1997 was a big year for Paul Thomas Anderson
In the first episode of our four-part series on Paul Thomas Anderson, we revisit Hard Eight and Boogie Nights
Film Features Paul Thomas Anderson
Every new movie from Paul Thomas Anderson is an event. That’s certainly how we’ve been treating Licorice Pizza, the writer-director’s latest picture, which hits theaters at the end of November. All month long, in the run-up to its release, critics A.A. Dowd and Katie Rife will be revisiting all of Anderson’s other movies. The four-part series kicks off with a look back at his first two features, which happened to open the same year: the low-key gambler/crime drama Hard Eight, and the porn-industry epic Boogie Nights.
You can hear the entire conversation in the episode above, or read a lightly edited excerpt down below.
A.A. Dowd: I think if there’s an arc to [Paul Thomas] Anderson’s career, it has been shedding some of the more hotshot qualities that defined his work early on.
Katie Rife: Well, he was a boy wonder, you know?
A.A. Dowd: Yeah. He came up in the 1990s, with other filmmakers who came up during the indie boom. I think one of the reasons that Anderson is as revered as he is today is that he never went out of fashion, and he kept evolving as an artist. Anderson is not somebody who flamed out. You don’t look at his work and think he’s some relic of the 90s.
Katie Rife: Right, it doesn’t seem dated, his work now.
A.A. Dowd: Yeah, and a big part of that is that Anderson, like a lot of artists, started out emulating the giant influences on his work. He started doing his take on Robert Altman, on Martin Scorsese, on Jonathan Demme. And eventually, as often happens with great artists, the qualities that felt imitative fell away and Anderson became himself.
Katie Rife: Yeah, exactly. And I think that has a lot to do with Anderson being a film school guy. Beginning with the 70s, where you had the “film school brats,” And then in the 90s, it was a more varied field; not everybody came out of film schools from that 90s wave. But they were similar to the 70s wave in the sense that they were all about digesting and recontextualizing their influences. They were filmmakers who are obsessed with movies.
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47 Comments
I fucking love Boogie Nights. It still holds up beautifully.
I can’t get over how great that cast was…oh, and the Wahlberg guy of course.
they’re a real Funky Bunch
He gets astonishing work out of his actors. He finds profound vulnerability in everyone.
I mean Dirk is not smart, so good casting.
This is where Luis Guzman truly earned his Greendale statue.
On my short list of perfect films.
I remember having absolutely no idea what it was going to be about, I figured it was about disco.
It sure does – I love it, and I still love watching it after the nth time.
It is terrific, so many quotable lines and great performances.
I might be misremembering this, but I seem to remember PT Anderson in a commentary track saying that a big chunk of the film’s budget went to the CGI that was done for the montage sequence where Dirk was starting to win all the awards – even for simple stuff like newspaper headlines flying horizontally across the screen. I guess that was expensive back in the 90s.
I watched it for the first time recently, and I felt that there were some parts that were very, very good, but that the first half of the movie had almost no conflict in it. I kept waiting for something to happen. And they didn’t invest enough in the side characters to get you really interested in them.
It is great but it is depressing. These characters are at best clinging to a dysfunctional community that accepts them when the world won’t, but still doesn’t treat them very well. At worst, they’re caught in a fairly horrific downward spiral. Buck’s relative good luck notwithstanding.
“There Will Be Blood” was a special kind of world, and one that I hope he revisits. His 1970’s fetish isn’t really my bag.
I’m the reverse in that I love everything 1970’s so that IS my bag, baby.
Although of course “There Will Be Blood” is fucking great.
Hey, I can dig it. My word is Thunderbird, man.
I like Boogie Nights far less than most cinephiles, but I really dug Inherent Vice. I’m not especially interested in Licorice Pizza.
It is by far my favorite film of the excellent film year of 2007 (yes, better than “No Country for Old Men”). Fantastic lead performance and one of the best commentaries of the American drive for greed and power. Soundtrack, cinematography, production design — it’s an A+ on every level.
I can’t think of a specific uniting theme, or source work he could adapt, but I’d like to see a PTA film that gets him out of California. My vote is for late 1950s-early 1960s NYC or Paris. Either dealing with fictional outsiders looking for a way in to the Beatnik and other countercultures of that time. If actor portrayals of real-life historical figures of either city’s art, literature, political, and philosophical circles of the time is too much of a creative cage, I’d be perfectly fine with fictional amalgamations of said time period’s historical figures. Something akin to the way The Master cast Seymour-Hoffman as “L. Ron Hubbard” and dealt with the early years of “Scientology”, but wasn’t “really” a “factual” depiction of either.
A narrative that is simultaneously not 100% factual but is 100% truthful.
“Throughout their three-year relationship, Apple remembers Anderson saying harsh words, telling her she was a bad partner, making her look unstable, and, once, he shoved her out of a car. She remembers he threw a chair across the room after the 1998 Academy Awards, where Boogie Nights lost Best Original Screenplay. “Fuck this, this is not a good relationship,” Apple recalled thinking at the time. They’d date for two more tumultuous years, during which, Apple clarifies, he never hit her. Anderson declined to comment through his agent.”https://www.vulture.com/2020/03/fiona-apple-paul-thomas-anderson-louis-ck.html
Huge fan of both (have every one of her albums, and own every one of his movies), but not sure what to make of this. I mean, he directed music videos of hers years after they broke up, so it couldn’t have been that traumatic? Also don’t doubt he might have anger management issues, being a perfectionist on set. Sounds just like a bad relationship all around, as she says.
“it couldn’t have been that traumatic”I think you may be underestimating the degree to which abuse victims can rationalize their abusers’ behavior.
BRING ME HIS HEAD. And be sure to text Maya Rudolph that link so she can divorce him immediately.
The same article also notes that she declines to use the term “abusive,” but that may be overly semantic. I’ve kind of struggled with this ‘accusation,’ if you can call it such, since that article was released.
To me, PTA was a young 20-something with obvious trauma in his own life growing up who probably was a dick to Fiona Apple and treated her poorly during their relationship. For what it’s worth, I can point to a relationship I had in my 20s where I was potentially being emotionally abusive due to my own glaring immaturity and lack of relationship experience.
I’ll also note that Fiona and Paul have worked together as recently as five years ago. Not that that means he never did anything wrong; they’re at least still cordial enough to want to work together. On the other side of this, there’s a good argument for reading the lyrics of “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” (the song) as being directly about the trauma she faced both during and after her relationship with Paul.
Like most things, the truth is probably much more nuanced.
I saw Boogie Nights at the Toronto Film Festival, and that must have been early in its life because it wasn’t even quite finished. Well, they hadn’t put the credits on yet, anyway. But it was a real experience, let me tell you!
I didn’t see it until a year or so later, at home. I would love to have been in a full theater to see the reaction during the Big Reveal.
Awed silence, as I recall. Looking at the release date section of the IMDb, it seems the screening I saw was the very first public one, so I feel pretty, if pointlessly, lucky.
Well that was Rollergirl’s reaction as well, and she’s seen some horns.
I’m a star. A big, bright, shining star.
I’d rather be drug across a gravel parking lot than sit through the Master again, it has to be one of the most irritating, pointless movies ever made. Inherent Vice isn’t much better, with effectively one good laugh (which appeared in the trailer), and two hours of Pynchon’s mind-numbing comings and goings. And Phantom Thread didn’t make enough of an impression to irritate, though it was also a decidedly not-fun movie. Those movies have my enthusiasm for his next flick in the gutter, even if it is an Almost Famous riff.
Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and There Will Be Blood are three of the best movies ever made, and I will die on that hill. The Master and Phantom Thread are both good films, but difficult to love. Hard Eight and Punch-Drunk are too inconsequential to add up to much. Inherent Vice is expertly made crap. The trailer for Licorice Pizza looks very much like old school PTA visually, but I’m not sure about the actual story yet.
I read this entire thing thinking it was about Paul F. Tompkins.Oops!
Jack Frost is on my short list of perfect films.
I thought it was about Paul W.S. Anderson, director of Event Horizon!
F. TOMKINS! We’re talking Anderson here!
Years ago I posted something about not knowing who he was , someone replied that he’d been their room mate for a while , and was fantastic both as a performer and a human being . Anyway I’ve seen himnin loads of stuff since and it turns out that PFT IS great and makes everything he’s in better.
I actually prefer Hard Eight to Boogie Nights.
Same. Great film! Watched it recently and John C Reilly is incredible.
Just curious why you have a picture of the Brady Bunch for this article.
I saw Magnolia twice in the theater.Once with my then-girlfriend now-wife. On one of our first dates.Then the second time also with her, but after I found out that she sat through the entire movie with me without glasses on and couldn’t see anything (I didn’t know she wore glasses at the time). But she didn’t say anything because she didn’t want me to miss the movie. It’s been 2 decades and she’s now much better at putting her own needs first.
Katie: Boogie Nights, five stars.Dowd: I enjoyed it as well.
Was that the year he started working on the Resident Evil movie then?
Christ, Article a Video Podcast
I recently saw Hard Eight for the first time and was very, very impressed. It’s more low-key than Anderson’s subsequent films, but it’s rare you get to see a first-time director who seems so in control of his own craft. It’s a damn good movie.Anderson’s not even one of my favorite directors; there’s a slight whiff of pretentiousness to some of what he does that keeps me at bay (and Inherent Vice is just painfully incoherent no matter how well directed it is), but I can recognize a good filmmaker when I see one.
PTA is my favorite director and I can’t wait to listen to all of these!
Also, sidebar: Do you guys have a new editor? Or is your editor on vacation? Three articles on your homepage today have glaring typos.
Hard Eight has my favorite quote of his whole oeuvre. “You know the first thing they should’ve taught you at hooker school? You get the money up front!”
LMFAO!