Boogie Nights
Boogie Nights at 25: How Paul Thomas Anderson Foresaw Changing Attitudes Towards Art, Porn, and Commerce
25 years ago, Boogie Nights arrived in theaters, introducing audiences to a promising-turned-renowned filmmaker (Paul Thomas Anderson) and showcasing a fantastic ensemble of young breakout performers (Mark Wahlberg, John C. Reilly, Philip Seymour Hoffman), rising character actors (Don Cheadle, William H. Macy, Julianne Moore) and Hollywood veterans (Burt Reynolds, Philip Baker Hall) in an endlessly entertaining depiction of the Golden Age of Porn. Laced with colorful period detail and a vibrant wall-to-wall soundtrack of pop, disco, and Motown, Anderson’s sun-soaked chronicle of the San Fernando Valley in the late 1970s illustrated a seemingly halcyon time in American culture. As the film’s trailer posits, it was an era when “sex was safe, pleasure was a business, and business was booming....
