To sync commentary: Insert your DVD/Blu-Ray/VHS/Laserdisc of “Boogie Nights” Proceed through any/all menus and as soon as the film itself begins (black screen, New Line Logo flying into frame) Hit start on the .mp3. Featuring Mike Russell (The Oregonian, CulturePulp.com) Erik Henriksen (The Portland Mercury) and Big Jim Willig (Big and Loud Podcast). Recorded in the CIC of the Battlestar Portlandia, docked above the Roseway Theater.
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{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
FYI, Boogie Nights is Anderson’s second feature film. His first is Hard Eight but to him it is called Seymour after the main character. That is, they are the same film.
Yeah, I straight-up pooched that one, sorry. I listened to Anderson’s commentary track, he kept calling “Hard Eight” “Seymour,” I made an assumption, and didn’t have time to prep otherwise before the taping. I am much ashamed.
No… “Sydney”. Not Seymour.
I share Erik’s obsession with Julianne Moore. I didn’t know that I had a “thing” for red heads. I first saw her in The Fugitive at an advance screening at the Lloyd, and my jaw metaphorically dropped. I always stay through the credits of a film while the rest of the screening rats are rushing to their cars to join in the traffic jam but in this case I stayed to find out the name of this dish who has two minutes of screen time as the doctor in the hospital who is wondering why Harrison Ford the janitor knows so much about thoracic surgery. I watched the film again recently to remind myself of the source of the cine-crush and she looks exactly the same now as she did then. The woman hasn’t aged or changed. She has signed a pact with the Devil!
Like Anderson, Tarantino also likes to claim that the influence of Scorsese is minimal. Tarantino also claims that he is un-influenced by Peckinpah, and gets prickly about the suggestion and there is some truth to what he says. Anyway, De Palma’s wholesale cynical thievery from Hitchcock taught Tarantino that it is OK to “quote” from other filmmakers, but the way that Anderson is “quoting” Goodfellas at the start of BN is at least thematically consistent. His movies are usually about how people are connected, and the long opening show (Wellesian, too, I just realized, vide Touch of Evil) shows or suggests how interconnected all the people in the following story are going to be.
See, I was giving Mike the benefit of the doubt because I’d never heard of “Seymour” but I DID know that “Sydney” became “Hard Eight.” My default is to default to Mike’s knowledge on most things, because I’m only just smart enough to realize most people know more than I do
That’s an interesting contrast between Anderson and Tarantino, with regards to their quoting: Anderson quotes only if it fits well with the narrative/themes he’s trying to push forward in the film, like your example of the opening of “Boogie Nights” sampling “Goodfellas.” Tarantino probably bristles at his quoting because it isn’t as organic – basically, he’s not weaving it or interpolating it in as well. When he does it, he’s doing it to bask in how COOL that shit is. Because it IS really cool.
The camera dipping into the pool mimics a similar long take in the Soviet film I Am Cuba, directed by Mijail Kalatozov in the early ’60s. I don’t know if it means anything that PTA borrowed the shot, but they are awfully similar.
Re: Porn Film Writers: There is a small reference to what it was like to be that guy, in Jerry Stahl’s confession, Permanent Midnight. It turns out that he wrote the script to what may well be the best porn film of all time, and also one that anticipated in a Cronenbergian way the Aids crisis, Café Flesh of 1982.
Great track from all parties involved. I wasn’t able to make it to the Baghdad, but I did go out and rent “Hard Eight” and finally decided to buy a copy of “Boogie Nights.”