Paul Thomas Anderson Tribute Month: My P.T.A. Mix-Tape (The Opening Shots of Hard Eight)

John has got some serious worry. Way past the end of his rope, he sits outside a coffee shop on the outskirts of Reno thinking about the money he just lost, the cup of coffee he can't buy and his recently deceased mother that he can't afford to bury. Depressed and disillusioned, John remembers his mom and prays that some miracle will come that can help him gather the six thousand dollars he needs for her funeral. That miracle arrives in the form of an aging and mysterious man named Sydney, who approaches John outside the diner with an offer to buy him a cup of coffee and give him a cigarette. This seemingly inconsequential meeting will change both of their lives forever.




While nowhere near as famous, or as technically accomplished, as the opening shots for films like Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood, the simple and brief opening to Paul Thomas Anderson's Hard Eight is both eloquent and poetic. It is also, in hindsight, a thematically perfect introduction to his canon considering how often his films concern the fractured but important relationships that occur between sometimes surrogate fathers and sons.





Looking back on the opening moments of Hard Eight, which are nearly completely silent save for Sydney's offer to John at the tail-end of it, one can already detect just how different Anderson was compared to the many American filmmakers that came out in the wake of Quentin Tarantino. The tracking shot that opens Hard Eight has a stillness that is much more in line with works from the early seventies like Five Easy Pieces than the overtly showy work that was populating theaters post-Pulp Fiction in the mid-nineties. It is fitting that when Anderson did decide to open up Boogie Nights with an audacious and technically dazzling one-shot take that he never let his technique overwhelm the emotion, something most of his peers struggled with.




Like all of Anderson's works, I find Hard Eight to be an extremely moving and wonderfully realized work. The well-documented trouble that Anderson had with the studio concerning the final-cut of Hard Eight, along with lying in the imposing shadow of works like Boogie Nights and Magnolia, has made his first feature one of the nineties key overlooked classics. These opening shots remain a real personal favorite and I find them extremely haunting.

Paul Thomas Anderson Tribute Month: My P.T.A. Mix-Tape (John and Sydney's Final Conversation in Hard Eight)

Some moments in a great film might speak to you, some might move you and some will hit you so hard emotionally that you feel it physically. The final phone conversation between John and Sydney towards the end of Hard Eight falls in that latter category for me and it remains one of my favorite scenes in Paul Thomas Anderson’s filmography. It’s a quiet and relatively static scene that shows how well Anderson knows when NOT to be showy. From Hard Eight to There Will be Blood, Anderson has never forgotten how powerful a moment can be when you have enough faith in your actors to just keep the camera on them and let them work their own particular brand of cinematic alchemy.




That final conversation between John C. Reilly and Phillip Baker Hall in Hard Eight just fills me with gratitude every time I watch it. Gratitude to P.T. Anderson for writing such a simply and yet poignant scene that manages to spiritually and emotionally give a sense of closure to two men who so badly need it, and gratitude to Reilly and Hall for being such mesmerizing and brilliant actors. It’s one of those moments in a film where you just sit back and marvel at just how effective a truly great pair of actors can be at communicating exactly what it is they are thinking, feeling and needing.




Anderson sets up the scene in the simplest way possible by keeping the camera on his two actors and just cutting back and forth as their conversation progresses. For a couple of minutes he allows his actors alone to relay the emotion of his piece, and he only cuts away from them once (to Paltrow’s Clementine waiting patiently in the car for John). The scene is one of the many great moments in Hard Eight, and there are tons of them, that truly signaled that Paul Thomas Anderson was going to be a force to be reckoned with as one of the most intelligent and graceful filmmakers of his generation. He would follow-up this scene with similar moments involving monumentally important phone-calls in Boogie Nights, Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love, and all those indelible moments owe something to this brief section of Hard Eight.




I’ve watched Hard Eight at least a dozen times in the near decade and a half since it was first released and the moment when Sydney tells John that he loves him like his own son still shakes me up. Also, no one will ever convince me that John C. Reilly is not one of the finest actors on the planet. Just watch his reaction after Sydney tells him this thing he has badly needed to hear for so long...it's so beautiful and so fucking devastating.

Paul Thomas Anderson Tribute Month: Images From Hard Eight

Okay folks...here we go. I'll be sporadically reminding everyone all month to please pay a visit to Cigarettes and Red Vines, the most essential Paul Thomas Anderson spot on the web. I hope my own upcoming tributes prove interesting and thanks to everyone so far who has signed up for the blogathon. Keep those links and submissions coming...

Paul Thomas Anderson Blogathon: Jeffrey Goodman on Hard Eight

***Director Jeffrey Goodman is among my favorite young filmmakers in America right now, so it's a real pleasure to offer up this piece he wrote on Hard Eight for our Paul Thomas Anderson Blogathon. Jeffrey's extraordinary debut film, The Last Lullaby, is one of the best neo-noirs of the past decade and I urge anyone here who hasn't already seen it to track it down immediately. I have had the pleasure to interview Jeffrey here before and I can now call him a friend, so it's a real treat to have him offer this up for us here. Jeffrey is currently planning his follow-up to The Last Lullaby, Peril, and he has his own blog everyone should check out, which is located here.***

HARD EIGHT:
Jeffrey Goodman


Let me start by saying, I’m not one of these guys that knows Anderson’s cinema all that well. I haven’t even seen all his films. But I’ve always been intrigued by him, his knowledge of cinema, and the legion of die-hard fans he’s been able to rack up along the way.
While watching Hard Eight for the first time, I was struck by a few different things. First off, the way that Anderson’s managed to build a cinema family around himself. He’s used several actors numerous times, even been the one to establish them. John C Reilly, Philip Baker Hall, Melora Walters, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman all show up here, and numerous other times in his subsequent films. He’s also already using here in his debut, cameraman Robert Elswit, who has since worked with him on all his features and Jon Brion who has scored all his work with the exception of There Will Be Blood.
I had always heard that Anderson really loved Scorsese and Altman. And while there are certainly hints of both (think Goodfellas and California Split), I see more of Tarantino’s influence here than anyone else. And of course this makes great sense given the context. We’re in 1996, two years after Pulp Fiction had exploded on the scene, and Tarantino had become a veritable cinema rock star.
Anderson chooses to cast Samuel L Jackson, who I think turns in one of his most
memorable performances. He also chooses to start the movie in a diner, which is of
course quite reminiscent of both Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. He also seems to share QT’s love for words (mannered but sharp and effective) and his mixture of humor and violence. See Jackson’s final scene to get a real feel for this. Anderson might be post-modern. There’s undeniably a self-consciousness to some of his work, particularly his use of the steadicam and how he likes to have the camera push in on his actors in a way that’s somewhat unmotivated by the action. But he’s not as blatant with his pop-culture references as Tarantino nor the slew of other people in his generation that jumped at making a “crime film” after Pulp Fiction.
I would also offer that Anderson proves from the beginning to have a real skill and feel for actors. The performances are very strong across the board, and I would give special mention to Hall and Jackson.
My only real complaint about the film is the ending. I just felt a little let down by it. It didn’t pop or register for me in the same way as most of the rest of the film. But as a first-time filmmaker myself, it’s striking to watch Hard Eight and Anderson’s confidence right out of the gate. This film doesn’t seem like a debut. It seems like someone who already has a complete understanding of film language and is using it however the hell he wants.

Paul Thomas Anderson Blogathon: Bill Ryan on Hard Eight

***I was really hoping we would get another article on Hard Eight before the Blogathon ended, so I was thrilled when Bill Ryan, author of the wonderfully titled The Kind of Face You Hate, sent me this excellent new look at the film. Bill celebrates the incredible Philip Baker Hall, an actor who should be celebrated on a daily basis, in this piece and I think it's a wonderful addition to our Blogathon.***



The Collection Project: You are Big Time!
Bill Ryan

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Hard Eight is not exactly a young man’s film, but in some ways it is very much a young man’s screenplay. In the DVD commentary track, Anderson talks about struggling with the script almost from the start, and saying the way for him to bust through that is to put two characters in a room and get them talking. This method resulted in Hard Eight’s wonderful opening, with John (John C. Reilly) and Sydney (Philip Baker Hall) sitting in a Reno, NV diner, over coffee and cigarettes, the mysterious Sydney offering to help the sad-sack John – who’s just come from Vegas after failing to win enough money at blackjack to pay for his mother’s funeral – avoid becoming a homeless Reno reject.

As I say, this is a great scene, highlighting Reilly’s effortless comic abilities, and Anderson’s considerable gift for dialogue. It also subtly clues you into the fact that the only reason Hard Eight exists at all is because Philip Baker Hall is an actor who is alive now on this planet. Though I had, by the time Hard Eight came out on video and I was able to see it for the first time, seen Hall in Altman’s Secret Honor (as well as – and this is not insignificant – the episode of Seinfeld where Hall plays the library cop), Hall’s work in Anderson’s debut feature was still a revelation for me. Sydney is one of my favorite film characters, certainly of modern times, and Hall gives what I consider one of the great screen performances. From the beginning of the film, you know just enough about Sydney to be fascinated by him, and to admire him (so fascinating that Hard Eight is one of the films from my burgeoning movie geek years that I got my dad to watch. This sort of thing didn't always work out too well, but after watching the film I remember my dad telling me that he didn't like it at first, but the further along he got, the more he thought, to paraphrase the line he most often quoted from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, "Who is this guy??"). Sydney’s a remarkably decent person, decent in a very old-fashioned way, who appears to know more than anybody else how to get buy in towns like Reno and Vegas, and it’s this knowledge he’s offering to John. But there’s a very sharp edge to him as well, shown first when the knuckleheaded John (who is nevertheless expressing some understandable paranoia) reacts to Sydney’s offer of help by saying he’s not gay, so if Sydney’s looking for some boy hooker, he can forget it. Sydney’s response is to say no, that’s not what I’m after, and this is the last time I’m going to offer my help.

At various points throughout the film, Sydney is shown to be quietly angered and frustrated by any person or encounter that proves to him that basic civility and manners are evaporating, though his only recourse seems to be to make sure those values remain intact within himself, as well as, to the extent he’s able to control such things, John. A sticking point for Sydney is John’s friendship with Jimmy (Samuel L. Jackson), a flashy, loud-mouthed, low-rent dickhead who works security at one of the casinos. When Sydney and Jimmy first meet, Sydney is playing Kino by himself when John and Jimmy come by. As they do, Jimmy uses his outside voice to comment on the physical attributes of their departing waitress. When Sydney quietly objects to this behavior, Jimmy condescendingly explains that these waitresses not only enjoy such compliments, but they’re all whores anyway. To which Sydney says, “I just don’t want it coming from my table.” It’s possibly my favorite line from the movie, delivered by Hall in a way that somehow mixes civility, exasperation, and a kind of suppressed danger.

To counteract, among other reasons, John’s friendship with the loathed Jimmy, Sydney constructs an introduction between John and Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow), one of those waitresses Jimmy was talking about. Clementine is typical Reno damaged goods, a nice young girl, lost, or close to being lost, to a life of being a waitress as a cover for really being a hooker. Paltrow is very good here, but it’s around the time of her introduction that Anderson’s writing methods, and his youth, start to show their negative influence. Shortly after Clementine and John first make googly eyes at each other, John calls Sydney in the middle of the night, begging for help. When Sydney arrives at the motel room where John told him they’d be, Sydney finds a terrified John, a tearful, weirdly angry and withdrawn Clementine, and another man, unconscious and bleeding on the bed. That man is or was one of Clementine’s clients, but for some reason he refused to pay her for services rendered, so she or John or both of them knocked him out, tied him to the bed, and called the guy’s wife, demanding Clementine’s fee as ransom.


This is, we can all agree, a very stupid thing to have done, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that the long scene that follows, in which Sydney announces how stupid this is, and alternately offers the best practical advice he can and refuses to help at all, feels exactly like a scene that Anderson had no map for when he began, but he kept writing it until he’d found the exit. I’ve mentioned that Anderson is an enormously gifted writer of dialogue, but if screenwriters ever put together audition reels of their best writing, Anderson should leave this bit off. All you really get here is characters saying something, and then a minute later shouting out the same question or statement or insult, slightly reworded, or, if things have gotten really tense, one character will say “Fuck you!”, and then another character will say “Fuck you!”, or words to that effect.

I criticize with love, though, because I feel like I know what he was going through. In my own humble way, of course, and I’m in no way trying to associate myself with Anderson, but I don’t think anyone who has tried their hand at fiction, either in script form or prose, doesn’t know what it’s like to hit a dead end in your story that you simply try to write your way through. It’s like a car being stuck in the mud, and you keep the wheels spinning in the hopes that something will grip. Sometimes it do, sometimes it don’t, and this scene from Hard Eight don’t. At the very least it should have been tightened up, if not ditched outright and completely rethought. But the good news is that the narrative goal of that scene (the scene has other things on its mind, to do with character, which I suppose are more or less accomplished, however clumsily) is simply to find a reason for John and Clementine to get the hell out of Reno and leave Sydney alone with Jimmy, thereby setting up Hard Eight’s brilliant final stretch. In that stretch, which I won’t describe in detail, you find out why Sydney went out of his way to help John, a stranger at the film’s beginning, and while that explanation might be a bit too neat in terms of cause and effect, Sydney remains a largely mysterious figure by the end. Less mythic, perhaps, but still mysterious, and, in any case, Hard Eight, while by no stretch Anderson’s best work, does contain my favorite last shot (or shots) out of any of his films, and those shots would have no weight, or wit, if Sydney’s myth hadn’t been shattered.

Faces and Names: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Devotion to Character

***Back in September for my Paul Thomas Anderson Tribute Month I wrote several pieces that I didn't end up posting, due to the fact that the response to my Paul Thomas Anderson Blogathon was much greater than I expected. I didn't want to let these pieces go to waste so I will be presenting them sporadically throughout the year, along with some promotional PTA scans I didn't have back in September. I hope they prove enjoyable and interesting.***



Director Jack Horner and his assistant Kurt Longjohn have been in the editing room for hours creating the title sequence for Jack’s newest opus, Angels Live in my Town. For the first ‘Brock Landers’ film Jack had hoped to creatively go farther than he had before and, as the opening titles play out before him, he realizes he has accomplished his goal. Visibly moved by what he and Kurt and have come up with, Jack exclaims that this is the film he wants to be remembered for.

In any other film outside of Boogie Nights, this little moment would have been played for laughs, or would have played out at the expense of adult maverick Jack Horner, as Angels Live in My Town wouldn’t exactly be the film most would choose as their greatest cinematic legacy. However in the hands of Paul Thomas Anderson, the scene is incredibly moving, sincere and humane. For all of his considerable skills as a screenwriter, and his extraordinary technical skills as a filmmaker, the relationship Anderson has with his characters remains perhaps the most resonate aspect of his career. Anderson has, time and time again, presented us with some of the most flawed and damaged characters imaginable but his love and compassion for them shines through, just like the love Jack Horner had for the flawed little films he created.



From the first frames of Hard Eight, to the final chilling moments of There Will be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson has shown himself as modern film’s greatest humanist. Nearly all of his characters are injured lost souls, but Anderson refuses to pass moral judgment and he asks the same from his audience. He asks for compassion as he recognizes we are all ultimately flawed, which is one reason the characters in Anderson’s films continue to live and breathe long after the final-credits roll.



Strip them down to their barest element and all of Paul Thomas Anderson’s films are essentially very vivid character studies. While most modern American filmmakers are more comfortable building their films around situations, it is the people in Anderson’s films that guide them. All of them, from Sydney in Hard Eight to Daniel in There Will be Blood, are haunted by Quiz-Kid Donnie Smith’s line in Magnolia concerning the fact that “We may be through with the past, but the past isn’t through with us.” Like the great early seventies character studies by the likes of Rafelson, Altman and Scorsese, Anderson’s films are populated with people looking for something usually just past their grasp, while attempting to escape from something that is always close behind.



Anderson has clearly been fascinated by the idea of character since his very first work, the short film inspiration for Boogie Nights, “The Dirk Diggler Story.” The emphasis is always on the people in Anderson’s films and he clearly loves his characters and embraces their flaws; even when that character is monstrous like Daniel Plainview in There Will be Blood.

Because of Anderson’s attention to his characters, and his astonishing ability at writing them, many of them have taken on an iconic stature typically reserved for figures decades old. As far as modern filmmakers go, only Quentin Tarantino has rivaled Anderson’s knack for introducing characters that immediately feel like they are a part of our popular culture. Whether it is Dirk Diggler or Frank T.J. Mackey or Daniel Plainview, Anderson has given us some of the most memorable characters in all of film history, and he has allowed actors as famous as Mark Wahlberg, Tom Cruise and Daniel Day Lewis the opportunity to disappear in the best roles of their careers.



While his most famous characters have entered the popular consciousness, Anderson’s many supporting players also occupy the thoughts and dreams of his many fans. What Anderson devotee hasn’t been occupied by thoughts of what happened to the likes of Roller-Girl, Buck Swop, Claudia Gator and Dean Trumbell? For people who become truly invested in the films of Paul Thomas Anderson, these characters finally become a part of us in a way typically reserved for the just the most famous icons of art, literature, and film.



Of course, the many memorable people that have occupied Anderson’s films have taken on an added relevance when one considers his unnerving ability to match the perfect actor with each part, and his braveness at often casting underestimated actors. Who would have thought an often maligned performer like Heather Graham could have delivered such an emotionally devastating turn as Boogie Night’s Roller-Girl, and who else in the mid-nineties would have trusted a then considered past his prime Burt Reynolds for the pivotal character of Jack Horner?

Paul Thomas Anderson’s films are finally transformed from just potent character studies into astonishing works of cinematic art, due to his astounding technical skills as a filmmaker. Anderson has, in the span of the less than half a dozen features, become far and away the most technically accomplished American filmmaker of his generation, and his films are as cinematically dazzling as his characters are damaged.



With his next project The Master sadly on hold, let us take a moment and recall the many faces and names that have populated Paul Thomas Anderson’s first five features. To quote Lou Reed recalling the films of Andy Warhol, “Images are worth repeating”, and the films of Paul Thomas Anderson continue to become richer and richer with each viewing. Like the sharply drawn characters he has presented to us, Anderson’s works are very much alive in a way reserved for only the greatest of cinematic achievements.

-Jeremy Richey, 2011-