Boogie Nights Screenplay Introduction
Written by Paul Thomas Anderson - December 12th, 1997
So here is the script I suppose, technically, was ten years in the making. When I was seventeen - young, impressionable and horny - I wrote a short film called The Dirk Diggler Story. I shot it on video and it was fun and actually pretty good.
What I was doing for the ten years I was trying to write this script? Well, I was actually devising what I think is an interesting method. The short film was a fictionally documentary, basically a Spinal Tap and Zelig rip-off. A couple of years later, when I was nineteen, I expanded the short into a feature, keeping the structure of a fictional documentary. Well, by that time, the format, so wonderfully done so many times, had, in fact, 'been done so many times.'
