Heather Graham as Rollergirl in Boogie Nights

She’s an attractive young star in the stable of go-to actresses around Burt Reynold’s porn studio in the 1970s and 1980s. Called Rollergirl because she never takes off her inline skates, even during sex, she helps to recruit Mark Wahlberg by seducing him in the nightclub where he works as a bus boy. She is an intriguing presence in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Boogie Nights (1997).

Decades before the film was made, the director’s father, Ernie Anderson, was a big star on WJW-TV, Channel 8 in Cleveland. He played a character named Ghoulardi who hosted horror films between 1963 and 1966. In between scenes of the films he showed, he made fun of Cleveland¹s Polish population with their polkas and white socks and flamingo lawn ornaments, and particularly when they lived in the southwestern suburb of “PAHR-ma?” His catch phrases were “turn blue” and “stay sick.”

If you were a teenager in Cleveland during the 1860s, you watched Ghoulardi and adopted his mannerisms the next Monday in the school cafeteria.

One final note: If you watched reruns of the Carol Burnett Show, you may recall that in the opening scene, when Carol comes out on stage to answer questions from the audience, she occasionally gave a call-our to Ernie Anderson, who was a frequent member of the studio audience. Ernie typically smiled and gave a little wave to acknowledge. That was Ghoulardi, who had come to Los Angeles and served a number of years as announcer for the show after Lyle Waggoner had left.

It’s a long way from horror films in Cleveland in the 1960s to his son’s explicit study of the emerging L.A. porn scene filmed in 1997.