"All I ever wanted was a cool '78 'Vette and a house in the country."
Dirk Diggler (Michael Stein)
When Boogie Nights (trailer), the sophomore feature film release by Paul Thomas Anderson (born 26 June 1970), the son of Ghoulardi, hit the screens in 1997, it caused a lot more people to sit up than his first feature film, the highly troubled production but ultimately critically successful Hard Eight (1995 / trailer), which was based on Anderson's second short film, Coffee & Cigarettes (1993 / film). That Boogie Nights, a well-acted ensemble film with an expansive cast of amazing names and faces set in during the Golden Age of Porn, was based on the life and times of unattractive porn legend John Holmes (8 Aug 1944 – 13 March 1988) and his weapon of vaginal, anal and esophageal destruction, otherwise known as "Dirk Diggler" (Mark Wahlberg) in the flick, is relatively well known. Less known, perhaps, as that the character played by the recalcitrant and cash-strapped Burt Reynolds [11 Feb 1936 – 6 Sept 2018, below not from the film], white man Jack Horner, was inspired by the Chinese American porn filmmaker Bob Chinn.
And possibly even less well-known than that is that Boogie Nights, like Hard Eight, is a retooled, extended and meatier version of an earlier Paul Thomas Anderson short film: in this case, his 1988 "official" directorial debut, the shot-on-video, roughly half-hour-long short titled The Dirk Diggler Story. A mockumentary with a cast of unknowns, Ghoulardi was the cameraman. Nevertheless a highly intriguing film, here it is:
The Dirk Diggler Story
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