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Twenty years ago, a 27-year-old director named Paul Thomas Anderson decided to turn a lingering obsession of his into a full-length feature film. That obsession of his was L.A.'s porn industry, and his 150-page script told the story of a restaurant busboy (Mark Wahlberg) endowed with a 13-inch penis, who's eventually shaped into a porn star name Dirk Diggler. Anderson's movie, Boogie Nights, gave a thrilling and gritty perspective to Hollywood's more "mature" underbelly.
"I felt it should maybe resemble my personal experience of watching a porno film: incredibly funny one second, turns me on the next, then incredibly depressing and so on, up and down," Anderson told Grantland of the movie.
As Todd Williams, a production assistant for Boogie Nights, said, "The whole 'porn is cool' thing hadn’t happened yet." With the The Deuce, a drama about the burgeoning days of the porn industry, now airing on HBO, we can safely say that the "porn is cool" thing — as in, looking into the history of it — is in full force. Here are other movies and shows which illuminate the biz.
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