Paul Thomas Anderson's second feature. The Valley adult-film industry from 1977 to 1984, told as an ensemble Altman would have made if Altman had been Catholic.
1977, San Fernando Valley. Jack Horner is a director of pornographic films who considers himself a genuine filmmaker. He discovers Eddie Adams, a teenage busboy, in a Reseda nightclub. Eddie becomes Dirk Diggler, the most-bankable male star in Jack's studio. The film follows Dirk and the extended makeshift family of Jack's company — Amber Waves the maternal female lead, Roller Girl the perennial roller-skater, Reed the second male lead — through the late 1970s peak of the analog adult industry and into the 1980s collapse of that industry under the arrival of videotape.
The film's structure is the rise-and-fall: roughly the first two-thirds are the rise, the final third the collapse. By the film's end, the family has scattered, several members are dead, and Dirk is back at Jack's house begging to be readmitted to the project he abandoned.
Boogie Nights opens with a 2-minute-and-47-second Steadicam shot. The camera enters the Hot Traxx disco from the parking lot, glides past Jack Horner, follows Amber Waves through the dance floor, picks up Roller Girl as she skates past, and finally settles on Eddie Adams emerging from the kitchen as a busboy. The entire ensemble is introduced in a single take.
The shot is openly indebted to Martin Scorsese's Copacabana sequence in Goodfellas (1990) and to Robert Altman's ensemble openings (particularly Nashville, 1975, and Short Cuts, 1993). Anderson, at 27, was announcing himself as part of that tradition rather than departing from it. The shot was his calling card; the film's commercial success made him a major director.
The 9-minute drug-deal sequence near the end of the film — Dirk, Reed, and Todd attempting to sell baking soda as cocaine to a paranoid drug dealer (Alfred Molina, in one of the great supporting turns of the 1990s) — is the film's most-quoted set piece. The scene cycles through Night Ranger's 'Sister Christian,' Rick Springfield's 'Jessie's Girl,' and Nena's '99 Luftballons,' punctuated by random firecrackers thrown into the room by the dealer's bodyguard.
The sequence is constructed to make the audience feel the drug paranoia from inside. The firecrackers are unexplained until the scene's final beat. The music selections are diegetic — Molina's character is putting on the songs. The escalating dread is constructed entirely from incommensurate stimuli pressing in on the protagonists from all directions. It is, structurally, one of the masterworks of 1990s American film direction.
Burt Reynolds had not had a serious dramatic role in over a decade when Anderson cast him as Jack Horner. The performance — paternal, faintly delusional about his own artistic seriousness, deeply emotionally tender toward his actors — earned Reynolds his only Oscar nomination. Reynolds reportedly disliked the experience and refused to work with Anderson again; he also called the film, late in his life, the most-important of his career.
The performance gave Reynolds a third act few major American stars get. Jack Horner is the film's emotional centre. Reynolds plays him without irony and without contempt. The Academy nominated him for Best Supporting Actor; he lost to Robin Williams for Good Will Hunting.