Exhausted (1981) from Johnny Wadd Web

Although it is a clumsy and fundamentally dishonest film, the DVD has a lot of extra material and a fascinating commentary track, making the Exhausted DVD one of four films you'll need to watch in order to understand the life of Mr. Holmes.

• Boogie Nights (1997) - a highly regarded fictionalized version of Holmes' life directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (called PTA hereinafter).
• Exhausted (1981) - a pseudo-documentary, actually more of an apologetic, made when Holmes was in his prime, or just past it. The Exhausted DVD also includes a commentary track in which the characters look back on the era. They also comment on the accuracy of Boogie Nights. (Their opinions differ widely)
• Wadd (1998) - the Cass Paley documentary about Holmes.
• Wonderland (2003)- a Holmes biopic in docudrama style. This film concentrates on Holmes's violent life after porn, and tries to stay as close to the facts as possible within the format.

Exhausted was a critical piece of reference material for PTA's script for Boogie Nights.

• One scene from a porn film, presented in Exhausted, is re-created moment by moment in Boogie Nights, even to the point of intentionally duplicating a continuity error. PTA told an interviewer, "Yep. That is taken, shot for shot, from a real porno. Even up to the point that if you look closely, you see Mark at the bar. He's sitting in the wide-shot with a toothpick and then cut to the close-up and he's holding a cigarette in the other hand."
• One of Exhausted's sample action sequences - taken from a "Johnny Wadd" porno/detective film - is copied closely in Boogie Nights.
• The Mark Wahlberg character is based on Holmes. The correspondence is nearly perfect, right down to Holmes's posturing, his incessant bullshitting, and his clumsy and imprecise use of language in his interviews. Wahlberg was an excellent casting choice, and nailed the characterization in many ways.
• The Burt Reynolds character is based on porn director Bob Chinn.
• The Julianne Moore character is very similar to Seka, and the relationship between Holmes and Seka is reflected in the relationships between the corresponding characters in Boogie Nights, but "Amber Waves" is actually an amalgam of several women, including the director of Exhausted.
• The Amber character makes her own film about "Dirk Diggler". Amber's film-within-a-film is essentially a whitewash which is modeled closely after Exhausted itself. David Poland asked PTA, "How important was Exhausted in the development of your film?". The response:  "Critical. It was so clearly made by someone who was just blind to what John Holmes clearly was. She tried to make this wonderful portrait of who he was. So here's this narration saying how he's a wonderful guy, and in the background, he's slapping some woman around saying, 'Shut up, bitch! Answer my question!' And that's how it came to Amber doing a kind of damage control for Dirk, doing her own kind of Exhausted for him."
• Snippets of dialogue in Boogie Nights are quoted verbatim from the interviews in Exhausted. The most entertaining example is Holmes's claim that "Bob lets me block my own sex scenes", followed by Bob Chinn's laconic, "I don't let you block your own sex scenes".

I recommend listening to the commentary track for Exhausted, which was recorded recently, and has much more perspective and honesty than the whitewashed film.