The year was The Zimas were flowing, there were frosted tips as far as the eye could see, and Night Ranger's power ballad "Sister Christian" was suddenly cool again. Why, you ask? Mark Wahlberg played a down-and-out nobody reborn as adult industry legend named Dirk Diggler, his nom de porn a reference to his freakishly large dong. Diggler and his giant junk are welcomed into a world of free love and easy drugs by veteran smut producer Jack Horner Burt Reynolds and his porn actress Amber Waves Julianne Moore , just before the fun grids to a halt in the early '80s. It's definitely one of the greatest movies of the '90s and a movie you probably already know and love.
2. Mark Wahlberg almost turned it down, too.
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The film Boogie Nights , written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, follows high school dropout Eddie Adams Mark Wahlberg , who uses his one remarkable characteristic—his ample endowment—to transform into Dirk Diggler, the biggest porn star of the s. Macy , boom operator Scotty J. Philip Seymour Hoffman and the rest of the crew look on. Dirk is sitting on the edge of the bed, dressed up in a brown suit and his hair is brushed back, parted down the middle. He paces a little, does some deep breathing, looks over script, etc.
Read the scene where Dirk Diggler unzips
Sign In. Edit Boogie Nights Showing all items. Director Robert Downey, Sr. Is There Sex After Death? Robert Downey, Sr. Buck Swope refers to a "TK modification" on his stereo, with the serial number of the stormtrooper that Luke Skywalker impersonated on the Death Star.
Made by a brilliant new writer-director, Paul Thomas Anderson, it's a giddily trenchant drama and a weirdly engaging dark comedy: a wide-awake look at the American adult movie industry in the late '70s and early '80s, that re-creates that bizarre era -- when bell bottoms, long hair and the sexual revolution gave way to AIDS and the button-down Reagan years -- while also raising its story to a higher symbolic and comic level. As the movie follows the meteoric career of Eddie Adams Mark Wahlberg , a San Fernando Valley high schooler and busboy who changes his name to Dirk Diggler and achieves brief but transcendent fame as a mainstream porno star, Anderson's movie almost encapsulates the wacky, self-deluded spirit of its times. But the movie doesn't moralize over Dirk's fall, or anyone else's. Anderson is so vastly amused by the whole California porno milieu, which he records with punctilious wit and a sardonic eye, that he never stops having fun, never stops boogieing. Macy as cuckolded manager Little Bill and the late Robert Ridgely as the bankroller, "Colonel" James -- "Boogie Nights" is a blast of brainy writing and on-the-nose acting, with dazzling camera displays by Anderson and cinematographer Robert Elswit. They begin the film with an amazing one-take tracking shot through a '70s L. At the end of the opening shot, moving though this glittering, hopped-up scene is the laughably naive Dirk, the Joe "Midnight Cowboy" Buck of his day. When we meet Dirk, he is a likable, not-too-smart but prodigiously endowed busboy, dreaming of Hollywood stardom. That comes to him one night at the club, when Dirk's endowments are discovered by roller-blading porno star Rollergirl Heather Graham and her boss, Horner. And it becomes a running joke afterward that all the affable Dirk has to do to convince the pros he has the stuff for stardom is to drop his pants.
