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: Actor Profiles (John C. Reilly)

***Wow, it's so strange to go back and read this. This little piece on John C. Reilly was one of the very first I wrote for Moon in the Gutter, way back in December of 2006. While it was long before I had any real readers, this article did garner me my first email from someone I had wrote on, which was really freaking cool! In the nearly four years since I wrote this little article Reilly has continued his reign as one of our great actors, although now he can also claim to be one of our great comedians with side-splitting roles in films like Walk Hard, Talladega Nights and Step-Brothers all showing him as one of the funniest men on the planet. He also got nominated for his first Oscar and recently appeared in one of the real bright spots (so I am told, as I still haven't been able to see it) of 2010, Cyrus. I was tempted to really update this article but I thought I would let it stand as it is. Let me just say that John C. Reilly remains a major cinematic treasure and there are very few actors that I like seeing more in modern American films.***


The roles for John C. Reilly leading up to playing John Finnegan in Paul Thomas Anderson's debut Sydney (Hard Eight) were mostly just bit parts in films such as Brian DePalma's Causalities Of War and Woody Allen's Shadows and Fog. The great opening shot of Reilly in Anderson's film feels like a debut though, a major debut. Reilly's amazing performance, as the lonely Finnegan looking to win enough money in Vegas to bury his mother, is one of the great performances of the 90s. While Phillip Baker Hall's work as the mentor Sydney was rightly acclaimed, Reilly seemed to drift so far into the character that you forget it's a performance that needs praising.
The obvious comparison in looking at John C. Reilly is Gene Hackman. Reilly has that same everyman quality but more importantly, like Hackman, he is able to invest his characters with a real soul. There is never a moment watching Reilly where we aren't watching someone who is internally questioning and searching. While he hasn't yet found a leading role the equal of Hackman's Popeye Doyle or Harry Moseby one hopes the wait won't be long.
His most iconic work has been with Anderson, like in Boogie Nights where he gave Reed Rothchild a sincerity that anyone else would have missed and in Magnolia's lonely police officer Jim Kurring, a man so desperate for someone to accept the love he wants so much to give. Magnolia's final moments with Reilly telling Melora Walters Claudia how special she is is one of the most moving things I've ever seen in a film. Anderson's decision to drown out Reilly's wonderful dialogue with Aimee Mann's incredible score ranks with Scorsese's famous pan away from Travis on the phone in Taxi Driver as an example of a rare scene that is too personal to film straight on.
Reilly has continued in film after film to prove his dramatic, comedic and even musical chops. His performance as the simple well meaning husband in The Good Girl is a personal favorite, and his singing cowboy was a major highlight in Robert Altman's final film A Prairie Home Companion. A greatly underrated performance in an equally underrated film, Walter Salles' Dark Water, shows just how much Reilly can give what could have been a very flat character. Jennifer Connelly would talk of being floored by just how inventive Reilly was, and he had no problem stealing every scene he was in from heavyweights like Connelly and Tim Roth.
Whether or not Reilly ever gets his French Connection or Night Moves remains to be seen but I highly doubt that Anderson is done with him. In the meantime he stands as the finest character actor of his generation and someone we can look at as truly being one of us.

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...

Overlooked Classics: Boogie Nights

Ask the average person what the first word that comes to mind is when THE GODFATHER is mentioned and I would bet most would say 'gangster'. Ask that same person what word BOOGIE NIGHTS springs to mind and I am guessing the response would be 'porn'. I would answer the question the same way to either one of these films, my answer would be 'family'.
The films of Paul Thomas Anderson are all in some way centered on family, sometimes real families and other times surrogate ones. It seems to be the connecting line in his already fascinating body of work that started with SYDNEY (HARD EIGHT) and will no doubt continue with the upcoming THERE WILL BE BLOOD.
There is a moment just before the famous long tracking shot that opens BOOGIE NIGHTS that I remember clearly being hit by at the film's opening night. The New Line logo, a black screen and then an extremely sad sounding Jon Brion-Michael Penn instrumental. These near silent mournful few moments signal that this film isn't going to be just another nostalgia filled ride through the free and fun loving seventies, it's a lovely way to open the film and I always look forward to it each time I put in the dvd.
The Penn-Brion track quickly gives way to The Emotions BEST OF MY LOVE and the film is off and running. The opening moments of BOOGIE NIGHTS are still some of the most exhilarating I have ever seen as Anderson expertly introduces us to nearly all the main players in a breathtaking long tracking shot that works thematically as well as stylistically. As the camera finally settles on Mark Wahlberg we realize that Anderson has just centered his film on one character, the rest of the cast however important will ultimately travel around him.
Wahlberg is extraordinary in this movie. The early scenes of his home life surrounded by the comfort of his posters of Bruce Lee, Al Pacino and other Seventies icons are crushed quickly by his smothering and harsh mother and weak near invisible father. One can easily see why Eddie would want to, and need to, get away from this so called family. An early moment between him and a girlfriend has him revealing that even he "is blessed with one special thing" and he soon finds someone who recognizes it.
Adult film director Jack Horner is the one who is going to let him use that one special thing and the film quickly roles into overdrive with Eddie leaving home and becoming the superstar Dirk Diggler. He finds a new home with his new 'father' Horner and a sweet caring new 'mother' Amber Waves. Also on board, and all lost in their own way, are co-star Reed Rothchild, teenage sex queen Roller-Girl and the dreamer Buck Swope. They all have one thing in common, they are all lost and need love.
Dirk's rise to the top of the adult film world and Horner's ambition to make one film "that's true" make the first half of BOOGIE NIGHTS one of the funnest films of the nineties. There are of course drugs and flirtations with disasters from the beginning but as long as the film stays in the seventies, everything will be okay.
Along the way we find out more about the supporting characters. Reed wants badly to be a magician, Amber wants her real son back, Buck wants to have a family and open a stereo shop, and Roller-Girl ultimately wants love and respect. Anderson gives all of these characters an amazing amount of life and we are totally sympathetic to them. These aren't adult film stars but real people all needing and wanting very specific things.
Dirk Diggler wants to be one of those posters from his wall and prove to his mother that his is indeed 'somebody'. For the films first half all seems to be working with Dirk winning many awards and getting more and more money but as 1980 hits the film begins a downward spiral into addiction, darkness and tragedy.
The second half of BOOGIE NIGHTS is as dark as the first half is light. The comedic touches disappear and the film becomes more and more frantic and ragged as Dirk's cocaine addiction becomes as out of control as his ego.
Many people including Pauline Kael had issues with the second half of the film but I find it to be among the most thrilling and audacious hours in American cinema. It's like the climax of GOODFELLAS only more intense and more tragic.
The film is, of course, based partially on John Holmes and his Johnny Wadd character. Although it should be noted that this is not a straight bio-pic by any means, at one point Dirk even mentions his distaste for Holmes and the Wadd characterization. Still Anderson has been very up front on how much the films of Holmes and the documentary EXHAUSTED influenced BOOGIE NIGHTS. BOOGIE NIGHTS climax at the Alfred Molina household is Anderson's own take on the Wonderland tragedy and I can still remember the intense and visceral reactions the scene got the four times I saw this in a theater. I have seen very few films that have caused so many people to be on the edge of their seats and jump so much. Anderson creates a tension that, when seen with other people, almost becomes a whole separate character.
BOOGIE NIGHTS ends in a way happily. It isn't a traditional happy ending and perhaps only Buck really gets what he wants but still Anderson allows these people that we have come to love to at least end on a calm note. The use of The Beach Boys powerful GOD ONLY KNOWS is one of the great musical choices Anderson has ever made in his career and it brings the film to a sweetly sad ending.

BOOGIE NIGHTS is a film that obviously means a great deal to me. I wouldn't even know how to go by accurately 'reviewing' it. I still meet people who have never seen it because of its subject matter which strikes me as very odd. There is something about sex in American film that remains more loaded than any horrible war or personal atrocity that a person can think up and gladly pay money to see. Ironically BOOGIE NIGHTS has very little sex, but a whole lot of heart.

Paul Thomas Anderson would do the impossible and top BOOGIE NIGHTS with his next film, the wondrous MAGNOLIA. BOOGIE NIGHTS though will always remain something special to me, a film that in itself became my own surrogate family when I needed one the most. I am eternally grateful to Anderson for delivering a film in my 23rd year that could mean so much to me. I watch BOOGIE NIGHTS at least a couple of times a year and for that 156 minutes I am 23 all over again...and I always find exactly what I need.

-Jeremy Richey, 2007-