Hardcore (1979 film)

Hardcore
Directed by	Paul Schrader
Produced by	Buzz Feitshans John Milius
Written by	Paul Schrader
Starring	George C. Scott Peter Boyle Season Hubley Dick Sargent Leonard Gaines
Music by	Jack Nitzsche
Cinematography	Michael Chapman
Edited by	Tom Rolf
Production company	A-Team Productions
Distributed by	Columbia Pictures
Release date	February 9, 1979 (USA)
Running time	109 min.
Country	United States
Language	English

Hardcore is a 1979 American crime drama film written and directed by Paul Schrader and starring George C. Scott, Peter Boyle and Season Hubley. The story concerns a father searching for his daughter, who has vanished only to appear in a pornographic film. Writer-director Schrader had previously written the screenplay for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, and both films share a theme of exploring an unseen subculture.

Jake Van Dorn (George C. Scott) is a prosperous local businessman in Grand Rapids, Michigan who has strong Calvinist convictions. A single parent, Van Dorn is the father of a seemingly quiet, conservative teenage girl, Kristen, who inexplicably disappears when she goes on a church-sponsored trip to Bellflower, California. Andy Mast (Peter Boyle), a strange private investigator from Los Angeles, is then hired to find her, eventually turning up an 8mm stag film of his daughter with two young men.

Van Dorn then suspects that his daughter was kidnapped and forced to join California's porno underworld. His quest to rescue her takes him on an odyssey through this sleazy adult subculture.

With no results from the PI, the Los Angeles Police Department, or even from Los Angeles' sex shop keepers and "rap parlor" women, a desperate Van Dorn ends up posing as a pornography producer in the Los Angeles Free Press, hoping to find information about his daughter. A scraggly actor named "Jism Jim", who was in the film with Kristen, knows where she might be and sends him to a sometime porno actress/hooker named Niki (Season Hubley). Van Dorn hires Niki to accompany him on the search for Kristen. Chasing a rumor that Kristen was now filming porn in Mexico, their uneasy alliance moves from Los Angeles to San Diego, gradually warming up to each other: Niki feels protected by Van Dorn because he is a man who doesn't see her as merely a sex object, and he is able to speak openly to her about his deepest feelings, such as his wife leaving him. The unlikely pair ends in San Francisco where Van Dorn finds that Kristen may be in the hands of Ratan, a very dangerous S & M porn player who deals in the world of "snuff movies". Yet when Niki refuses to give the address of a porn industry player to Van Dorn, he loses his temper and strikes her. He immediately regrets his action, but the rapport between Van Dorn and Niki is clearly damaged.