Boogie Nights is ready to bring porn to a cable network near you. New Line is shopping a late-night series that would bring the antics of Dirk, Amber, Rollergirl and Buck into your house every week. HBO was the first cable net to produce original sitcoms with “Dream On,” the show that had almost every gorgeous up-and-coming actress in Hollywood sleeping with a short, average-looking book editor within 10 minutes of meeting him. In Boogie Nights: The Slut-Com, it won’t take 10 minutes. Watch Dirk as he measures his new apartment in the nude! Will Amber ever get her hair really clean? See Rollergirl face off against Suzanne Somers in a Thighmaster competition! Watch Buck read and use multi-syllabic words! (Someone has to be politically correct!)
Boogie Nights burnt up the box office charts in limited release last weekend, but from every second week, a pattern emerges. In Los Angeles, the film was dropping quickly in the big multi-plexes, while still growing in the smaller venues. Of course, even while dropping, the numbers were pretty damned good. In New York, there wasn’t much change on the Westside and downtown, but there was a drop on the Eastside. This is the first indication that Boogie Nights may have a hard time with the mainstream in the long run. But in the short run, it still looks solid as a… well, just solid.
Boogie Nights doesn’t have the exclusive on bare bodies. The Full Monty passed Four Weddings and a Funeral this weekend as the most popular British film ever in the U.K. It took Monty just eight weeks to pass the $45 million that Weddings took 22 weeks to acquire. The Pantless Ones have taken just over $25 million here in the US. But England’s dance with flesh is far from over. The Spice Girls movie, Spice World, is due on U.K. screens before the end of the year. It’s enough to make you drink warm beer.
Tomorrow, Boogie Nights leads the weekend preview . Meanwhile, check out the disco dancing on Rough Cut weekly.
Email is fun. And this week I tell you why I love L.A. Let me count the ways on The Whole Pictures in one!