Christmas movies, like Christmas music, are difficult to avoid when the month of December rolls around. Streaming services feature “Holiday Classics Collections” on their home page. Cable television channels air Christmas movie marathons. Commercials spoof iconic scenes like Flick’s tongue frozen on the flagpole in A Christmas Story (1983) and Andrew Lincoln holding cue cards on the snowy doorstep of Richard Curtis’ Love Actually (2003).
The ubiquity of Christmas movies has even led to some hilarious online debates on whether films like Die Hard (1988) qualify as a Christmas movie. These debates have snowballed in recent years along with many other cultural impasses created by social media. It seems that even a holiday which celebrates the setting aside of petty differences can still tear us apart online. (Die Hard is a Christmas movie, by the way. If you don’t like it then feel free to leave a comment below).
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Christmas is Hollywood’s favorite holiday setting. But when the studios want to stir up a little more romance, they often set their sights on the holiday a few days after Christmas. After all, there’s nothing quite as romantic as the fireworks, chilly “huddle-up” weather, the glimpse of a fresh start, champagne toasts, and that countdown to a midnight kiss on New Year’s Eve.
Romantic Comedies Set On New Year’s Eve Are a Hollywood Tradition
Castle Rock Entertainment
Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light (2022) is the latest Hollywood film to prominently feature New Year’s Eve. While the events of the film take place over several months, the poster features screenshots from a scene wherein Olivia Coleman and Michael Ward stand on a rooftop with a view of the English coast as holiday fireworks flash over their heads. This scene marks the beginning of what develops into a somewhat unusual on-screen love affair.
In Bundle of Joy (1956), the lead characters played by Carrie Fisher’s real-life mother and father, Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, fall in love on New Year’s Eve. Director Gary Marshall followed up his universally-panned but star-studded and financially successful Valentine’s Day (2010) with New Year’s Eve (2011), a romantic comedy that critics somehow hated even more.
The classic romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally (1989), directed by Rob Reiner and written by Nora Ephron, features one of the most iconic New Year’s Eve sequences. After an on-and-off relationship with its share of ups and downs, Sally (played by Meg Ryan) is about to leave a 1988 New Year’s Eve party when Harry (played by Billy Crystal) strolls in and declares his love for her before their midnight kiss. Ephron was clearly a believer in the holiday’s cinematic power to conjure up romance, as she also featured the holiday in the climax of another romantic comedy classic which she wrote and directed herself, Sleepless In Seattle (1993).
However, there is another writer-director who subverted the romantic associations with the holiday rather than carrying on its legacy like Nora Ephron. Paul Thomas Anderson showed audiences the dark side of New Year’s Eve — and not just in that creepy ballroom scene from Phantom Thread (2017) — with the infamous New Year’s Eve Party scene from his controversial classic Boogie Nights (1997).
Boogie Nights Was Met with Praise and Controversy
New Line Cinema
Boogie Nights tracks the rise and fall of young busboy Dirk Diggler who, after breaking into the pornography industry in the 1970s San Fernando Valley with his exceptional “male talent,” finds himself adopted into a dysfunctional tribe and swallowed up by a life of sex, drugs, and disco. The setting of Boogie Nights (minus the porn industry) is one that Anderson has returned to as recently as 2021 with his semi-autobiographical and seriously underrated romantic comedy Licorice Pizza. Growing up in “The Valley” during the 1970s left its mark on the director and, in turn, Anderson has left this mark on the history of film.
Given its pornographic subject matter, Boogie Nights was met with some controversy upon its release. But it was applauded by critics on several counts, including Anderson’s original screenplay, his direction, and the ensemble cast. The cast of Boogie Nights would one day be considered one of the greatest ensembles ever assembled, with up-and-coming actors like Mark Wahlberg, Julianne Moore, Don Cheadle, John C. Reilly, Heather Graham, Nicole Parker, Philip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy, and Burt Reynolds in a career comeback.
Burt Reynolds and Mark Wahlberg Distanced Themselves From Boogie Nights
Despite the praise they received, some key members of the cast tried to distance themselves from the film like rats from a sinking ship. Though he would receive a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his role in Boogie Nights as porn producer Jack Horner, Burt Reynolds hated the film so much that he fired his agent afterward.
Even Mark Wahlberg, who starred as Dirk Diggler after Leonardo DiCaprio turned the role down to star in Titanic, voiced regrets about being a part of the film. DiCaprio and Wahlberg had just starred together as urban heroin addicts in The Basketball Diaries (1995) for New Line Cinema when Anderson was getting the funding together for Boogie Nights, also at New Line. In 2017, while speaking at a religious event at the UIC Pavilion in Chicago, Wahlberg said:
Reynolds and Walhberg are two of the most important characters in the film. But many of the supporting cast remain proud of Boogie Nights and have fond memories of their experiences making the film, not least of which is William H. Macy.
Boogie Nights and William H. Macy Gave Cinema its Most Horrifying New Year’s Eve
The first half of Boogie Nights features the rise of Dirk Diggler. These are the salad days when the good times rolled for everybody in Horner’s orbit. Well, almost everybody. It is throughout this half of the film that William H. Macy’s character, assistant director “Little Bill” Thompson, is repeatedly cuckolded and humiliated by his unfaithful wife in front of his friends and colleagues. On one fateful New Year’s Eve party at Horner’s house on December 31st, 1979, while the gang are ringing in the 1980s, Little Bill catches his wife cheating on him for the last time. He snaps, murdering his wife and her lover before taking his own life.
The scene is jaw dropping, not only due to Macy’s performance but for the bold style employed behind the camera. Anderson shot Little Bill’s death scene in one extended shot, what’s often referred to as a “long take” or a “oner,” where the camera follows William H. Macy’s character as he walks around the New Year’s Eve party, discovers his wife’s infidelity, walks outside to his car to grab his gun, and comes back in and commits the double murder-suicide.
William H. Macy Remembers His Boogie Nights Fondly
In October 2022, Macy spoke with Derek Lawrence of Vulture and reminisced about his experiences on the set of Boogie Nights 25 years ago. Speaking about the Oner from the film, Macy said:
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights Pays Homage To Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas
Warner Bros.
The fact that Anderson only needed three takes to get a shot that complex is impressive for a director who was only 27 years old at the time. And it is all the more impressive that the shot still carries every bit of the shock and horror that Anderson intended given the fact that Boogie Nights is loaded with other extended dolly shots. In fact, one such shot opens the film. Anderson admitted in the film’s DVD commentary that he lifted these long dolly shots from Martin Scorsese, who had featured them extensively in Goodfellas (1990), a film with its own great Christmas scene.
Boogie Nights’ debt to Goodfellas runs deeper than simply borrowing camera moves, as both films track the rise and fall of a young man seduced by a taboo group on the fringes of society. Cocaine addiction and self-destruction await both the late Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill and Mark Wahlberg’s Dirk Diggler at the end of the road. With Goodfellas and Boogie Nights, Scorsese and Anderson eschewed the Hollywood standard three-act screenplay, opting instead for two acts to suit their rise (Act I) and fall (Act II) narratives.
We can thank Anderson, and Scorsese to some degree, for his inventiveness on the page and behind the camera which gave us the most horrifying New Year’s Eve scene that Hollywood has ever financed. Although, Anderson’s creepy New Year’s ballroom scene in Phantom Thread is a runner-up.
