Hello! Thank you for signing up to, or stumbling on, this no-news-newsletter written by me, Ashley Clark. If you do choose to subscribe—and it’s free—you’ll receive bulletins about whatever’s on my mind: usually some combination of art/film/music/literature/football. If that sounds good, hit the button!
In Paul Thomas Anderson’s sweeping period epic Boogie Nights (1997), silver-coiffed pornographer Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds) considers himself to be a genuine artist with a duty of care to his theatrical audiences. “It is my dream, it is my goal, it is my idea,” he explains, “to make a film that the story just sucks them in and when they spurt out that joy juice, they just gotta sit in it.” As the rapacious 1980s encroach on his ‘70s paradise, however, Horner is plunged into an existential crisis at the prospect of his cherished art form—celluloid filmmaking—becoming obsolete with the advent of cheap, quick and nasty video technology. He reacts with complete disdain when adult film theater magnate Floyd Gondolli (Philip Baker Hall) shows up like the ghost at the feast to his New Year’s Eve 1979 party, preaching the fiscally inevitable gospel of video. “I'm a filmmaker,” Horner retorts. “That's why I will never make a movie on videotape.”
Despite Horner’s bullishness, Gondolli’s appearance marks the beginning of the end for Horner’s dream, and effectively catalyzes the barrage of vivid low points that make up the film’s grim, ‘80s-set second half. In one of the bleakest scenes, a listless Horner attempts to shoot a porno in the back of a limo featuring Rollergirl (Heather Graham) and a random preppy john recruited off the street. “We’re about to make film history, right here… on videotape,” sighs Horner with barely veiled contempt. The encounter quickly curdles, and the scene ends with an enraged Horner, then Rollergirl, knocking seven bells out of the john, who turns out not to be so random, but a former school tormentor of Rollergirl.
I’ve seen Boogie Nights so many times that I know its (incredible, indelible) music cues by heart, but I’ve never been as moved by the film as I was while watching it this week at Film at Lincoln Center, where it screened from a gorgeous, newly struck 70mm print (the film was originally released in anamorphic 35mm; this print was a blow-up from the original camera negative.)
I was immediately, viscerally entranced by the depth, grain and flicker of the image, and the glorious richness of its colors. I felt grateful for the opportunity to see a film that was shot on film, projected beautifully on film. As Boogie Nights unfolded, I felt—even though I don’t consider myself a celluloid fetishist, and I’ve written enthusiastically about the dynamic possibilities of digital video filmmaking—like I knew exactly where Jack Horner was coming from. (As, evidently, did his creator Paul Thomas Anderson, who has shot each of his subsequent movies on film.)
As I watched Jack Horner’s idealistic yearnings come to naught, I thought about the sharp decline in the use of celluloid—in terms of how films are both shot and projected theatrically—in my lifetime as a moviegoer. What was once commonplace is now a rare treat. At the end of each year, the critic Vadim Rizov publishes a list of every new feature shot on 35mm film. In his most recent round-up, published in December 2022, Rizov writes: “Bleak, but possibly apt: The number of U.S.-released features in 2022 shot, in whole or in part, on 35mm is lower this year than in my previous eight round-ups [in order: 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021]—around 24, depending on how you count, below the usual roughly 30 total.”
The decline in film as a shooting format has gone hand in hand with the rise of digital projection. Boogie Nights was released in 1997, when cinemas projecting celluloid—and employing skilled projectionists—was the norm. Just five years later, though, in 2002, a consortium of major Hollywood studios formed Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI), and began working, with incredible and perhaps inevitable success, to take control of a global digital exhibition system.
As Will Tavlin reports in his gripping and essential history of Hollywood’s digital takeover for N+1, DCI spent the next three years designing the technology that would replace film reels, and plotting a new system by which projectionists would screen films: a Digital Cinema Package (DCP), a collection of encrypted files on a hard drive. One knock-on effect of these developments was the depersonalization of film projection. As Tavlin writes:
…theater chains identified another benefit of digital projection: they no longer needed to pay unionized projectionists. Anyone who knew how to operate a computer could theoretically screen a DCP. Some theaters opted to get rid of their projection booths altogether, installing theater management systems in closets and using the old space for building out concession areas.
I’m outrageously fortunate to live in an area that is well served by repertory cinemas—Film at Lincoln Center, Film Forum, Anthology Film Archives, BAM, Museum of Moving Image to name just a few—staffed by skilled cinephiles committed to keeping alive the art of projecting film. There are more around the country. And I’m grateful for filmmakers like Anderson for keeping the faith, and insisting on using film stock to shoot. But the wider reality is that DCI’s near total victory has resulted in a colder, cruder cinemagoing landscape where a movie’s projection and presentation, especially when left to understaffed multiplex chains, is often indifferent if not downright sloppy. Mostly gone is the inherent, near-subconscious thrill of a live show taking place (those gorgeous little wobbles at reel change time!), replaced by remote, ambivalent ghosts and gremlins in machines.
Just yesterday, in fact, I attended a late morning screening of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem—a pretty good movie, by the way!—at our local mall’s AMC. To my dismay, I immediately clocked that the entire right side of the screen was studded with what appeared to be stuck pixels that blazed with fierce blue light whenever the image was dark. Since the Turtles live in the sewer and only really come out at night, this was quite often. It’s difficult to imagine two more comically contrasting consecutive moviegoing experiences, in terms of presentational care and quality, than the AMC multiplex’s Turtles botch job, and FLC’s magisterial presentation of Boogie Nights.
Despite my watery-eyed testimony above, there is an irony at work here. I’ve only ever seen Boogie Nights projected on film twice: this week at FLC, and a few years ago, on a 35mm print at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. My love affair with Boogie Nights was, of course, forged firmly on Jack Horner’s loathed videotape format.
Boogie Nights was released on VHS in the UK in 1998, at the exact moment that I was really starting to get into movies in a serious way. I decided, after having read about it in the pages of a magazine, that I had to see it. Unfortunately, it was rated 18 and I was only 13. So, in a daredevil move, I asked my slightly older-looking friend—he, unlike myself, proudly sported a few precious sprouts of bum fluff—to attempt to buy it for me from the HMV at the Trocadero (RIP) in Piccadilly Circus.
I recall feeling genuinely nervous as I loitered in a nearby aisle, waiting for the outcome of this charged transaction. As it happened, the cashier didn’t bat an eyelid, so I was able to watch the film in the living room that night after my Mum had gone to bed (sorry Mum, if you’re reading this.) I was swept away by its verve, energy, and humor. I watched it over and over again, and even wound up writing a paper for my Media Studies AS-Level class about the strikingly attenuated close-up of Dirk Diggler’s etiolated face near the end of the Rahad Jackson drug deal sequence.
Back then, what struck me most was Anderson’s total empathy for his cast of seedy oddballs; a depth of feeling that stops the film from ever seeming like a salacious wallow, even in its darker moments. Today, twenty five years on, nothing’s changed on that front. Boogie Nights simply carries a deeper weight of cinematic history, and its most blunt character—businessman Floyd Gondolli, a man of simple pleasures, like “butter in my ass, lollipops in my mouth”—now seems more than ever like its keenest prophet.
Hello! Thank you for signing up to, or stumbling on, this no-news-newsletter written by me, Ashley Clark. If you do choose to subscribe—and it’s free—you’ll receive bulletins about whatever’s on my mind: usually some combination of art/film/music/literature/football. If that sounds good, hit the button!