Investigation: Paul Thomas Anderson's Early Career

 

There are few directors that understand what it means to make movies like Paul Thomas Anderson. Every one of his movies are distinctly cinematic, using each individual element to his narrative advantage. Anderson's movies hold a distinct manicured quality, in which every piece feels absolutely intentional, if improvisation was done in the process of making the movie you would never know. This level of craftsmanship has made Anderson my highest ideal as a filmmaker. With this consideration I felt he would be a perfect director to examine in a video essay about what makes a movie a masterpiece. When I was making my comparative study the background work I did on Charlie Kaufman through these posts was extremely useful, so in order to provide myself the same advantage I decided to write this post. Similar to Kaufman I needed to find a splitting point to make this post manageable so I will be covering Anderson's career up until he switched his composer from Jon Brion to Jonny Greenwood.    

Early Life 

Born in Studio City and the son of a radio actor, it is extremely unsurprising Anderson decided at an early age to start making movies. Making his first film when he was only eight, Anderson has been a director for most of his life. Anderson's first real production was a mockumentary about a porn star called "The dirk Diggler Story", which was a 30 minute short film he made as a high school senior. After spending a year at Emerson College, in which he was taught by David Foster Wallace, and two days at NYU, Anderson decided to drop out and make a short film. With money won from gabling and his college money Anderson made "Cigarettes and Coffee" a short version of his first feature film. This short got Anderson into Sundance which allowed him to make his first feature. 

Hard Eight 

This film is about a group of gamblers who pull of harmless little crimes, which slowly escalate as the film goes on. By the final scene characters are committing murder. Similar to Reservoir Dogs, this film serves as a clear example of who Anderson could be as a director but in an unformed way. The film sets up the tropes we associate with Anderson, but does not live up to any of those stylistic quirks in any meaningful way. For example, The film has a number of camera movements, but none as evocative as the movements he would use latter in his career. Additionally, this film shows Anderson's initial inability of writing effective dialogue with many lines in the movie sticking out as non-human. 

Boogie Nights 

If Hard Eight provided a glimpse into Anderson's style, this film presents that style hard and fast providing the standard he would follow for the rest of his career.  About the porn industry in the late 70s and early 80s, Boogie Nights is one of those movies which comes to define an artist. Continuing the  Tarantino analogy, this is PTA's Pulp Fiction. Beyond being stylistically interesting this movie carries the intellectual weight Anderson is associated with, portraying his typical themes of Greed, Social Acceptance, and Belief. It covers all these themes by showing a variety of different stories contained in a singular plot, something he plays with at the end of Hard Eight and displays perfectly in this movie. The film intriguingly displays the porn industry with equal distain and sympathy providing a uniquely human prospective on an often disregarded part of society. Boogie Nights also serves as Anderson's first technical masterpiece with the cinematography, editing, and sound design providing near perfect cinematic experiences. 

 Magnolia    

Magnolia is a very ambitious movie. In the course of three hours the movie attempts to tell five separate stories and fails in all of them. Each of the stories told by the movie could have been their own separate films. Out of PT Anderson's movies this is the only one I dislike. While there the Tom Cruise and child quiz player subplots are very good, the rest of the movie does not support those elements. This movie serves as a clear example of how being overambitious can have negative consequences on a movie. The only part of this movie that is extremely exiting to me is the opening which is one of my favorite scenes in all of cinema: 

Punch-Drunk Love 

To finish the Tarantino analogy this is PTA's Inglorious Bastards. He had set up his style and themes in his earlier movies but needed to find his narrative structure. Punch-Drunk Love continues to have Anderson's evocative style with the bonus element of a good script. While his other films are competently written, this is his first one that is beautifully written. In taking the general narrative structure of the Coen Brothers in which the audience follows a single character surrounded by a bunch of very interesting small characters, PTA was able to write in a beautiful way for the first time. This film also shows PTA's first use of music as a central narrative component, another smaller factor that would continue in his work after this movie. 

The Second Half of PT Anderson's Career Coming Soon...

Work Log:

Monday- Script for video essay

Tuesday- Read There Will Be Blood critiques

Wednesday- tried to find a pre-existing word for what I'm talking about

Thursday- Script

Friday- Looked into literature on what makes a masterpiece