Boogie Nights

Boogie Nights is a 1997 American comedy-drama film written, directed, and co-produced by Paul Thomas Anderson. It is set in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley and concerns a young nightclub dishwasher who becomes a popular star of pornographic films, chronicling his rise in the Golden Age of Porn of the 1970s through his fall during the excesses of the 1980s. The film is an expansion of Anderson's mockumentary short film The Dirk Diggler Story (1988), and stars Mark Wahlberg, Julianne Moore, Burt Reynolds, Don Cheadle, John C. Reilly, William H. Macy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Nicole Ari Parker, and Heather Graham. Boogie Nights premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 11, 1997, and was theatrically released by New Line Cinema on October 10, 1997, garnering critical acclaim and grossing $43.1 million against a $15 million budget.