[3] It is set in Los Angeles's San Fernando Valley and focuses on 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.

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.

[8][9] In 1977, high-school dropout Eddie Adams is living with his father and emotionally and physically abusive mother in Torrance, California.

While attending a New Year's Eve party at Horner's house on December 31, 1979, assistant director Little Bill discovers his adulterous wife having sex with another man.

After his friend and financier, Colonel James, is incarcerated for possession of child pornography, Jack cooperates with Gondolli but becomes disillusioned with the work he is expected to churn out.

One of these projects involves Jack and Rollergirl riding in a limousine, searching for random men for her to have sex with while being taped by a crew.

The court determines that she is an unfit mother due to her involvement in the porn industry, criminal record, and cocaine addiction.

Having spent most of their money on drugs, Dirk and Reed are unable to pay a recording studio for demo tapes they believe will enable them to become music stars.

Dirk, Reed, and their friend Todd Parker attempt to scam local drug dealer Rahad Jackson at his estate by selling him a half-kilo of baking soda disguised as cocaine.

Boogie Nights is based on a mockumentary short film that Paul Thomas Anderson wrote and directed while he was still in high school called The Dirk Diggler Story.

[12] Bill Murray, Harvey Keitel, Warren Beatty, Albert Brooks and Sydney Pollack declined or were passed up on the role of Jack Horner, which went to Burt Reynolds.

The site's critical consensus states, "Grounded in strong characters, bold themes, and subtle storytelling, Boogie Nights is a groundbreaking film both for director P.T.

Adult films are a business here, not a dalliance or a pastime, and one of the charms of Boogie Nights is the way it shows the everyday backstage humdrum life of porno filmmaking ...

More impressive, it captures the decade's distinct, decadent glamour ... [It] also succeeds at something very difficult: re-creating the ethos and mentality of an era ... Paul Thomas Anderson ... has pulled off a wonderful, sprawling, sophisticated film ... With Boogie Nights, we know we're not just watching episodes from disparate lives but a panorama of recent social history, rendered in bold, exuberant colors.

Yes, its decision to focus on the pornography business in the San Fernando Valley in the 1970s and 1980s is nerviness itself, but more impressive is the film's sureness of touch, its ability to be empathetic, nonjudgmental and gently satirical, to understand what is going on beneath the surface of this raunchy Nashville-esque universe and to deftly relate it to our own ... Perhaps the most exciting thing about Boogie Nights is the ease with which writer-director Anderson ... spins out this complex web.

A true storyteller, able to easily mix and match moods in a playful and audacious manner, he is a filmmaker definitely worth watching, both now and in the future.

"[29] In Time Out New York, Andrew Johnston concluded, "The porn milieu may scare some folks off, but Boogie Nights offers laughs, tenderness, terror and redemption--everything you could ask for in a movie.

"[30] Peter Travers of Rolling Stone said, "[T]his chunk of movie dynamite is detonated by Mark Wahlberg ... who grabs a breakout role and runs with it ...

Even when Boogie Nights flies off course as it tracks its bizarrely idealistic characters into the '80s ... you can sense the passionate commitment at the core of this hilarious and harrowing spectacle.

For this, credit Paul Thomas Anderson ... who ... scores a personal triumph by finding glints of rude life in the ashes that remained after Watergate.

Add the home video revolution to this mix and curiosity about the size of the boy wonder's equipment; throw in a few topical references like the soft drink Fresca, and you have the bare bones of the story."