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RECOMMENDATION: NO: Read the brutal rejection letter for the first draft of ‘Boogie Nights’
04.11.2016
12:39 pm
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I am a staunch appreciator of Boogie Nights. It would definitely be on my shortlist for my list of best movies of the 1990s. I liked it the first time I saw it as a new movie, but to be honest the subject matter squicked me out a little bit, and it took a few more viewings for me to appreciate what a rich, funny, resonant, accomplished piece of work it is.

Some Paul Thomas Anderson fans might opt for Magnolia or There Will Be Blood or The Master as Anderson’s best movie, but to me that’s all poppycock—the right answer is clearly Boogie Nights in my mind. It’s one of those movies that every time I stumble upon it on TV, I’m going to watch it to the end. I love everything about it.
 

Paul Thomas Anderson and some of his Boogie Nights cast members
 
Released in October of 1997, the movie was eventually distributed by New Line and had a production budget of $15 million. Anderson, however, had considerable difficulty getting the project off the ground; three years earlier, in October of 1994, at the age of 24, Anderson submitted a draft of the script to Twentieth Century Fox, which rejected it. Anderson put the project on the back burner and concentrated on finishing what would prove to be his debut, Hard Eight, which first saw audiences at the 1996 Cannes film festival.

Here’s Fox’s assessment of the various parts of the script:
 

RECOMMENDATION:  NO
CONCEPT: POOR
CHARACTERIZATION: FAIR
DIALOGUE: FAIR
STORYLINE: POOR

 
Keep reading after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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04.11.2016
12:39 pm
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Paul Thomas Anderson: David Foster Wallace was ‘the first teacher I fell in love with’


 
Two days ago Marc Maron’s WTF interview with Paul Thomas Anderson, who is promoting his new Thomas Pynchon adaptation Inherent Vice was posted, and buried in that interview is an intriguing tale about Anderson’s days as a student in a class taught by revered author David Foster Wallace. It turns out that Wallace spent a year as an adjunct professor at Emerson College, and that happened to be the same year that Anderson was there as a student, and Anderson happened to take one of Wallace’s classes, in which they apparently read Don Delillo’s classic postmodernist novel White Noise.

Here’s the relevant portion of the interview, which takes place around the 38th minute, lightly edited for readability:

Anderson: [Being at Emerson College] just felt like a drag. It didn’t really. … And I would have to say, that probably was just because I didn’t find a teacher that kind of spoke to me. The funny thing was, is when I was at Emerson for that year, David Foster Wallace, a great writer who was not known then, was my teacher. He was an English teacher.  And, it was the first teacher I fell in love with. And I never found anyone else like that at any other schools that I’ve been to, which makes me really reticent to talk shit about schools or anything else, because it’s just like anyplace, like if you could find a good teacher, man, I’m sure school would be great.

Maron: So why didn’t you stay?

Anderson: He left.

Maron: So you were there with him for a year?

Anderson: Yeah.

Maron: And you spent a lot of time with him?

Anderson: You know why I didn’t stay? And in that classic move, I thought, “Oh, I want to get to New York. That’s where I’m supposed to go. I’m supposed to go to NYU,” ‘cause it had this good rep and all that. … And, dummy that I am, I did it, and I got there and I thought, “Well, I don’t want to be here. I wish I was back in Boston, you know, taking English classes.”

Maron: Did you spend a lot of time with David Foster Wallace?

Anderson: No. Just in class.

Maron: Oh really? You weren’t one of those guys that after class was like, “Hey, can I talk to you?”

Anderson: No. Uh, I called him once. He was very generous with his phone number, he said “Call me if you got any questions.” I called him a couple times.

Maron: Yeah? What did you say?

Anderson: I ran a few ideas by him about a paper I was writing. I was writing a paper on Don Delillo’s White Noise.

Maron: “Hail of bullets!”

Anderson: And I came up with a couple of crazy ideas, I don’t remember how the conversation went but I just remember him being real generous at like, you know,  midnight the night before it was due.

Maron: Really? You were freaking out, all jacked up?

Anderson: [Laughing] Yeah, basically!

Maron: “I’m almost done, man!”

Anderson: It was like, I think I’d written a pretty good paper. It was like, cooking a pretty good dish and at the last minute just panicking—“I got to add some more shit on, on top of it.”

Maron: Or you missed the point, like “Aww, that’s what it’s about!”

Anderson: Right. Yeah. There was no cut-and-paste back then, if you typed it out, you were….

Maron: That book was a life-changer for me, man.

Anderson: Was it really?

Maron: Little bit.

Anderson: I’d love to go back and read it again.

Maron: I would too, actually.

As it happens, Wallace paid close attention to at least two of Anderson’s movies, Boogie Nights and Magnolia, without ever betraying any inkling that he had ever had contact with the director, which frankly seems a little odd. Wallace had a prodigious intellect, and even if Anderson were the most anonymous shnook Wallace had ever had as a student—which seems unlikely—if you’re on the phone multiple times with him discussing White Noise, when a movie as big as Boogie Nights comes out just six years later (Anderson’s debut film, Hard Eight, came out just five years later), you’d think it might make a more lasting impression in a mind as capacious as Wallace’s. Be that as it may, Wallace had strong opinions about Boogie Nights and Magnolia, opinions that track my own precisely: he was tremendously impressed by Boogie Nights and didn’t much care for Magnolia.

In Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, the biography of Wallace that came out after Wallace’s 2008 suicide, author D.T. Max reports the following: “When Boogie Nights came out in 1997, Wallace called Costello and told him the movie was exactly the story that he had been trying to write when they lived together in Somerville.” “Costello” here is Mark Costello, a close friend of Wallace’s with whom he co-wrote the bizarre 1990 book Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present. About Anderson’s follow-up to Boogie Nights Wallace was a good deal grumpier; according to Max’s account, Wallace “hated the acclaimed Magnolia, which he found pretentious and hollow, ‘100% gradschoolish in a bad way.’”
 

 
It’s tempting to say that Anderson (whatever Wallace thought of Magnolia) is the only director who could ever successfully direct one of Wallace’s works, and so on. Anderson is such a gifted director that he would be the first choice for almost any writer’s works, whether it be Delillo, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, J.D. Salinger. He has just completed the first Pynchon adaptation with a fair degree of success. Of course, there already exists a Wallace adaptation, John Krasinski’s 2009 movie Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. It happens that Jason Segel is attempting to portray Wallace himself in The End of the Tour, an adaptation of David Lipsky’s memoir about Wallace titled Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. Segel has come under fire for daring to attempt to play Wallace, which makes sense primarily insofar as it’s exceedingly difficult to capture an intelligence like Wallace’s onscreen, and Segel has mostly played dumb guys in his career.

What’s been overlooked in the apparent linkup between Anderson and Wallace is a key shared point of interest, that being the adult entertainment industry. Anderson’s breakthrough success, Boogie Nights, is an affectionate look at the porn industry of the 1970s, which in the movie is eventually usurped by the more cutthroat and impersonal video-based porn industry of the 1980s, mirroring a progression that happened in real life. Anderson grew up in the San Fernando Valley and has often told of his youthful adventures figuring out that certain houses in the neighborhood were being used for porno shoots. (The subject comes up in the WTF interview too.) Wallace also had a keen interest in the porn industry, writing a piece of reportage for Premiere magazine on the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in 1998. The article was hilariously written under the pseudonymous byline “Willem R. deGroot and Matt Rundlet”; the title of the piece was “Neither Adult Nor Entertainment.” It’s the first essay in Consider the Lobster, Wallace’s second collection of non-fiction works, although the title’s been changed to “Big Red Son.”

But the AVN story is just a small part of it. At one point, around the time he and Costello were working on the hip-hop book, Wallace, according to Max, spent a considerable amount of time trying to write a novel set in the pornography industry, one that never got finished:

Another nonconformist industry now caught his eye: the pornography business. Pornography fit well into Wallace’s ongoing areas of inquiry: it linked to advertising—the thing really being sold was the idea that we are all entitled to sexual pleasure, which in turn feeds the secondhand desire that Wallace saw at the root of the American malaise.

You can see this idea playing out in Wallace’s masterpiece Infinite Jest, in the “samizdat” that is so entertaining that its viewers lose interest in everything else and eventually die. In The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Costello (pretty hilariously) reported on Wallace’s research methods for the book as follows:

Wallace set timetables for his work, intricate as the Croton-on-Hudson local. Get up. Talk on phone with porn actress famous for giving screen blow jobs. Hang up. Ask: is the porn queen an actress? Look up actress in the OED. Actress: a female actor. Look up actor: one who acts in a drama. Surely a blow job is an act. OK then: is a blow job drama?

Not surprisingly, per Max, Wallace soon came to think that some “actual on-set knowledge might help.” It’s in this context that Wallace’s interest in Boogie Nights becomes more evident. According to Max, Wallace “came to think that what was needed was a reported piece on how the industry had changed as the so-called golden age of porn gave way to the era of inexpensive and inartistic video,” which is precisely the perspective that Anderson offered in his highly confident and knowing movie about porn.

Here’s The Dirk Diggler Story in full, the half-hour movie Anderson made in 1988 that many years later would become the core of Boogie Nights.
 

Posted by Martin Schneider
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01.07.2015
01:39 pm
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Stay sick: Cleveland’s legendary 1960s horror host ‘Ghoulardi’ is Paul Thomas Anderson’s father
08.15.2013
12:28 pm
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Ghoulardi
 
In the city of Cleveland, people of a certain age get all misty-eyed when the name “Ghoulardi” is uttered in their presence. He was a mysterious, anarchic, goofy “degenerate” Beatnik character who hosted a Friday late-night horror movie show from 1963 to 1966 on WJW-TV, Cleveland’s channel 8. Ghoulardi was more daffy than scary. You can see traces of Lenny Bruce, Soupy Sales and Ernie Kovacs in his shtick—the Bruce influence is evident in Ghoulardi’s slogan, which was “Stay Sick!”, whereas the Kovacs influence was demonstrated by Ghoulardi actually appearing in the monster movies thanks to a camera trick that superimposed him over the film chain. He would also use sound effects, shoot off fireworks and employ his own soundtracks for comic effect, often “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow” by The Rivingtons. The Soupy Sales influence came with the general anarchy on the live TV set and Ghoulardi’s jabberwocky catchphrases like “Cool it with da boom-booms!” and “Turn blue!” There might have been a soupçon of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth in the mix, too.

Many of Ghoulardi’s baby boomer fans might be only dimly aware that Ghoulardi—real name Ernie Anderson—was also the father of some big-shot director who’s been making waves in Hollywood lately, P.T. Anderson or something like that? That’s right, Paul Thomas Anderson’s production company is called “The Ghoulardi Film Company” in honor of his father. Ernie Anderson died in 1997 and the movie Boogie Nights is dedicated to his memory.
 

 
Given how fondly his fans remember his show, Ghoulardi’s tenure in Cleveland was surprisingly brief—but this was an era in which television dominated everything (and with far fewer distractions). Ghoulardi was a huge influence on The Cramps, so much so that they titled their 1990 Stay Sick album in homage to him. When Anderson died, they dedicated their 1997 album, Big Beat From Badsville to the memory of Ghoulardi. David Thomas of Pere Ubu once complained that The Cramps were “so thoroughly co-optive of the Ghoulardi persona that when they first appeared in the 1970s, Clevelanders of the generation were fairly dismissive,” but from the vantage point of 2013, as John Petkovic wrote earlier this year in The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Ghoulardi (and his rock and roll progeny) “altered the gene pool, leaving a legion of freaky followers to continue in his wake.”

Ernie Anderson left Cleveland for the warmer climes of Los Angeles, where he became a respected voice-over artist and more or less the voice of the ABC television network. In 1983 he demonstrated some of his voice-over artistry on Late Night with David Letterman.

This November 1 marks the start of the three-day Ghoulardifest in Cleveland to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the show.

Catch some of Ghoulardi’s comedy stylings from 1963. Only 18 minutes of his programs actually survived. In this clip he opens up his mailbag, a format that Letterman himself would later make hay with. Ghoulardi gets away with an “racy” joke about poker that wouldn’t make an 11-year-old blink today.
 

 
After the jump, the Emmy-winning Ghoulardi documentary, ‘Turn Blue: The Short Life of Ghoulardi’

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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08.15.2013
12:28 pm
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‘The Master’: It ain’t the meter, it’s the motion
09.11.2012
10:27 pm
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image
 
There are few theaters left in the world that have the capability to screen 70 millimeter film. Which is a shame. Because if you’re going to see Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master one of the main reasons to do so is to be ravished by the look of the film, which was shot in the high resolution 70mm format. The Ritz (part of the Alamo Drafthouse chain) in Austin will be screening The Master in 70mm when the film opens wide on September 21. While Anderson has made a bold move by reviving the format, this isn’t a first for The Alamo. In its ongoing commitment to present films as they were originally shot, The Alamo has already been screening classics like West Side Story, Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade and Baraka in 70mm. Upcoming films include Ghostbusters, Cleopatra and Jacque Tati’s Playtime. Bliss for film fans

I saw The Master in 70mm this past Tuesday and it really is an amazing looking film. The opening shot of ocean water churning in the wake of a boat was the bluest blue I recall ever having seen projected onto the silver screen. A series of shots in a mid-twentieth century department store had the heightened look of photo realism, the colors so rich they seemed edible. Yes, the film is ravishing to look at, but as an emotional experience, it is hollow - an epic about nothing. It may be a masterpiece of some sort, but it’s not a good movie.

Anderson creates screenplays that on the surface seem important but as you attempt to dig deeper there’s nothing below. It’s like the wooden laminate flooring you buy at Home Depot - there’s a veneer of faux wood stamped onto some synthetic crap. It pleases the eye and fools you into thinking you’re seeing something real, but it’s plastic.

The Master approaches subjects that had they been examined with more insight and imagination could have yielded hugely thought-provoking and entertaining results. Subjects like Scientology, sexual dysfunction, post traumatic stress disorder, psychoanalysis, masculine rage, past life regression, alcoholism and the cult of personality are rich in possibilities for a director who might have a real passion for storytelling. Unfortunately, Anderson doesn’t seem to have either the patience, the intelligence or curiosity to approach these worlds with more than a glance. It is not enough to throw this stuff up on the screen and hope that somehow through some sort of mystic alchemy they will coalesce into something approximating a point of view - something that transcends mere technique and gives us something to think about, to feel. Not even Jonny Greenwood’s relentlessly melodramatic score can fill in the emotional blanks.  Anderson’s eye candy may be gorgeous, but it has little nutritional value.

Frankly, I’m fucking tired of film makers who demand that their audiences fill in the blanks. There’s a mighty big difference between films that compel one to think and those that ask the viewer to co-write the script. Like the Rorschach test that appears early in the film, The Master asks us to make something out of a series of beautiful blots on the screen. When confronted with the Rorschach, the main character in the movie sees mostly “pussy.” When confronted with The Master I saw something other than “pussy.” But it wasn’t nearly as satisfying. And I saw it in 70mm.

The Master has two brilliant performances that will no doubt be nominated for this year’s Academy Awards. Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman are extraordinarily good in roles that have almost no anchor in character. These are indelible acting riffs that exist in a series of powerful moments none of which connect to the other. Therefore, they have no momentum or shape. As you watch Phoenix and Hoffman act, you’re enthralled not by the persons they’re depicting but by their skill in making you believe in something that is not there. I challenge anyone who sees the film to tell me who these men are…what makes them tick, why they do what they do. And most importantly: why are they drawn to each other? As much as I admire the acting skills on display here, there’s absolutely nothing to engage you. And that goes for the rest of the cast as well. These people are members of some kind of Scientology-like cult. Even cults built on depersonalization have some defining qualities. With the exception of one jarring scene involving a nude sing-a-long, there’s nothing about this group of people that differentiates them from any gathering of good friends. They could be your local PTA. Why make a bunch of boring stiffs the subject of a movie? Even the normally magnetic Laura Dern fails to make an impression.

Hoffman has a certain appealing bluster in his depiction of an L. Ron Hubbard-type guru. But he’s more of a mess than a messiah. It’s hard to believe that anyone would fall sway to this fleshy fellow with anger issues and an alcohol problem. He’s a huckster more along the lines of Criswell than Hubbard and I guess it makes some sort of sense that his most slavish disciple (Rivers) seems to have wandered in from a Jim Thompson novel.

Anderson has been given all kinds of props for being some kind of wunderkind, a boy genius film maker. Well, guess what? He’s no longer a boy. He’s 42 years old. One year older than Roman Polanski was when Polanski made a genuine masterpiece Chinatown. He’s seven years older than Donald Cammel was when Cammel made (with Nic Roeg) the mindbendingly brilliant Performance.

Anderson has formidable skills, but he lacks the ability to summon up a vision from deep within. No matter how hard his characters stomp their feet and no matter how many millimeters he has at his disposal, there is something emotionally stunted in his work. His films are beautiful, and like Stanley Kubrick’s they have their own special architecture. But just as Kubrick’s films suffer from a lack of a human pulse, so does Anderson’s. His movies feel as though they were made by someone who hasn’t really lived yet. Anderson’s ideas may appear big and gorgeous looking. But so is Italian pastry…and that shit’s mostly air.

I recently watched F.W. Murnau’s beautiful and moving Sunrise on my television set. In terms of scale, it was as far as one can get from seeing The Master in 70mm. Sunrise is black and white, silent and was made in 1927 when its director was 39 years old. But any given scene in Sunrise packs more of an emotional punch, a sense of humanity and an engagement with the world we live in than the entirety of The Master. Proving, at least for me, it’s not the size of your frame that matters, it’s what you put into into it. It ain’t the meter, it’s the motion.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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09.11.2012
10:27 pm
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The Master: New look at PT Anderson’s upcoming L. Ron Hubbard film

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The marketing campaign for director Paul Thomas Anderson’s fictionalized L.Ron Hubbard flick, The Master, is starting to heat up. Yesterday a mysterious trailer with Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams and Joaquin Phoenix was released and it looks like this is going to be a fascinating film.

Here’s all it says on IMDB at present:

“A 1950s-set drama centered on the relationship between a charismatic intellectual known as “the Master” whose faith-based organization begins to catch on in America, and a young drifter who becomes his right-hand man.”

Hoffman as Hubbard is an inspired bit of casting (although I think the ultimate portrayal of Hubbard will come one day from The Mighty Boosh‘s Rich Fulcher) but are Adams and Phoenix supposed to be based on Marjorie Cameron and Jack Parsons? It kinda looks that way.

One of the film’s producer, JoAnne Sellar, denied any connection to Hubbard or Scientology: “It’s a World War II drama. It’s about a drifter after World War II.”

Yeah, right…

With a tense soundtrack from Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood. The Master is scheduled for release on “Crowleymass,” October 12th. I wonder if that is a co-incidence or deliberate?
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.20.2012
12:26 pm
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