogie Nights toes the line between obsession and perversion. Anderson himself fully admitted to being a porn connoisseur while growing up in Los Angeles during the 1970s, collecting as much film as he possibly could. Only someone like Anderson could see the beauty, the toil, and the tragedy in people like John Holmes, and that love seeps into even the lowest moments of Boogie Nights.
In order to get the cast of the movie fully immersed in their roles, Anderson went to some pretty wild extremes. In Grantland‘s oral history of Boogie Nights, cinematographer Robert Elswit recalls that he and Anderson watched “every existing porno that was ever shot on film” during pre-production. Elswit probably had the most exposure to lewd acts, but Anderson wanted the actors to feel the realness of porn as well.
There was only one way to do that: expose most of the actors to real porn shoots. “A bunch of us visited a porn set one day,” Phillip Seymour Hoffman confirmed in the oral history. Nicole Ari Parker, who portrayed starlet Becky Barnett, and William H. Macy, who played assistant director “Little Bill”, both recalled how strangely familiar the set felt.
“It was a female director running the shoot, really a tough cookie — a former porn star, I think,” Parker explained in the oral history. “She was a real serious director in jeans, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap giving the actors direction about positioning. It was a very authentic film shoot except for the two people having sex, doggy-style, by a pool.”
“In the hair and makeup room, I was having a conversation with a girl who was completely naked, sitting Indian-style in front of me on the floor, curling her hair and talking completely normal about what the lineup was for the day,” she added. “And she said it was her character’s birthday in the scene and they were having a pool party. And first she has an orgy scene in the pool and then the guy scene and then a girl-girl scene, a girl-guy-guy scene and then a girl-girl scene. I was like, ‘Wow, that’s a full day.’”
“She looked like any director I’ve ever worked with,” Macy confirmed about the shoot’s filmmaker. “She had X amount of hours to shoot X number of pages, and she had that same frantic gait. And the actors are sort of la-di-da, having a grand old time, you know, not worrying about the clock. Looked like any other shoot. It could have been Masterpiece Theatre.“
Another notable field trip involved taking Julianne Moore to a shoot with infamous porn-lifer Ron Jeremy. “We were all crammed into this 10-by-10-foot motel room in Fairfax. There was Julianne, Ron Jeremy, some old guy, a girl, and the girl’s husband and me — all shoved up against the wall watching this guy do the girl,” Anderson told Details magazine in 1997. “At one point, Julianne turns to me and says, ‘It kinda smells in here.’ I thought she’d quit after that.”
“We went to the shoot in a production van. We got out, and we walked into the house,” Luis Guzmán remembered about the research endeavour. “They said, ‘Be very quiet,’ and they sent us up to a balcony. ‘You can watch from here.’ There’s a guy, and he’s banging this chick. The next thing you know, the guy looks up at the balcony, and he points to me. He yells up, ‘Hey, I know you!’ I go, ‘That’s fucked up.’ Next thing you know, he goes limp.”
Anderson even went so far as to cast actual adult film actors in the movie, most notably Nina Hartley, who plays Little Bill’s cuckolding wife. During the scene where Hartley meets her grisly end at the hands of Bill, Hartley did what her character does throughout the film – have sex with men who aren’t her husband. But in her final scene, Elswit was convinced that the action went beyond simulated.
“In one take, I walked in and realized that that guy is actually fucking Nina Hartley,” Elswit told Grantland. “It’s clear that his dick is in her. So I think the producers and Paul went in and, ya know, ‘You have to be simulating having sex. It’s not a porno movie. We can’t do this.'”
Second assistant director Adam Druxman also believed that Hartley and her co-star were really doing the deed. “But there’s like 30 crew members standing outside the house looking into the laundry room. And the two porn stars are really doing it,” Druxman said. “They just thought it would be easier to really have sex. The producer went crazy.”
For her part, Hartley denied actually having unsimulated sex during the scene, but her description of the action sounds likely something that only an experienced adult film star would know to do. “We were not really having sex. But my partner was not, you know, taped down,” Hartley explained in the piece. “His penis was not taped to his leg. We hid it in the old-fashioned way — not in me but between the tops of my thighs.”
