Early Life
Paul Thomas Anderson was born on June 26, 1970, in Studio City, California, to Edwina (née Gough) and Ernie Anderson, who was an actor, the voice of A.B.C., and a Cleveland television late-night horror movie host known as "Ghoulardi" (for which Anderson later named his production company). Anderson grew up in the San Fernando Valley and had a troubled relationship with his mother but was close with his father who encouraged him to become a writer or director. He attended a number of schools, including Buckley in Sherman Oaks, John Thomas Dye School, Campbell Hall School, Cushing Academy and Montclair Prep.
Anderson was involved in film-making at a young age and never really had an alternative plan to directing films. He started making movies on a Betamax video camera which his dad bought in 1982 when he was twelve years old. He later started using 8 mm film but realized that video was easier. He began writing in adolescence and at seventeen years he began experimenting with a Bolex sixteen millimetre camera. After years of experimenting with "standard fare", he wrote and filmed his first real production as a senior in high school at Montclair Prep using money he earned cleaning cages at a pet store. The film was a thirty-minute mockumentary shot on video called The Dirk Diggler Story (1988), about a pornography star (inspired by John Holmes, who also served as a major inspiration for Boogie Nights).
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