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Why Mark Wahlberg Believes 'Boogie Nights' is Too Risky for Today's Studios
Mark Wahlberg, the renowned actor, recently reflected on his initial reluctance to join Boogie Nights. Released in 1997, the film is about adult entertainment industry of the 1970s.
Speaking recently about the experience of making Boogie Nights, Mark Wahlberg revealed that he had harbored early doubts about accepting the role. Helmed by Paul Thomas Anderson, Boogie Nights was released in 1997. Today, it is remembered as one of those landmark collaborations that defined Wahlberg's acting career while also catapulting Anderson to the status of being one of the more interesting working directors today.
The film takes as its subject the rise of Dirk Diggler, played by Wahlberg, a young po*n star coming into manhood in the s*x film industry of the 1970s with the help of an ambitious producer. It lost all three of its Academy Award nominations but remained a critical success and made its mark upon cinematic history.
In an interview with Variety recently, Wahlberg revisited his experience of making Boogie Nights, as he attempted to remember lines from his most iconic movies. He reflected on just how unsure he had been when the project was pitched to him initially.
At the time, Wahlberg was really trying to move beyond his status as a former Calvin Klein model, and he thought making a porn star wouldn't help in that regard. He admitted to being apprehensive, with the inclusion that the concept is tough to sell. "I was terrified because the pitch was tough. It's like Ted, a guy and a teddy bear smoking weed. That doesn't sound very appealing, right? Or a porn star. I was like, 'Ah, I don't want to do that.' I had just come from Calvin Klein and all that stuff. I was trying to get away from all that," he explained.
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One of the factors in Wahlberg's hesitation was also the recent bomb of Showgirls, a picture dealing with an adult subject that hadn't gone down well at all. He admitted he had never met Anderson before and he hadn't seen his previous work, Hard Eight. But the counsel he received about the talents of
Anderson persuaded him to take the plunge and read some of the Boogie Nights script anyway. Indeed, he let it lie there before his opinion changed by getting to meet the person of Anderson himself. "As soon as I met with him, it was like, 'Okay, I get it.' And then I finished the script, I was cast in the part. We were both 25 at the time. It was wild," Wahlberg said, remembering.
If we look deeper, at the time, such success for Boogie Nights was far from certain. With an estimated budget of $15 million, the movie would go on to gross $43.1 million worldwide, quite a success at that budget for a film of this size and caliber. That budget, today, adjusted for inflation, would be just under $30 million—small compared with today's blockbusters, but still a hearty sum for a drama centered around the adult film industry.
The film also had a few other better-known actors, including Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore, and Philip Seymour Hoffman.
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It's a different time and different scenario now than it was in '97. And Wahlberg doesn't believe that a film like Boogie Nights, containing this kind of subject matter, would be made by a traditional studio today. "That movie ain't getting made today. Not at a studio," he said, remarking on how changing dynamics at the film studios, as an event of streaming platforms, have slid their focus away from risky and auteur-driven films.
Whereas studios could be taking a pass on such projects now, a lot of that, certainly, has changed—now a Netflix or Apple TV+ will give opportunities for a Boogie Nights –type of film to find its audience in the current marketplace.
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