Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights is set against the backdrop of the sex industry. New Line’s marketing team had to find a way to sell it.
It was back in October 1997 that the American Film Information Council bestowed upon the movie Boogie Nights the prize of the best marketed film of that month.
Appreciating that it’s a fairly closed shortlist it’ll have been competing against, it was still up against Kiss The Girls, I Know What You Did Last Summer and The Devil’s Advocate. Even so, it was still likely to have been something of a split decision. Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie was treading a fine line between the old adage of sex sells, and American censors grappling with material of a fruity nature.
Boogie Nights, if you’re unfamiliar, is a superb film. It’s an ensemble movie set against the backdrop of the American porn industry, as it moved from the 1970s into the 1980s.
It must have been a welcome respite for the team at New Line Cinema tasked with promoting the film when the award was bestowed, however. Before that, there was a suspicion that Paul Thomas Anderson’s second feature was looking like being absolutely the wrong film at absolutely the wrong time.
The context here is crucial. By early 1997, as Anderson’s feature was heading towards release, sex and cinema were not having a good time of it in the American marketplace. This was still the era where if a film didn’t get an R rating at the top end, cinema and video store chains would effectively lock a film out of sizeable mainstream distribution. Violence usually got through easily enough, but sex was something of a hot topic.
Even as Boogie Nights was making its way through production, Adrian Lyne had filmed a new take on Lolita, and that couldn’t land a US distributor. Thousands of words were written about that.
David Cronenberg’s Crash was equally getting entirely sensible and not at all sexy knickers in a twist. In the UK, the Daily Mail saw it as something of a flat-out assault on cinema, practically begging for it to be banned. The year before, even Milos Forman’s terrific The People Vs Larry Flynt had struggled to bring in levels of business to match its acclaim, and had to do battles with the Motion Picture Association of America over its poster.
Sex sells, goes the cliché. Well, it depends how it’s presented.
Into this ecosystem them, the New Line marketing team walked.
Paul Thomas Anderson had been given huge amounts of creative freedom over Boogie Nights, all the more remarkable given that he was in the latter half of his 20s when he wrote and directed it (with the troubled, excellent Hard Eight his only other feature credit). Costing $15m to make and with a running time heading past two and a half hours, the challenge was how much to lean into the subject matter of the porn industry.
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Appreciating the not-unreasonable insistence that the film wasn’t actually about sex, it just happened to have the adult film world represented. Adult films were making zillions of dollars of course, but you weren’t allowed to admit that.
What, then, did New Line do?
Sure, it could have tried to create a tabloid storm, and it had the material. The film’s final scene, the camera lingering on a subsection of Mark Wahlberg, was already being widely talked about. But as New Line’s president of marketing and distribution at the time – Mitchell Goldman – told Entertainment Weekly issue 376, “the wrong kind of controversy isn’t good for this movie. It isn’t about porn. It’s about dreams and growing up in that time [the 1970s], and how our mores were different.”
None of which looks particularly good on a poster.
In fact, the poster itself was a point of contention. Just as Larry Flynt had hit problems beforehand, the original poster for Boogie Nights fell on the wrong side of the MPAA. It’s not a poster I’ve been able to find online, so I’ll do my best to describe it in a delicate way. It features a gentleman’s jeans, with the flies unbuttoned (they don’t look like those cheap jeans with a zip that gets stuck), and a big star over an exposed area, with ‘Boogie Nights’ written on it.
Too much for the MPAA, that, and in the end, this was the US release poster.
Not even a hint of a bum cheek on that.
Considering its options, New Line decided to buy itself some time. There’d been the hope that the Cannes Film Festival would accept the film, giving it a prestige launchpad and a chance to focus on some critical laurels. When the chance of that diminished, the studio yanked the movie from a May 1997 release to September instead. Its theatrical release was originally counter-programmed against Steven Spielberg’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park, but there was only one large monster that was going to win that fight, and it didn’t belong to Mark Wahlberg.
What New Line opted for, then, was something of a half-way house.
It was happy for stories of the film’s sexual material to be discussed, not least its most infamous scene. But also, it wanted to play on the prestige of it. New Line boss at the time, Michael De Luca, argued that he knew this wasn’t going to be a mainstream film, and was happy with the critical plaudits he felt it would receive. It dialled back on the nookie, and played a bit more on prestige. Hindsight is easy: it was always going to be uphill.
Anderson delivered his R-rated cut, as agreed, and a film that run to over two and a half hours. New Line could have pushed back, but as Michael De Luca would relay to Grantland many years later, “Paul didn’t have final cut and he didn’t have control over the marketing or the distribution plan. We agreed to take our chances with each other.”
Test screenings weren’t helping the confusion. In fact, New Line’s Bob Shaye oversaw a second cut of the film (made independently of Anderson), and that was separately tested. The idea was that whichever got the best scores would be released. “Paul reacted, I wouldn’t say violently, but he reacted very negatively to the proposal, and to the cut that I had actually made for his benefit,” Shaye would lament.
Out the film went, as Anderson intended.
If anything, the criticism of the marketing in the end was that it was on the tame side. AdAge would describe the ad strategy as “timid” at the point the film was set to come out of limited release to broader expansion. Yet it was enough to win a marketing plaudit.
Going back to that Film Information Council prize, a Tampa Bay Times report back in 1997 reported “FIC members noted that Boogie Nights expertly used target marketing with its trailers as well as using media interviews with its stars.”
That’s open to debate.
When it came to the box office? It did just about enough, without ever really taking off. In limited release Boogie Nights did well, but failed to ignite when the screen count went up. Still, a $26.4m American gross was offset in the end by the shifting of a fair few DVDs. Plus, there was Oscar attention (memorably, Burt Reynolds was said to have cost himself a chance of a Best Supporting Actor Oscar by criticising the film), all of which was enough to convince New Line Cinema to back Paul Thomas Anderson again.
The project in question was Magnolia, arguably his masterpiece.
But if Boogie Nights was tricky to sell to the American moviegoing public? Magnolia would approach end of level boss-like levels of challenge. That story, though, is one for another time…
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