Daily Dialogue — January 1, 2014
FLOYD GONDOLLI: So let’s talk about the future. Let’s talk about what it really means to this industry, and let’s talk about how all of us, not one of us, how all of us are going to profit. Now, I’ve been doing theater in San Francisco, San Diego about as long as you’ve been doing stag and hard core.
JACK HORNER: We’re all familiar with your biography, Floyd. No one doubts your credentials or your history.
FLOYD GONDOLLI: Then why the resistance? This industry is going to be turned upside down soon enough.
JACK HORNER: Why help it?
FLOYD GONDOLLI: Why not be prepared? The Colonel’s got the money. You got the talent. I got the connections to the equipment and the mail-order distribution, not to mention those kids out there who are hot fuck action to the max, Jack. This is the future. Videotape tells the truth.
JACK HORNER: Wait a minute. You come into my house, my party, to tell me about the future? That the future is tape, videotape, and not film? It’s amateurs and not professionals? I’m a filmmaker. That’s why I will never make a movie on videotape. I’ll tell you something else. I will never, ever loan out any of the actors that I have under contract.
FLOYD GONDOLLI: Wait, wait wait now, Jack. I’m not a complicated man. I like cinema. In particular, I like to see people fucking on film, but I don’t want to win an Oscar, and I don’t want to reinvent the wheel. I like simple pleasures, like butter in my ass, lollipops in my mouth. That’s just me. That’s just something that I enjoy. Call me crazy, call me a pervert, but there’s one little thing that I want to do in this life, and that is to make a dollar and a cent in this business. Jack, I’m not trying to hurt you. I’m trying to help you stay one step ahead of the game.
JACK HORNER: We’re going in circles now, but we’re in familiar territory.
FLOYD GONDOLLI: The territory we’re in is the future, not to mention the cost.
JACK HORNER: You know, if it looks like shit, and it sounds like shit, then it must be shit.
FLOYD GONDOLLI: You’re holding on too tight. It doesn’t have to look good. Film is just too damn expensive, and the theaters are already converting to video projectors.
JACK HORNER: I haven’t heard that.
FLOYD GONDOLLI: Well, it’s true.
JACK HORNER: Well… ten minutes before the new year. I’d like to spend it with my friends. We will or will not continue this conversation.
— Boogie Nights (1997), written by Paul Thomas Anderson
The Daily Dialogue theme for the week is New Year’s Eve. Today’s suggestion by Adam Gottschalk.
Trivia: Paul Thomas Anderson used Exhausted: John C. Holmes, the Real Story (1981), a documentary about John Holmes, as a reference for some of the scenes in this film. Many interview scenes, including one where a strung-out Dirk tells the interviewer about how Jack allows him to block and edit his own sex scenes, are identical to the interviews in “Exhausted”, especially one where a strung-out John Holmes, for no clear reason, lies about how director Bob Chinn allows him to block his own sex scenes.
Dialogue On Dialogue: Commentary by Adam: “Two elements that make this scene’s dialogue particularly effective — the contrast between Floyd Gondolli’s huckster folksiness and Jack Horner’s more straight-ahead way of speaking, and the context of New Year’s Eve, which ties in thematically with Jack’s resistance to changes that are coming as inevitably as the dawn of a new year and a new decade.”
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