Sept 15-21 Mockumentary Week: “Ladies and gentlemen, by way of introduction, this is a film about trickery – and fraud. About lies. Tell it by the fireside, in a marketplace, or in a movie. Almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie. But not this time. No, this is a promise. During the next hour, everything you hear from us is really *true* and based on solid facts.”

Nine years before Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson made this movie, which is not a drama but instead a documentary on the life of a dead porn star. This is all ragged charm without the crazy camera work, and yet it gets a lot of the same story beats, even if so much comes from the John Holmes documentary, Exhausted.

We learn the fact early: Dirk Diggler (Michael Stein) was born as Steven Samuel Adams on April 15, 1961, outside of Saint Paul, Minnesota. His father is a construction worker, and his mother is a boutique shop owner who attends church every Sunday.

Jack Horner (Robert Ridgely) discovers high school dropout Diggler at a falafel stand, and he soon meets his best friend, Reed Rothchild (Eddie Delcore), while working for the director. Then comes fame. Then comes drugs. Then comes the fall.

Anderson made this film when he was 17 years old and a senior at Montclair College Preparatory School. Anderson’s father, Ernie “Ghoulardi” Anderson, narrated the movie — he was the voice of ABC — and Robert Ridgely, a friend of his father, played Horner.

Shot on camcorder and edited with two VCRs, this is so close to Boogie Nights, even if in this, Dirk has a successful music career (and died after coming back to do gay porn, which is treated as the worst think ever, which is not PTA being homophobic; this feels like it was made by someone who was reading porn star interviews in Hustler regularly — ask me how I know that…)

You can watch this on YouTube.