Courtesy of Yvon Lambert Gallery, Paris and New York

Deep in the heart of the San Fernando Valley, in a little cinder-block office that used to be a motel room, Carole Stevens is surrounded by memorabilia from her former students. There's a publicity shot from Robin Thicke's last record, a clipping of Toi Cook playing in the Super Bowl. She's proud that so many of them showed up for a recent ceremony commemorating the school's much-beloved founder. And she smiles with real happiness when she remembers the teenage boy who always wore the Cushman Academy sweatshirt even though it was against the rules. When the principal walked by, she would make him go into her bathroom and hide. Then he'd turn it inside out and make his escape. He was always like that, skating right on the edge of trouble, a charmer and a scamp, always turning other people into his accomplices. His best friend was a kid named Shane Conrad, and they were always thick as thieves, plotting one mysterious adventure after another. He was popular with girls and brilliant in the classroom, but he always had another agenda. And he always used to say, "Miss Stevens, I'm going to be a famous director. I'm going to win the Academy Award." And then he grew up to become Paul Thomas Anderson, the acclaimed director of Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love, and There Will Be Blood. It's wonderful to think about, almost a fairy tale.

But then Stevens stops, puzzled and even a little sad. Although Anderson is one of the most autobiographical filmmakers of his generation, drawing heavily on his childhood in the San Fernando Valley, most stories about him offer some variation on "very little is known about his early years" or "little is known about Paul's childhood." He has stopped talking to most of his friends from those years, and none of them can say whether he just moved on naturally or broke with his past for some secret reason.

"When he did Magnolia," Stevens says, "I sent word through someone who worked with him to tell Paul it would be great if he could come back for a visit. I'd love to see him. And the answer came: 'Paul doesn't go back.'"

She pauses for a moment. "Isn't that strange?"

In all of Anderson's movies, people try to reinvent themselves in new identities. One character models himself on a gambler, another becomes a porn star, another comes up with a nutty scheme to escape his suffocating life through mass purchases of pudding. This is a theme Hollywood usually treats with the dark cynicism of All About Eve and The Hustler or the frothy glitz of The Sting and Ocean's Eleven, but the beautiful thing about Anderson is that he takes it all so personally. There's a tenderness to the way he treats his scammers and schemers and lonely midnight dreamers, love in the way he accommodates their fervent transformations. To him they're not weird Ratso Rizzo freaks; they're more like friends or family members, people he wants to give a little bit of hope or slap across the face a couple times to snap them to their senses. Even hit them with a rain of frogs if that's what it takes. There's a reason for this, and oddly enough, it is a reason he has tried very hard to keep hidden -- the history of his peculiar Hollywood childhood and his own ferocious hustle for transformation.

The story begins in Cleveland in the early 1960s, when a local TV station bought a bulk package of terrible horror movies and hired a born cutup named Ernie Anderson to be the host. Treating the subject with the seriousness it deserved, he called himself Ghoulardi and dressed in a lab coat with a fake Vandyke beard and horn-rimmed glasses, tossing out catchphrases like "stay sick, knifs" (fink spelled backward), "turn blue," and "ova deh." He liked to play "Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow" over a clip of an old hillbilly chomping his dinner. "He just did wacky things," remembers Tim Conway, who worked with Anderson in Cleveland before leading the way out to Hollywood. "He would pop up onscreen and say, 'This is the dumbest plot I've ever seen. You know who the killer is!'"

One time, Ernie rode a motorcycle through the studio. He liked tossing firecrackers around. Once, he stuck a firecracker in a dead frog and blew it up on camera.

When he followed Conway out to Los Angeles, Ernie made a fortune as a voice-over artist, narrating a thousand commercials and introducing shows like The Love Boat in a plummy baritone that always got the joke. He became the official voice of ABC and bought a big house in the San Fernando Valley, putting in a full-length oak bar and whiling away the long sunny days with friends like Conway, Harvey Korman, and Robert Ridgely -- all comics with a flair for twisted humor. Conway had regular spots on Laugh-In and The Carol Burnett Show, Korman appeared in High Anxiety and Blazing Saddles, Ridgely in Get Smart and Kung Fu. None of them took show business too seriously, and all of them liked to drink and have a good time. Conway says he sees Ernie in the porn director Burt Reynolds plays in Boogie Nights. The attitude that Burt had? That carefree, freewheeling guy? That was totally Ernie.

Paul was always underfoot, overshadowed by his many older siblings, worshipping his dad and trying to find a way into his inner circle. For the first eleven years of his life, he went to an elite private school called Buckley, set like a jewel among the mansions and jacaranda trees of south-of-the-boulevard Sherman Oaks. He ran with a group of rich kids that included a urologist's son named Steve Garrett, an entertainment lawyer's son named Alain Kalcheim, and Shane Conrad, son of actor Robert Conrad. Although everyone comments on his natural sweetness, they also say he had a sharp, jittery edge. The way Conway puts it, "He held a little bit of anger at a young age."

As Conrad remembers it, "He had a fucking mouth on him, and he was this skinny little shit. He was one of those crazy, manic, super-hyper guys who would just talk trash to anybody. If you could catch him, you could pound on him, but it was hard to catch him."

One time playing tennis, Paul got so mad, he threw his racket at Conrad. Another time, he elbowed Conrad's big brother in the face. "And my brother was six two. I was like, 'Dude, there's nothing I can do for you, my brother's going to beat your ass.'"

Around sixth grade, he left Buckley for brief stints at a couple more elite private schools, John Thomas Dye and Campbell Hall. Although the legend is he got kicked out for fighting, Buckley won't comment and Conrad doesn't remember any specific incident. "It was a coat-and-tie establishment, and Paul didn't really fit that mold," he says.

Part of the problem seems to have been hypoglycemia. "He was always trying to get his sugar balanced and not act like a madman," Conrad says. Another part was growing up with three sisters, plus another sister and four brothers from Ernie's first wife. "Anytime you take the only boy and surround him with three ladies, he's going to assume the favoritism is with the ladies," Conway says. Another part was his mother, Edwina, who was neither carefree nor freewheeling. Although his friends avoid this topic, there is a dash of her in the ugly little scene in Boogie Nights when the character played by Mark Wahlberg goes home to find his mother glowering in an armchair. On the director's commentary, Anderson says he wished the scene were half an hour longer -- half an hour! -- because it was "coming from a personal place" where he was too blinded by emotion to do his best job as storyteller. "Maybe it was too easy to think that she's nuts -- 'cause she is nuts. But why is she nuts?"

Then Ernie gave him one of the first video cameras to hit the market, a boxy old Betamax. He was about twelve, fresh from his break with Buckley, deeply in need of a stabilizing force -- and tellingly, his starter movies were all vignettes of Ernie and his rat pack of show-business buddies doing silly things. One time, they had a contest to see who could bake the best pie, but the pies were so awful, they ended up bringing in the family's Shetland pony to judge the contest. As the pony sniffed one pie and then another and finally made his choice, they laughed and laughed -- and Paul got it all on video.

Another time, one of the family dogs swallowed a whole orange and Ernie sat sentry until it passed the whole damn thing. Paul thought it was hilarious and videotaped it all.

Another time, on a trip to San Francisco, he got his father to dress up as a bum and wander the streets of Haight-Ashbury acting out vignettes with the hippies.

From the beginning, Conway says, he seemed to have a born sense of how the camera related to people and how to use images to tell a story. "Even if it was just pictures of us playing volleyball or swimming, he had a way of editing with his eye." And once he got an idea in his head, it was almost impossible to dislodge. "He was always taking pictures of us and always annoying us," Conway says. "We'd tell him to get lost."

Then they'd look over and he'd still be there with his Betamax on his shoulder, documenting another moment.

So far we have: frogs, father figures, firecrackers, families, a bunch of sick knifs, lots of film parodies, and one protracted scene that is both agonizing and funny -- all motifs that would appear in Anderson's future movies, evidence of his remarkable capacity for transforming the fragments of his real life into an artistic whole. The unifying element may be his unusual capacity for aggression, which soon turned his camera into something almost like a weapon. "What we did instead of taking drugs, we were trying to fuck with people and film it," Conrad remembers. "One night, Paul and Alain TP'd my house and filmed it, so my brother and I got high-powered water guns and attacked their houses and videotaped it all. I remember the camera was on top of me, duct-taped with a Maglite. We would do stuff like that every weekend." It was a teenage hooligan's version of guerrilla filmmaking, a showbiz brat's version of drag racing, and they ended up getting so out of control -- their motto was anything for a shot -- that Steve Garrett's dad laid down an ultimatum. "You are all to stay away from the house," he said. "Especially Paul."

Anderson's parents came to the same conclusion, sending him all the way across the country to spend tenth grade as a boarding student at yet another elite prep school, the Cushing Academy. "I think that played a big part in Paul's life," says Conway. "He was separated from this man he loved so much, and that didn't sit right with him." A year later, he talked his way back home and joined Conrad at Montclair Prep. Quite a change from Buckley, John Thomas Dye, Campbell Hall, and Cushing, Montclair was housed in an old motel deep among the taco joints and auto-repair shops of the central San Fernando Valley. But finally Anderson began to thrive, and Carole Stevens remembers him as a popular student and classroom star who would drop by her office every day with a twinkle in his eye. "Miss Stevens," he'd say, "were you ever a stripper?"

He'd turn to Conrad and say, "I bet Miss Stevens was hot."

Then he would try to convince her to let him out of class so he could go on some mysterious errand. He took the same seduce-and-evade approach with Joyce Sachs, the woman who taught him advanced comp during his senior year. "I had two rules," she remembers. "You had to be there every day, and you had to turn in your paper. But Paul was not a rule follower. It came to the point where I said, 'You can't come to class anymore, because you don't come, and if you come, you're late, and it's discouraging the other students to see this really gifted student who doesn't have to work.'" But he was always very pleasant and seemed like a decent person, so she never knew quite what to make of him. He had this way of smiling so you never knew if he was laughing with you or at some private thing you could never share. It was a secret smile, a "Mona Lisa smile," the same smile he always gave Stevens when he was trying to convince her that high school was no place for a guy like him.

Occasionally, he would tease them with a glimpse. In the summer of 1988, for example, when Midnight Run came out. It was a fairly formulaic action-comedy, and Martin Brest wasn't even close to Anderson's pantheon of cool directors, but one thing caught his eye: a little-known actor named Philip Baker Hall. In four very brief scenes, Hall plays a Las Vegas consigliere who keeps trying to convince his godfather not to whack people. His name was Sidney. "I don't think you should do this," he says in one scene. In another, he uses the curiously formal diction that seems to have hit Anderson in the place where he vibrates to the rhythms of David Mamet: "I'm supposed to advise you against such acts."

Not long afterward, Anderson walked into Stevens's office and handed her a piece of paper. "This will be my next film," he told her.

Scribbled on the paper was one word: Sydney.

Then he went right back to trying to charm and mystify her into giving him total creative control of his high school life: "You don't understand, Miss Stevens. You have to get me permission to leave campus. I have to go." But he would never tell her exactly what he was plotting. Stevens would talk to Conrad's mother and she'd always ask, "What are they doing?" Sometimes she'd make him go explain the urgency to the principal, and sometimes she'd just let him have his way. "He would just wear you down," she laughs.

What was he doing? Using his brothers and Conrad and Steve Garrett and his handyman Fernando as stars, stuntmen, and crew, he made a parody of gang films called Ranger: The Man, the Myth. It was about a real-life group of middle-class white gangsters who called themselves Fighters for Freedom. He made a parody of Miami Vice called Brock Landers (the name he would later give Mark Wahlberg's porn detective in Boogie Nights), with Conrad and his brother playing cheesy detectives who spouted hard-boiled dialogue like "I am the law" and "He was a cop, a damn good cop." He made a Terminator parody called The Legend of Garth, about a spaceman who travels to the future to battle a giant robot, dubbed in the style of Woody Allen's What's Up, Tiger Lily? He did a knockoff of private-detective noir called Earl Flick, which gave Conrad a chance to play the gumshoe and drive Ernie's old Studebaker, even though he was only sixteen and didn't have a license -- anything for a shot. Enlisting a new friend named Michael Stein -- another movie-mad high school kid from Encino -- he made a mockumentary called The Spastic Olympics, which focused on goofy events like a contest to see who could eat the most Rice Krispies. After the climactic eat-off, Anderson ran through traffic on Ventura Boulevard with his shirt off, covered in Rice Krispies -- anything for a shot. He made a film called Young Buns that added porn undertones to Young Guns. He made a short called The Big Shit, about a guy who couldn't find a bathroom on La Brea Avenue. He made another one called Thief, which was about a guy packing his briefcase for work, only he packs it with guns. Then he goes to rob a liquor store and comes back to find his apartment empty -- he wuz robbed!

When they weren't shooting, they were sneaking onto the lots of Hollywood studios. The CBS Radford studio was right in Anderson's backyard, and he figured out every possible way to get around the gate. Plus, he was reading Variety and the Hollywood Reporter every day, not just the articles but the production charts too, so he knew every film in production and just which names to drop. Plus, he was friends with Jody Guber, and she introduced him to the producer who happened to be her dad, who introduced him to Joel Schumacher, the director of The Lost Boys, which made it easy to get onto the Warner Bros. lot. "Paul always knew how to get to these guys," Conrad says. "We would walk right into the studio and watch these guys shoot. We thought it was normal."

When they weren't shooting movies, they were watching them. After he smashed up his Cherokee on Mulholland Drive, Anderson would ride his bike to the video store on Vineland and Ventura and rent two movies a day. Then he'd ride his bike to the Cineplex Odeon and see a couple more. He bought a laser-disc player so he could watch the directors' commentaries, too. He loved Stanley Kubrick, hated fluff like Dirty Dancing, loved both the Robert Downeys, hated dumb action movies, loved The Indian Runner and forced Conrad to go see it because it starred Viggo Mortensen and was in limited release and must be seen.

Then they'd go to hang out at Du-par's on Ventura Boulevard and conspire over their next project. Conrad lived near a fancy housing development built on the old Clark Gable estate, so they used to cruise there looking for locations. They haunted the cement-clad L.A. River looking for dramatic vistas of the urban wasteland. Anderson took his video camera with him everywhere, lining up shots. At the end of the day, they'd go back to Anderson's house. "It would be Tim Conway and Bob Ridgely and all those guys," Conrad remembers, and Ernie would look down the long oak bar and ask them, "What did you fucking guys get into today?"

Toward the end of his senior year, Anderson gave Joyce Sachs another glimpse. She was in charge of an honors program in which seniors in good academic standing could design their own course of study, and one day he came up to her, put his arm around her, and asked, "How's my favorite English teacher?" She laughed because that obviously wasn't true, and then he said he wanted to do an honors project. "I said, 'That's interesting, what do you want to do?' He said, 'The porn industry in the Valley.'"

Around that time, he put in a call to Michael Stein. "There's going to be a production meeting in my bedroom," he said. "Come over."

His bedroom was always a mess, but it was big and stocked with an early Macintosh, a laser-disc player, two VCRs for editing video, and a poster of all the Best Picture winners going back to 1927. "I'm thinking, Wow, I have the Miami Dolphins on my wall," Stein says.

Then Anderson told him his idea: "John Holmes."

Even then, Anderson had the package all complete. That's the way he liked to do things, putting the big plan together in secret and springing it on everyone in finished form. The model was Exhausted, an adoring documentary about Holmes that was full of cheesy sunsets and karate kicks and terrible puns about what a "big" star Holmes was -- and also a surprising number of scenes that would appear almost verbatim in Boogie Nights, like an interview in which Holmes insisted he got to block his own sex scenes and a portentous action scene in which he says, "I'm going to be nice and I'm going to ask you one more time -- Where's Ringo?" It was going to be called The Dirk Diggler Story, and Stein was going to play Dirk.

Stein loved the idea. He picked out a cheap suit, a blue-jean vest, and the perfect pair of leopard-skin underwear. One day he brought over some footage of a friend named Eddie Dalcour, a professional bodybuilder who looked like a cartoon superhero and sounded like Mike Tyson. Anderson said, "Oh, my God, this guy is a freak. He's so great." He cast him as Reed Rothchild, the part John C. Reilly would play in Boogie Nights. Anderson was also fascinated by Stein's father, who had swinging parties with a "lady friend" who painted really horrible paintings just like the ones Dirk Diggler shows off during the tracking-shot tour of his groovy new pad in Boogie Nights.

Dirk Diggler became their obsession, their top secret, the center of every conversation. They talked about it endlessly. Dirk would do this, Dirk would do that. Dirk grew up in Minnesota. That's total Dirk.

The first thing you hear is Ernie Anderson's overripe announcer's voice over a black screen, making fun of his whole career for the benefit of his son: "He was born Steven Samuel Adams on April 15, 1961. His father was a construction worker, his mother owned a popular boutique shop." Then you're in a seedy motel and a film crew is setting up for a shot, and there's enough cross talk and overlapped dialogue to satisfy the most fanatic Robert Altman fan. "I want to make sure Dirk is protected...the master shot...we're getting a shadow right there on her right breast."

Conrad knocks on the bathroom door. "Five minutes, Dirk."

Then they're rolling with Stein playing Diggler as Diggler plays a sex-mad doctor, acting up a cardboard storm on at least two levels. "You have not behaved," he tells his costar. "Inadequate sexual behavior requires modification."

He hits the bed with a whip. "I want you to -- what's the line?"

The script supervisor calls it out: "I want you to look at this meat."

Cut to Ridgely in a solemn bit of mock-interview footage: "Dirk was the greatest actor I ever worked with."

They shot most of it in a motel on the fringes of Universal Studios, using a video camera and a steadycam Ernie had contributed to the production. Anderson worked from a shot list and always knew exactly what he was doing next. His main note to the actors was that he wanted it done very seriously because the characters took their work very seriously. And yet, The Dirk Diggler Story is full of the ripest cheese, way too sophisticated for a seventeen-year-old, a savage but affectionate parody of the entertainment world he wanted to enter: Dirk was discovered at a falafel stand. His movies included Dr. Strangesex and Thunderbones. Candy Cane won an Orgasm Award for her work on Swedish Fly Girls. Ridgely acts like a diva producer ("My masseuse is waiting!"), and the cameraman kvetches about his setups ("It's not going to work, Jack, the light is in the mirror"). Then Dirk starts taking drugs and throws a tantrum: "Don't tell me what audiences want, Jack! They want me! They don't want plot, they don't want dialogue, they want me, Dirk Diggler!" He tries a music career, and we see him in the studio singing the same ridiculous song he will sing ten years later in Boogie Nights, "You Got the Touch." His dopey dialogues with the recording engineer are almost identical, too. "I know, we could speed it up a little -- like a couple of octaves." He also does a cop show called Angels Live in My Town, running down staircases and doing karate kicks to the sound of overdriven guitar. One big difference is the jokey treatment of Dirk's gay period, which includes hot tubs and hard hats and lines like "I was wondering if you'll be needing any more pipe work?" The other is the ending, which is both darker and more facetious: Dirk goes into the bathroom to "prepare" for his comeback scene and, as he overdoses offstage, clutching his leopard-skin underwear in his hand, the camera zooms and swirls around the production crew in one long delirious steady-cam take as Ridgely leads them in prayer. "So dear Lord, I ask you, please help us -- keep us from the great, great crime of premature ejaculation. We need a hit, Lord." Then there's a credit sequence with "The Way We Were" playing over adoring slo-mo shots of Dirk in his groovy shades, Dirk singing in the studio, Dirk romping shirtless in the park with his gay lover -- and finally a title card on a black screen: ALL I EVER WANTED WAS A COOL '78 'VETTE AND A HOUSE IN THE COUNTRY. --DIRK DIGGLER

That was 1989, the year Anderson graduated from Montclair Prep. Under his yearbook picture, he had the usual collection of ironic quotes -- the hook from "Staying Alive," a joke from Woody Allen, and a few lines from Robert Downey Sr.'s deranged 1960s business satire, Putney Swope. But he might have been the only kid in America who also quoted his own fictional character: "All I ever wanted was a cool '78 'Vette and a house in the country. --Dirk Diggler"

For the next couple years, Anderson knocked around the fringes of show business, working as a production assistant and trying to break into movies. He did a TV ad for a hip-hop clothing company called Freshjive, writing little scenarios about gangsters so it was almost a miniature ensemble film. He got some more production jobs: Peter Guber put him on the crew of a game show called The Quiz Kids Challenge, and Robert Conrad made him a production assistant on a TV movie called Sworn to Vengeance. He moved into an apartment in Santa Monica with his girlfriend from high school, Wendy Weidman. He worked on scripts, including one about a kids' quiz show. He made a famously brief stab at film school at NYU, quitting after two days because one professor dissed Terminator 2 and another gave him a C for a prose sample that was actually written by David Mamet. He also did everything he could to get The Dirk Diggler Story into the right hands, hustling with a relentlessness that would have made Dirk himself look retiring. One night Shane Conrad got tickets to the premiere of a Phil Joanou movie called Final Analysis, and "Paul was like, 'I have to meet Phil Joanou.'" They got into a fight because Conrad wanted to take his girlfriend, but Anderson managed to talk his way in, then dogged down Phil Joanou and ended up talking to him for forty-five minutes. Another time, when Conrad had tickets to the premiere of The Commitments, Anderson went into Terminator mode: "I must find Alan Parker." So they went to the premiere and Anderson found Alan Parker. "He shoves this videotape at him and says, 'You have to watch it. My contact information is on the tape,'" Conrad remembers. "And Alan Parker was almost scared -- he's this proper English gentleman. But a couple of weeks later, Paul calls me up and he's like, 'Dude, Alan Parker called me.'"

The episode made an impression on Parker, too, though in his version -- told via e-mail from London -- it happened in a parking lot after an event at the USC film school: "As I pulled away I could see in my mirror a young man chasing after me, waving a videotape. He ran alongside, banging at the window. I stopped, wound down the window, and he thrust the videotape through the window saying he'd made a short film and really wanted me to look at it. The short was The Dirk Diggler Story, which I looked at and thought was quite brilliant."

Then Anderson got another PA job on a PBS movie about an English professor who was accused of racism by his students. The star was Philip Baker Hall, the man who played Sidney in Midnight Run. "He seemed about sixteen," Hall remembers. But Anderson said he loved his performance in Robert Altman's Secret Honor -- a movie few humans had seen -- and asked him what it was like to work with such an innovative and brave director.

So they got to talking. Anderson would bring him coffee, and they'd smoke cigarettes and chat. And one day Hall asked him what he wanted to do with his life. "Write movies," Anderson told him. "Incidentally, I've written a twenty-eight-minute minidrama, and there's a good part in it for you. If you're interested, maybe I can borrow some equipment and we can shoot it."

Not long after, Hall received a script called Cigarettes and Coffee. The main plotline was about a young gambler who thinks his wife is having an affair, so he goes to an older gambler and asks for advice. It had a lot of clever twists and turns and some serendipitous crossovers that were similar to the opening of Magnolia, connecting multiple story lines through a twenty-dollar bill. But the most impressive thing was the writing. It wasn't just good, Hall says, it was dazzling. The gangly little kid who delivered his coffee had written something great. "I was wondering, Who was the first actor in the seventeenth century to see a Shakespeare script, and did he know what he was reading? I certainly knew what I had in my hand."

This is when it all came together, all the talent and confidence and hustle and aggression and accumulated connections and sheer unadulterated shameless hunger for the magical transformation of the movies. Conrad had some connections at Panavision, so Anderson asked him if he could borrow a Panaflex camera for one weekend -- a $6,000 rental to civilians. Conrad's friend said they could borrow it if they returned it on Monday morning. "I remember going to Kodak with Paul to buy the film," Conrad says. "He had researched exactly what kind of tungsten he wanted." Then he tapped his network to fill out the cast with more professional actors -- Miguel Ferrer (Twin Peaks), Scott Coffey (Ferris Bueller's Day Off), Kirk Baltz (Reservoir Dogs). The legend is that he financed the shoot with his NYU tuition, but Conrad says Ernie put in a couple thousand and he put in a couple hundred and they got some more from Wendy Weidman. They slipped onto the Disney lot to hit up the mother of one of the Freshjive guys for a donation, and she cut them a $500 check on the spot. Conrad handled the money. "I'm not sure Paul even had a checking account, so I was writing checks for the film-production expenses." The father of one of Conrad's friends helped arrange a stay in Las Vegas so they could spend a day shooting on the Strip. Anderson hired a professional cinematographer and rented a Fisher dolly, and Conrad found a camera operator, and they loaded all the equipment into the back of his Bronco and drove to the cheap diner Weidman had rented in the Gorman Pass.

Things were a bit chaotic at first, Hall says. The crew hadn't worked together before, there wasn't a strong producer or cinematographer running the show, and Anderson still had a lot to learn about working with real actors. "Miguel and I were not sure where we were or how we got there. We talked a couple of times, not exactly, Who is this kid?, but we weren't sure what was going on."

Anderson was about twenty-three then, still very young for a director. But he was assured where it counted. He had a very clear vision of his characters. He knew what he wanted from a scene. He understood all the technical details. He knew what to expect from every member of the crew, even knew enough to challenge their expertise. He didn't even have to do a lot of takes. "He seemed to have an almost instinctive knowledge about this kind of stuff," Hall says. And he had a laser intensity with actors. "A lot of directors shoot from the monitor, or even from another room. He will get as close as he can, just out of camera range. Sometimes just inches away. At first I found it a little distracting -- he's always right there, with such intensity. But if it doesn't unnerve you, it probably gives your performance a little extra buzz."

He also knew how to fight for what he wanted. The weekend loan from Panavision stretched into three weeks, and he ended up firing his professional cinematographer and hiring a new one -- still living by his teenage motto, anything for a shot.

That year John Cooper was booking short films for the Sundance Film Festival. He remembers Anderson showing up in New York with Cigarettes and Coffee, looking like he was twelve years old. But the movie was beautifully shot, and the dialogue had a subtlety and tension that reminded him of David Mamet. "I usually would take notes and go back to my office," Cooper says. "That one I took on the spot. I remember not wanting someone else to take it."

The next summer Anderson came back to the Sundance filmmakers' lab to work on his first feature. Although he was starting to avoid interviews and leave old friends like Stein and Conrad behind -- which has left many of them hurt and puzzled -- he was a great presence at Sundance, open to everything and friendly to everyone and completely absorbed in the entire history of movies at a level far beyond most other young filmmakers. He liked to tease the box-office lady about all the films he was going to sneak into. He would make people list their favorite directors and then defend their choices, Cooper says, arguing so fiercely they spent days questioning their judgment. There was no question where he was headed.

And this is where the story of Paul Thomas Anderson becomes almost mythical, a parable about the necessity of real art. The evidence is in the scenes he shot that summer at Sundance, now available in the supplemental material on the DVD that was eventually released under the title Hard Eight. (But the working title, the title he still prefers, is Sydney, just as he told Carole Stevens back in high school.) Although Anderson would soon become famous for some of the most dizzyingly ambitious sequences in the history of film, the DVD scenes are mostly just Philip Baker Hall and John C. Reilly sitting in a coffee shop and talking. There are no tracking shots, no fancy cuts. He barely moves the camera at all. Despite his youth and seemingly endless ambition, he already knew that a real story is about people talking around the things inside their hearts -- in this case, an older gambler who speaks in an oddly formal diction while becoming a father figure to a lost young man. It seems inevitable that the fools who financed it locked him out of the editing room to cut it faster and more commercially, that Reilly and Hall faked sore throats to avoid dubbing that edit, that Anderson recut his original version from scraps and got it accepted into the Cannes Film Festival, that the resulting acclaim launched his career, that his next film (and first masterpiece) was a three-hour remake of something he shot on videotape when he was seventeen.

An artist whose great theme would be the destiny coded in the seemingly random fragments of our lives was already standing in the doorway to his future, pulling together the fragments of his past, furiously fulfilling the person he already was and imagining the person he would become -- anything so he wouldn't have to go back.

*****

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