Boogie Nights.

It's amazing how entertaining a film can be and still espouse so much anachronistic nonsense. Perhaps history is better left to librarians and filmmaking to talented directors like Paul Thomas Anderson, whose new movie is Boogie Nights, a picaresque tale about the porn business in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Burt Reynolds is the triple-X producer who plays pasha to a family of outsiders with names like Amber Waves (Julianne Moore), Rollergirl (Heather Graham), and Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg). They bond as much at the loins on-screen as they do in life offscreen--that is, until the all-purpose 1980s apocalypse (too much money, cocaine, shag carpeting, etc.) arrives to spoil the hilarious and sometimes juvenile fun (the actors' reaction shots to the size of Diggler's penis is Boogie Nights' major leitmotif).

The wrinkle here is that the 26-year-old Anderson has a view of the era and the hard-core porn business that could make sense only to someone who wasn't there to live it. Or at least report on it, as I did when I edited for Penthouse magazine in the 1970s.

Anderson would have us believe that 1980s greed and the advent of video had something to do with bringing down the golden age of smut. In fact, Anderson might be surprised to learn that there actually was a golden age of smut, for a year or two in the early 1970s when Truman Capote coined the term "porno chic" and critics such as Vincent Canby of the august New York Times actually went off to write about such junk as Deep Throat, The Devil in Miss Jones, and Behind the Green Door. For a few wild months back then reviewer Norma McLain Stoop of After Dark magazine actually found talent in that fingers-on-the-nipples, mouths-open-in-vague-disgust approach to acting that turned Linda Lovelace and Marilyn Chambers into party favorites on the Andy Warhol circuit.

It didn't last long, of course. But the demise of the pornography-as-art aesthetic had nothing to do with video, which was not even a glimmer on porn director Gerard Damiano's lens. The real story of its fall is more intriguing than Anderson's mild conjecture.

In the mid 1970s Harry Reems, star of Deep Throat, was convicted in Tennessee for "conspiring to distribute an obscene film." The case sent shock waves through not only the hard-core porn business but also the offices of so-called legitimate publishers who were at that time still cashing in on the nation's appetite for The Joy of Sex, The G Spot, and The Happy Hooker's Sex Fantasies (which I ghostwrote for Xaviera Hollander). If an actor could be jailed in one state for something he did in another, what prevented the Jesse Helmses of the nation from going after any author, illustrator, editor--or fact checker, for that matter--who toiled on anything some fascist in another state deemed objectionable?

The case was dismissed, but it put a real damper on any talk about acting, plotlines, camera angles, or those other pretensions to art that Wahlberg's Dirk Diggler has to cope with in perfecting his screen persona between the come shots. In the real world of pornography, triple-X films went back to being all about coitus, which made perfect sense. If they weren't exclusively about the mechanics of sex, why else would you call them pornography?

Perhaps Boogie Nights is so much fun because it is so naive: Anderson doesn't let the complexities of history get in the way of telling a good story. Maybe in time (this is only Anderson's second feature) he'll have honed the technique to tell a great one. At 2 1/2 hours the best thing about Boogie Nights is that it always entertains and that the narrative--loaded down as it is with some clunky ideas about dysfunctional extended families--has more raw drive than a dozen Mike Leigh films. Industry insiders are already calling it the Pulp Fiction of 1997. Pulp fiction is very apt.