Boogie Nights
1997 film by Paul Thomas Anderson
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.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Boogie Nights” is 1997 film by Paul Thomas Anderson. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Boogie, Nights and film, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “1997 film by Paul Thomas Anderson” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The first chronological checks are 1997 and 1988.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.
- Identifying works and editions
- Tracing reception history
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The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Boogie Nights”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Boogie Nights primary sources, Boogie Nights archive and Boogie research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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- Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
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This entry incorporates text from “Boogie Nights” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.