'Boogie Nights'

The beauty of Paul Thomas Anderson is how he puts together these stacked casts, these crazy web of characters and stories that build on each other rather than take away.

However, the truth is most of his casts are a hodgepodge of talent at different stages in their brilliant -- or soon-to-be brilliant -- careers.

Take Boogie Nights for example. Now, the cast is a who's who of actors and actresses. Then, it was a veritable collection of has-beens and nobodies.

The film essentially launched Mark Wahlberg's career post-music by, at least, legitimizing him as an actor.

Julianne Moore was an actress of some renown already and if anyone was nearing the top of her celebrity and ability, it was her.

Burt Reynolds was Burt Reynolds. The once stud of the 1970s and early-1980s had become a TV actor  of some success, but otherwise was an actor without any hits on the big screen.

Relatively speaking, Don Cheadle, John C. Reilly (who steals the show in Boogie Nights), William H. Macy and Phillip Seymour Hoffman (not to mention Luis Guzman and Thomas Jane) were in the infancy of their careers and hadn't near gathered the cred that they'd later relish in as award winners and bona fide stars.

It wasn't until Anderson did Magnolia did he truly have an all-star cast and many of them were just hold overs from Boogie Nights, most who would be in multiple Anderson films. They did a lot for him and he certainly made (and re-made) a series of careers along the way.