Instant Celebrity: Heather Graham

Screen-grabbed from P.T. Anderson’s Boogie Nights, his great film about a kid making his way in the California porn business of the seventies. Polaroid cameras bob up a few times in the movie, because they’re so distinctively of-the-era and, I think, because they fit so nicely with the material. (Private dirty pictures were, let’s face it, a big part of the adult-entertainment scene.) There are a couple of moments where Anderson cuts on the burst of a Flashbar, shot so close-in that you can see the flare and fade of the individual wires within. He uses the motor sound of the camera, too.

Link to the pool-party scene here,. No Pola-moment, but watch it for the fabulous several-minute almost-no-cuts-Steadicam shot, akin to Martin Scorsese’s Copacabana scene in GoodFellas. Nice.