Headscratchers / Boogie Nights

• Early in the film, Amber tell her ex-husband that she has a lawyer to gain custody of her son. When she appears at the custody hearing, she doesn't have a lawyer. Why wouldn't she get one? She would presumably have plenty of money from her films, or has she snorted it all up her nose? Jack has plenty of money too, but does he not support Amber's case, or has she not told him about it? Or is Amber really that irresponsible a person that she can't even organise professional counsel for a case which is very important to her?
  • Probably a mixture of all of them. It's pretty clearly suggested throughout the film that while the case is important to Amber and (on some level at least) she genuinely wants to be a good mother to her son, she's just not mature and responsible enough to sufficiently get her crap together to make it happen. She's not exactly Ms. Responsible when it comes to life decisions, she's a pretty big cokehead at that point (which isn't going to help re: responsibility), and she and Jack probably aren't making the kind of money they were making in the late '70s when the good times were rolling, so she might not be able to afford a good lawyer. She implicitly loses the custody hearing, after all (if the fact that she's seen afterwards sobbing is any indication), so there were presumably reasons for it.
  • She could also be simply lying about having retained a lawyer in an attempt to get him to back down, and he called her bluff.
  • It also be possible she originally had a lawyer, figuring this was a simple open/shut type of case, and then they dropped her as a client when he discovered she was a drug addict and a porn actress, knowing that it would drastically hurt her case to the point where attempting to try to help her would have been pointless. So, combine this with any of the mix pointed out above, it'd be any reason for her to not have one when she needed it.
  • Something to remember is that Amber's claim that she has a lawyer is made in the 1970s, when times are good and the money is rolling in (though it's worth noting that even in the golden age of porn, the talent weren't exactly paid enough to become truly wealthy). The hearing that we see, however, occurs in the 1980s, when the good times have soured and everything is being made a lot more cheaply. She might have been able to afford the lawyer in the earlier instance but was unable to retain their services in the later appearance.
• Did Rollergirl go back to making porn films? The final scene shows most of the gang getting back together at Jack’s house. However only Dirk is shown getting ready to work.
  • Likely yes. The ending scenes would seem to suggest that the characters have achieved some small success and satisfaction outside of the world of adult entertainment, but for several of them this may not necessarily be enough to get them out of porn — nor, even, that they may want to, as for several of them for all its highs and lows it seems to be where they're happiest and have found some measure of success and family. Rollergirl, for instance, appears to have managed to clean herself off drugs and acquire her high school diploma, but that doesn't necessarily mean she's set up for success elsewhere, so for the time being at least she probably still has to make porn, or even chooses to.
• Would the donut store haul really be enough to finance your own stereo store?