Between last week’s oral history of Boogie Nights on Grantland and this week’sPaul Thomas Anderson WTF interview, this past month has been a treat for those of us who can’t get enough Boogie Nights behind-the-scenes stories. The most recent one that stuck out to me is a story from WTF about Burt Reynolds’ line read of “Nevertheless.”
I couldn’t find an embeddable version online, but if you remember the movie, there’s a scene where Mark Wahlberg is screaming at Burt Reynolds’s character, demanding to shoot a scene, and Reynolds is telling him that he can’t shoot it because he’s been up for two days. Dirk protests that he hasn’t been up for two days, at which point in the original script, Jack Horner says “Nevertheless, you don’t look good and I’m not going to shoot you this way,” or something to that effect. Meanwhile, Horner’s cameraman. played by Ricky Jay(pictured, right) holds them apart.
Anderson says every time the film comes on cable, he can’t help but notice the pained expression on Ricky Jay’s face during that scene.