ILLUSTRATION PETER STRAIN
Right: Alana Haim — of rock band Haim — and Cooper Hoffman as young paramours Alana and Gary.
PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON
HAS LIVED IN THE SAN FERNANDO Valley his whole life. It was there, in that huge suburban stretch of land north of Hollywood, where so many films and TV shows were shot in the ’70s and ’80s, and where he fell in love with filmmaking. It was there, snooping about as adult entertainment was being produced in the area, that he got inspired to make porn saga Boogie Nights. It was there that he set and shot his family epic Magnolia, named after Magnolia Boulevard, and written in a frenzy after his father died of cancer. And it was there that he stayed to make his surreal romcom Punch-Drunk Love. Three consecutive films ingrained in the Valley.
After that he ventured out, exploring less familiar territory: power-crazed oil mania in There Will be Blood, cult psychosis in The Master and obsession and fashion in Phantom Thread. He did revisit Los Angeles for his adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice but now, for the first time in nearly two decades, he’s returned to the Valley itself to make his latest film on home turf.
Licorice Pizza has been brewing for that long. Twenty years ago, at a school, he saw a young teenage boy flirting with the 20-something female photographer taking photos of the pupils, and thought up a story about her agreeing to go on a date with him. The idea languished for years, until he began to merge it with the real-life escapades recounted to him by his friend Gary Goetzman, who, as a teenage entrepreneur in the Valley, started a waterbed company. More recently, with Anderson making music videos for the Valley’s all-sister band Haim, the stars began to align.