Once Upon a Time in Encino: Making “Licorice Pizza”

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Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Inherent Vice and now Licorice Pizza, filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson loves the San Fernando Valley. He also loves the 1970s – when Boogie, Vice and Pizza are set. That’s natural, since he grew up there, but there was a moment where he asked himself, “Are you really going to make another film in Los Angeles in the ’70s again?”

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“Then you ignore that voice, and you swat it away like a fly,” he told Variety. 

“Comfort. Joy. I like the way [the Valley] looks. I like the way it tastes and smells. I don’t know beyond I love it.”

His latest film is a comic coming-of-age love story starring relative unknown actors Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman in the lead. It’s set during 1973, amid great political change, shifts in popular culture and a gas crisis and has a soundtrack featuring songs by David Bowie, The Doors, Paul McCartney and Wings, Sonny & Cher, Chuck Berry and Blood Sweat and Tears and others.

It’s a dramatic change of pace from much of Anderson’s other work, such as the avarice and paranoia depicted in There Will Be Blood and The Master, or the Gothic romance at the center of Phantom Thread.

“This story just emerged,” says Anderson. “I love the way it unfolds. You meet these two people. You have them fall in love and get to see their relationship blossom, and there are various episodes that challenge them in different ways. I didn’t overdesign it. I just got lucky.”

It is, indeed, Anderson’s happiest creation to date, says influential critic Anthony Lane at The New Yorker, adding “blithe, easy-breathing, and expansive. The odd thing is that, in terms of space and time, it’s what Bowie would have called a god-awful small affair. Aside from a short trip to New York, it clings to the San Fernando Valley, and we’re firmly stuck in the early nineteen-seventies.”

Lane adds, “There isn’t much of a plot to this movie. Rather, it’s shaggy with happenings—with the weird, one-off events that tend to crop up during adolescence, and to grow funnier, and taller, in the telling.”

Anderson used 1970s-style filmmaking processes for the visuals including shooting on 35mm film with vintage glass. The film itself has a limited theatrical release in 70mm. Cinematographer Michael Bauman (who shared lensing duties with Anderson) told Deadline, 

“Most of the time you’re using more modern glass, you get a sharper image. That was the exact opposite of what we’re doing here. We had a set of lenses Gordon Willis used from the ‘70s. The C Series is a very old series of lenses too. It adds that texture in the image.”

Dailies were screened every day, as filmmakers would have done to review footage in the ‘70s before video playback became widespread.

IndieWire’s review described the film’s camerawork as “an extension of the characters in front of it and the movie they’re pin-balling across. It’s not always sure where it’s going, but it’s hellbent on getting there without stopping, and enraptured by what it might find along the way.”

It was also filmed on location to lend the film a more freewheeling naturalism. “We were scouting to find intersections, big streets where we did full takeovers and designs of 10 storefronts,” says production designer Florencia Martin. “It was just taking away and really committing to de-modernizing the Valley and bringing it back to the ’70s.”

The touchstones for the film’s look and feel are George Lucas’ 1973 American Graffiti and Fast Times at Ridgemont High, a 1982 Brat Pack movie starring Sean Penn who also appears in Licorice Pizza.

The intriguing title refers to a record store (L.P) from Anderson’s youth. He told Variety:

“After many months of banging my head against the wall trying to figure out what to name this film, I concluded that these two words shoved together reminded me the most of my childhood. Growing up, there was a record-store chain in Southern California called Licorice Pizza. It seemed like a catch-all for the feeling of the film. I suppose if you have no reference to the store, it’s two great words that go well together and maybe capture a mood. Maybe it just looks good on a poster?”

The film’s stella supporting cast list includes Bradley Cooper, Benny Safdie, Tom Waits, John C. Reilly and Ben Stiller. If that weren’t enough there are also roles for two of Steven Spielberg’s daughters Destry Allyn and Sasha Spielberg and Leonardo DiCaprio’s father George. Hoffman is the son of late actor Philip Seymour.

Anderson is an eight time Oscar nominee for director or screenplay and the acclaim greeting Licorice Pizza gives him another great shot at landing the big prize.

It helps that Academy voters tend to go for films that reference themselves. Pizza may be set in adjacent neighborhood to Burbank but, like Quentin Tarentino’s 1969-set Once Upon A Time in Hollywood references the ending of the Golden Age of American movie making by weaving in contextually rich characters. In Pizza these include Sean Penn’s character based on famed actor William Holden, producer Jon Peters (played by Bradley Cooper), Fred Gwynne, the actor or portrayed Herman Munster (played by John C Reilly) and talent agent Mary Grady (whose clients included Nick Nolte, Penny Marshall and Ashley Olsen)

Interestingly, Lane compares Licorice Pizza to another new film getting Oscar buzz, The Left Hand of God which is a biographical account of Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s teenage years set in the 1980s in Naples and also featuring his early fascination for cinema.