Licorice Pizza - Speculation & General Reactions

[polkablues]

Not that it doesn't look at all like Spike Jonze, but I have no idea how someone could look at that frame and go, "That's Spike Jonze."

[Robyn]

I had a dream that David Thewlis was in this film. It's obviously him.

[wilberfan]

I swear this is true:

Last night, about mid-evening, one of my "guys that knows a guy" told me they'd seen the digital trailer, and that it was coming "soon" (they didn't know when that meant, precisely).   

This morning, around 7:30 am, I woke up from a looooong, elaborate dream that the trailer was out and that I was frantically doing what PTA Nerds do when that happens.

By 8:00 am the dream turned out to be quite prophetic!

[HACKANUT]

Not sure if that's Jonze or not but damn if it doesn't look a lot like his character in Wolf of Wall Street.

[md]

It's definitely him.  The nose gives it away.  Playing a 70's photographer.  PTA pulled a lot of favors for this.

Also, Alana says "You're not my director" to Cooper, not Tom Waits.

[Axolotl]

It's this guy

[Robyn]

Isn't that the guy who yells "I AM A NAZI!!"?

[Drenk]

The nazi is in a BDSM relationship with Liquid Snake.

[polkablues]

FROIOOOOOOO!!!

[Alma]

Because I am a sad case I have been trying to find pictures of Spike Jonze from the side and have come to the definitive conclusion that...it might be him 

[Robyn]

It's this guy

The plot thickens...

[wilberfan]

WE should have made one of these...

https://youtu.be/mjR5sZf3bkg

I haven't watched the whole thing...but I don't think the two guys on the right are buyin' it at all...

[Robyn]

^ i'm laughing

Spoiler: ShowHide

[Drenk]

It's Michael Bowen.

[wilberfan]

We've got an essay already??

[edit]  For our archives:

An Andersonian Lens on the Licorice Pizza Trailer - Ethan Warren - Medium
or: the S.E.O.-friendly but likely misleading "Licorice Pizza trailer EXPLAINED (at least on a thematic level with regard to the director's previous work)"

And so, at last, we have a streaming trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson's Licorice Pizza. After two weeks screening only in person before select 35mm repertory screenings (and after one blurry and muffled leak courtesy of an iniquitous theatergoer), there is now readily-available HD footage of Anderson's new work — his ninth feature film, his first since turning 50, and his first set in his native San Fernando Valley since he earned the unofficial "poet laureate of the Valley" title between 1997 and 2002.

For about a year and a half now, I've been writing a book titled (at least tentatively) The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson: American Apocrypha under contract with Wallflower Books and Columbia University Press. After dissecting his previous 8 movies to the point of atomization (you know how if you say a word enough times it becomes this disassociated object impervious to meaning? Yeah, it's like that) the prospect of some new Anderson material to chew on and integrate into my project has me straining at the leash. So now that we actually have some hot and ready Licorice Pizza, I have a few (OK, quite a lot of) thoughts and reactions and assorted gut-level musings while we wait to get a look at the movie this winter. If that's the kind of thing that interests you, step right up and grab a slice (sorry, I'll stop).

For my money, one of the most exciting — or at least most intriguing — elements of Licorice Pizza is its status as a narrative homecoming. Since being born in Studio City (one of 34 L.A. County neighborhoods that comprise the Valley) Anderson has rarely strayed particularly far; he made a couple of attempts at higher education on the east coast after high school, but he was always back in the Valley before long, and at least as of 2015, he's settled all of about 10 miles from his childhood home.

Anderson set his second, third, and fourth movies (Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Punch-Drunk Love) in the Valley, and that choice was a significant factor in press coverage of at least Boogie Nights and Magnolia, both of which he intended as major statements on the Valley's history and culture. Yet both of those movies are also overshadowed by Anderson's persistent hangups surrounding his home turf's worthiness as a storytelling subject.

When it came to the Valley — associated, at that point, primarily with the novelty song and movie Valley Girl, ground zero for the like, totally bitchin' slang of 80s teen culture — Anderson could easily be both defensive and chagrined: in a 1999 essay for the New York Times, he wrote that while "the pop imagination" typically associates the Valley with "stupid girls, malls, and bad hair...it's pretty near normal, or as normal as a place can be when bordering Hollywood." Throughout press for both Boogie Nights and Magnolia, he tended to express concern that his experiences in the Valley weren't worth much compared to other directors' trials and adventures ("There's Howard Hawks," he says on the Boogie Nights commentary track, "and boy, he served in the war, and there's Ernst Lubitsch who escaped Germany and all these wonderful things going on in their lives that you were supposed to bring to a movie"). But, he tended to conclude, if what he knew was life in the Valley, then he'd make movies about life in the Valley.

Yet in trying to make this distinctive region look "pretty near normal," he also made it look (at least for my money) somewhat indistinct. For the most part, the storylines in Magnolia — which he meant to be "the mother of all San Fernando Valley movies" — feel more broadly urban than essentially of-the-Valley, and while Boogie Nights centers on the Valley-specific subculture of porn production, the tone is primarily one of kinetic disco-era fantasia rather than any attempt at specific sociological portraiture (save for our repeated reminders of just how long Eddie Adams' bus ride is from his home in Torrance to his dishwashing job in Reseda). With Punch-Drunk Love, meanwhile, he did conjure a more expansive vision of the Valley, but it's a vision of the Valley as an eerie wasteland. He described his first two Valley movies as "fuck-you celebrations" of the area, a chip on his shoulder that's palpable in these two antsy, combustible movies. After his third Valley movie was overwhelmed with a tone of quasi-surreal dread, his mentor, Jonathan Demme, told him to "get the heck out of the Valley now." Ever since 2002, that's exactly what he's done.

But now he's back — and, specifically, he's back in the Valley of the '70s, the milieu of Boogie Nights, though where that movie picked up in 1977, this one would seem to take place closer to the 1970 setting of his last SoCal story, Inherent Vice (but we'll get to the history of it all). And while it's obviously too early to say how Licorice Pizza is going to add to the conversation surrounding the Andersonian Valley, a few things jump out at me. For one, we certainly seem to be seeing more overt local signifiers than we've seen before (the billboard for pioneering Valley radio station KMET spotted last year during principal photography serves as backdrop for one standout shot of Bradley Cooper, and the film's title itself refers to a bygone chain of record stores that served as a SoCal institution during the 70s and early 80s), which indicates a more textured and specific Valley than he's given us previously.

But even more enticing from my perspective: we're seeing glimpses of what seems to be a lot of evocative and atmospheric exteriors, something that's notably lacking in Boogie Nights and Magnolia. Both those movies, despite their massive casts and runtimes, often approach claustrophobia (in keeping with the often psychologically trapped characters), not to mention being kinetic to the point of overstimulation. He's never really let one of his Valley movies joyfully breathe. But in these two minutes of Licorice Pizza, we're seeing a vision of the Valley that's much more reminiscent of the sun-dappled, lazy-hazy landscape of the videos Anderson has directed for fellow Valley natives, rock trio Haim (the youngest of whom, Alana Haim, plays the female lead in Licorice Pizza; with middle child Danielle making a brief and wordless appearance in the trailer, it's hard to imagine eldest sister Este won't pop up in the movie too). If we're getting a feature-length expansion of the sort of work he's done for the "Summer Girl" and "Now I'm In It" videos, that'll be a nice warming energy this winter.

In terms of the cinematography, I'm struck here by what seems to be a contrast between naturalistic handheld footage (a relative rarity in his more stately post-2002 movies) and moments of real majesty (whatever's going on with Bradley Cooper and those car mirrors, it looks to be shot with all the grandeur of the derrick fire in There Will Be Blood). After Phantom Thread, this will be the second time an Anderson movie has no credited cinematographer — after shooting more than 15 music videos and other side projects since 2013, his camera crew is apparently such a well-oiled machine that they can work cooperatively — and if this is the kind of look we can expect, then the collective-cinematography gambit would seem to be panning out for him.

Given Anderson's tendency to dedicate his films to his recently-passed mentors and collaborators — Robert Altman on There Will Be Blood, released a year after Altman's death; Jonathan Demme on Phantom Thread, released eight months after Demme's; his father and Anderson family friend/supporting actor Robert Ridgely on Boogie Nights — it's more than likely Licorice Pizza will include a title card bearing a dedication to "Robert Downey, Sr. (a prince)," following Downey's death this past July.

Downey is just one among the constellation of elder auteurs associated with Anderson. As much as any director alive, Anderson's work is consistently discussed in tandem with the work of the directors he admired growing up, given his films' tendency — especially early on — to wear their references on their sleeve. For the most part, the directors he pays tribute to have tended to shift with time — he had his Mamet phase, which overlapped with his Scorsese one; later there was a John Huston phase, and then Phantom Thread went full Hitchcock. It's hard to guess what cocktail of associations he might be going for here, but when the movie comes out, I'll be thinking about what I see as two dials: one labeled Kubrick/Altman, and the other labeled Downey/Demme.

Kubrick and Altman are two directors whose stamp you can see in multiple ways across Anderson's career, but by and large, the Kubrick influence represents a meticulous control over every element of the process and a stripped-down production apparatus (two things that really struck Anderson when he visited the set of Eyes Wide Shut), as well as a storytelling style that's often elliptical (i.e. featuring narrative leaps that don't guide the viewer by the hand) and affective (i.e. edited more according to emotional rhythms than strict cause-and-effect ones). With Altman, on the other hand, the influential attitude is a willingness (as Anderson wrote in 2005 in the foreword to Altman on Altman) to "be rough and spit-shine it," as well as a feeling that "the hands that made these films were not too polite." Even his most Kubrickian movies have at least a hint of Altmanesque lack of pretension, and even his most Altmanesque movies have at least a hint of Kubrickian remoteness, but everything I'm getting from Licorice Pizza so far certainly suggests the dial will be turned firmly towards Altman — a shaggy and unassuming vibe that even the Anderson movies most persistently compared to Altman (Boogie Nights with its resemblance to Nashville, and Magnolia with its own to Short Cuts) don't tend to really embody given all their coiled tension.

Then there's the Downey/Demme dial, labeled for the two guys whose spirits I think are most detectable across the full arc of Anderson's career so far. First, there's Robert Downey Sr., an icon of the 60s cinematic counterculture whose movies violated taboos and pushed the boundaries of film grammar towards a sort of no-budget madcap anti-cinema. Downey was an early influence on, and friend to, Anderson; Boogie Nights includes a couple of fairly brazen (if relatively obscure) lifts from the Downey catalog, but given that Downey appears for a cameo — he plays the studio owner who blocks Dirk and Reed from retrieving their tapes after they fail to pay their bill — the theft is at least happening in plain sight.

Then there's Jonathan Demme, something of a journeyman auteur who worked in just about every genre, often either redefining or revolutionizing them in the process (the concert film with Stop Making Sense; the legal issues drama with Philadelphia; the serial killer thriller with The Silence of the Lambs), and he's come to be known as a consummate humanist who never allowed any character to seem two-dimensional or expendable.

Along with being friends and mentors to Anderson, Demme and Downey were mutual admirers, so there must be an analogous spark running through all three of them, and I tend to see it as a kind of selfish selflessness (or, depending on the day, selfless selfishness). When Anderson discusses Downey's work, he expresses admiration for his commitment to "his own rhythm....he just has instinctual feelings he follows and he sticks to them, and they make him laugh, they engage him," a sentiment that echoes his early tendency to describe his favorite directors as "selfish in the best possible way." With Demme, meanwhile, he talks about not just that famous humanist eye ("He loves people so much," Anderson said in 2002) but an abiding bruised optimism — "Even Jonathan's darkest movies are hopeful," he said in 2017. "I take inspiration from that."

Naturally, all we've seen so far have been a few selective clips arranged in a likely deceptive manner, but we're certainly being sold a feeling of humanism and hope, so crank that dial a little towards the Demme side. But given that what Anderson responds to in both directors' films are the idiosyncratic storytelling rhythms (particularly the "gear-shift" plotting of work like Demme's Something Wild, the unexpected shape of which had a seismic impact on him), I do think those two influences are more complementary than contradictory.

It'll also be exciting, though, to see which new and offbeat influences he brings to the table this time. When the Inherent Vice trailer was released, all anyone could talk about was The Long Goodbye, but once the film was in theaters and Anderson was out there being asked about it, he wanted to talk about Mondo Hollywood, Neil Young's Journey Through the Past, and the underground comic series The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. The reference lists on Anderson's movies are often as exciting as the movies themselves, and I'm looking forward to finding out what I get to dive deep on this winter.

Back in the '90s, Anderson tended to say he made movies about family, and that's remained a go-to lens in assessing his work given the prevalence of strained parent/child bonds and ad-hoc surrogate families in his canon. The Licorice Pizza trailer includes a look at what seems to be Alana Haim's home life, and it does seem to be exactly the sort of toxic nuclear household that Eddie Adams escaped in becoming Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights. In Anderson's work, family tends to be either a corrupting institution or a corrupted one, and if Haim's character is experiencing that phenomenon, she's in good Andersonian company.

Children tend to hold a position of great symbolic power in Anderson's work; in Magnolia, two drunken characters briefly debate whether it's dangerous to confuse children with angels, and that rhetorical debate looms large in Anderson's work. In a world gone often irredeemably wrong, the promise of youth — be it the burgeoning connection between H.W. and Mary in the blighted landscape of There Will Be Blood, or Amethyst, whose "little kid blues" Doc risks his life to prevent in Inherent Vice — tends to signal the possibility that renewal might still be possible.

Appropriately given its framing as a coming-of-age story, the Licorice Pizza trailer spends a lot of time on young people, and one thing that really jumps out is the mood of relaxed frivolity we glimpse. With a few exceptions — Dirk and Reed in Boogie Nights most prominently; Barry and Lance in Punch-Drunk Love and Doc and Denis in Inherent Vice to a lesser degree — Anderson's protagonists don't really have friends. His movies tend to center on alienated people, be they young or old, so the signs of warmth and joy in some spots here do look like a breath of fresh air.

Of course, for all we know, the American Graffiti tone (which seems to involve after-school filmmaking efforts of exactly the sort Anderson cut his teeth on in the '80s) being pushed here could easily be a red herring, with the primary thrust of the story being something thornier and more alienating. For as crowd-pleasing as this trailer makes Licorice Pizza look, it's worth remembering that twice in the past, audiences have felt Anderson sold them a false bill of goods, and in both cases — the frustrated Adam Sandler fans who initially rejected Punch-Drunk Love and audiences drawn in by the slapstick tone of the Inherent Vice trailer only to leave in droves when the film proved woozy and impenetrable — those backlashes were severe enough to be newsworthy.

If we're being sold anything in the Licorice Pizza trailer, though, it's romance. And, specifically, we're being sold a pretty classical first-bloom-of-young-love romance, to an even self-conscious degree — any use of the "I just saw the girl I'm going to marry" trope in 2021 is inherently self-aware, no matter what context Anderson might be using it in here. Anderson has made two capital-R Romances before, and in both films, the tenuous or uneasy couplings find equilibrium only through some form of romance-as-violence, whether it's Barry and Lena's brutal pillow talk in Punch-Drunk Love or the nauseating (in more ways than one) arrangement Reynolds and Alma agree upon in the denouement of Phantom Thread. Maybe Hoffman and Haim will demonstrate their own conflation of destruction and consummation, but (for better or worse) we are definitely being sold something more seemingly traditional. Licorice Pizza looks much closer to the "make-out movie" he described wanting to evoke with Punch-Drunk Love, even as that movie ended up being a fairly unpalatable romance by major-studio standards. If this is Anderson's actual honest-to-goodness "Friday night movie" — a term he used in his 30s but something he seemingly couldn't bring himself to make — then I'm absolutely ready for it. We can trust that with him it's probably not going to be quite that simple.

For as romantic as his urges may be, Anderson's romances are often oddly chaste. Any sex between either Barry and Lena or Reynolds and Alma is implicit at best, and the sex scenes in his other films tend to be transactional — the porn production of Boogie Nights; Claudia's briefly-glimpsed sex work in Magnolia and Clementine's more open prostitution in Hard Eight; the handjob-as-matrimonial-extortion in The Master. (As it is in so many ways, Inherent Vice is a bit of an outlier here, but given that it's the work of, as Wesley Morris put it, "Paul Thomas Pynchon," there should probably be an asterisk beside it on the big thematic chart anyway).

The most romantic sex scene in an Anderson movie must be either Freddie Quell's afternoon delight with virtual-stranger Winn at the end of The Master, or the foreplay between soon-to-be porn star Eddie Adams and his girlfriend Sheryl Lynn in Boogie Nights. But in the Licorice Pizza trailer we have something relatively new: a pretty conventional expression of sexual desire as a boy asks to "touch 'em" after a girl proffers her "boobs" in his bedroom. It's not much to remark on all things considered, but as a data point on that big Andersonian chart, it did catch my eye.

The climax of this trailer is assembled from two instances of a pretty familiar Andersonian shot: a character runs headlong across some expanse while the camera tracks alongside them. The most memorable examples might be Freddie Quell racing across the cabbage fields at the beginning of The Master (then riding across the salt flats on a motorcycle towards the end) or the roughnecks racing across the oil field towards the flaming derrick in There Will Be Blood. In either case, though, those shots have tended to connote anxious flight.

Here, we see that racing shot being used to suggest two characters hurtling towards each other across vast expanses of time and space only to collide into one another's arms, an expansion of one of the most iconic Andersonian shots: Barry and Lena in silhouette, missing a handshake and instead meeting in a rough embrace. In both Punch-Drunk Love and Phantom Thread, his two unconventional romances, Anderson has depicted love as this force of shocking upheaval that careens into your life and arrays your whole being in new configurations (for more on this, check out Glen Fuller's "Punch-Drunk Love: A Post-Romance Romance," one of my favorite articles on Anderson's work despite the fact that I can barely parse some of the concepts behind it). He's never taken that romantic collision image to quite the ecstatic extreme he does at the end of the Licorice Pizza trailer and I don't mind telling you that when I realized what I was seeing, my heart soared.

Not to bring down the mood, but Anderson has demonstrated some...let's say "room for improvement" in the past eight movies, and so far, two of those departments look to be worth considering in Licorice Pizza: his characterization of women and gay men.

In Anderson's two prior love stories, the female leads have been notably lacking in both backstory and any particular pressures or associations outside their relationship with the protagonist. This makes someone like Lena or Alma very easy to slot into the busy and vibrant milieu of something like Barry's warehouse or the House of Woodcock, but it can also leave these women feeling less than fully realized. After pulling a very similar trick in two very different romances across two decades, I'd love to see him challenge himself to create more balanced pairings, and I know I'm very much not the only one.

As with every aspect of this story, it's too early to say whether Alana Haim's character will be getting an equal share of narrative shading and agency to Cooper Hoffman's, but signs do look good — at this point, we're seeing more of her domestic sphere than his, which is shown glancingly if at all. By the time of Phantom Thread, some critics and commentators had gotten a bit fed up with Anderson's fixation on the white male experience, and if the overwhelming whiteness doesn't seem to have changed much since his overwhelmingly white Valley epic Magnolia, it would at least be pleasant if we got a female co-lead with co-equal agency.

As for the issue of homosexuality, Anderson hasn't featured an openly gay character in one of his movies since 1999, but both Boogie Nights and Magnolia feature gay characters with strikingly similar and strikingly undignified character arcs: both Scotty (amorous boom-mic operator of Boogie Nights) and Donny (former quiz kid and generally tragic figure of Magnolia) are sniveling and downtrodden men who pine hopelessly after unattainable hunks only to embarrass themselves with fits of drunken blubbering — a spiral that climaxes, in Donnie's case, with an abortive robbery and detainment by LAPD officer Jim Kurring, while Scotty is whittled out of the movie once his humiliation is complete. Over the years, Anderson has drawn some criticism for this portrayal of his only two central gay characters, and in response (or, at least, coincidentally), he's retreated into stories taking place in eras and spaces in which openly gay characters would be less likely to appear.

In Licorice Pizza, Benny Safdie plays real-life longtime San Fernando Valley city councilman Joel Wachs, who came out of the closet in 1999. Wachs' career seems to have been basically free of public scandal and there's little readily available information about his personal life, so I would wager there's a low likelihood of anything particularly outrageous going on with Safdie-as-Wachs. Thus, he may well be — if only by virtue of having been closeted at the time — the first major gay character in an Anderson movie who isn't defined by the tragedy of his same-sex attraction. It wouldn't be much of a victory, but it would be a first.

And speaking of Joel Wachs...

For the first time, we're seeing real-life figures incorporated into the Andersonian landscape. This is a particularly interesting departure given just how cloistered his stories tend to be; for the most part, Anderson's movies take place in snow-globe worlds largely impervious to real-life concerns (if Inherent Vice is, again, an arguable outlier given its geopolitical themes, it's also unmistakably a live-action cartoon). But now, it seems, we have two recognizable Valley characters being played by two recognizable actors: Safdie as Wachs, and Bradley Cooper as (presumably) Jon Peters.

Wachs can be seen in the campaign office during his run for city council, greeting a photographer while Haim looks on. This would date the scene sometime in early 1971, prior to a May election that Wachs — a respected lawyer and immediately popular political player — won decisively. From all I can gather, Wachs' campaign was fairly low in dramatics (save for some last minute allegations that his opponent might be going through white neighborhoods hoping to spark racial tensions by circulating a Black newspaper featuring a pro-Wachs editorial) and he would go on to a decade-spanning career as a respected public servant. Aside from the later admission that he was closeted during the time of Licorice Pizza's events, there wouldn't seem to be much narrative grist in the Joel Wachs story. Given what a seemingly curious choice he is for the first handful of real figures ever depicted in an Anderson movie, I can't help wondering what else might be on Paul's mind.

And then we have Bradley Cooper as Jon Peters — technically unconfirmed at this point, but if he's not Jon Peters, he's playing a character transparently modeled on him, down to being styled after an iconic photo of Peters and Barbra Streisand, whom Peters began dating in 1973 (one of several indications that this movie's events span at least three years). Peters is notorious for a lot of things — for being a hairdresser to the stars fond of telling people (spuriously) that he inspired Warren Beatty's character in Shampoo; for a codependent affair with Streisand that enabled him to turn her remake of A Star is Born into a slavish tribute to their love story; for riding a Batman producing credit all the way to the title of studio head when Sony bought Columbia in the late 80s, despite being functionally illiterate; and, of course, for a legendary obsession with giant spiders, which he tried to shoehorn into Kevin Smith's proposed Superman movie before getting his wish with Barry Sonenfeld's Wild Wild West. Most relevant for Licorice Pizza purposes, though, would probably be a quote from screenwriter Andrew Smith, who described Peters in the early 70s as basically feral: "Jon Peters was raised by wolves...It's like having a wolf in your house. It's not his fault. He's a wild thing."

Anderson has a habit of creating what I think of as gendered dyads, two figures who somehow represent opposing philosophies and, often, opposing modes of gender performance. The most central and memorable examples of these characters have tended to be male, representing some implicit battle for the masculine psyche: since 2002, we've had the repressive plunger salesman vs the assaultive mattress salesman, the brutal capitalist vs the effete preacher, the grunting soldier vs the foppish prophet, and the sensitive detective vs the brutal cop; to go back to the 90s, the heavily male ensemble of Magnolia is all but entirely composed of these pairings. So the fact that we already have our attention being directed to the upstanding public servant Wachs and the lunatic stylist Peters (himself a Valley native, who around the time of Licorice Pizza was splitting his time between cutting hair in the Valley and in Beverly Hills on his way up the social ladder) pings my interest.

We also have Tom Waits and Sean Penn in as-yet unknown roles, and they certainly look primed to provide their own examples of Andersonian masculinity (we haven't gotten a good old fashioned surrogate father in an Anderson movie in at least a decade now, and those four characters would seem to provide ample opportunity). Anderson has said in the past that he likes it when he can pair characters in a sort of Spy vs Spy arrangement, something detectable around the margins of his prior romances in not just the Barry/Mattress Man feud in Punch-Drunk Love, but the largely cold war between Phantom Thread's feminine dyadic sisters-in-law Alma (warm, sensual, promising the future) and Cyril (cold, tactical, reminiscent of the past). If there are any configurations like that being set up here — if not multiple configurations, a la Magnolia — it'll be an intriguing addition to the catalog.

If there's one element that's fascinating me most of all surrounding this return to the Andersonian Valley, it's the prospect of playing so openly with these real-world signifiers. His historical visions — and he hasn't made a movie set in the present day since 2002 — tend to eschew elements of historic record that don't suit his more mythic needs. Anderson's histories have largely been cinephiliac histories — films "interested," Jason Sperb writes in his book Blossoms & Blood: Postmodern Media Culture and the Films of Paul Thomas Anderson, "in a cinematic vision of the past that keeps the viewer constantly focused on cinematic representations of history that are defined as the surfaces, and not the depths, of history." Similarly, in her paper, "The Future of Anachronism," Elena Gorfinkel argues that in Boogie Nights, Anderson intentionally plays fast and loose with history in order to "[complicate] the audience's desire to seamlessly enter the diegesis" and force contemporary viewers "to reconsider their own historical position to film history and the popular cultural memory."

All of which is to say: if Anderson is now incorporating real-world figures and events in a way he never has before, I wouldn't wager he's going all historical realist on us — if anything, I'd look more towards the kinship between Anderson and Peters. Both men are known fabulists, Anderson with his intentionally apocryphal histories, and Peters with a famously incendiary memoir proposal recounting his own picaresque sexual odyssey across Hollywood history, a project he scrapped after being threatened with lawsuits by (give or take) everyone he'd ever known. It would be very exciting if the Peters spirit of flamboyant provocation is being channeled by Anderson, and given that majestic image of Peters, crouched and roaring like the wild thing Smith described him as, I'd wager that just might be the case.

In his 2016 book, Contemporary Film Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, George Toles wrote a truly beautiful passage about Anderson's use of the Valley in Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Punch-Drunk Love:

    "Anderson sought to make the Valley...into a place of mythic consequence, like Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. If he were to approach the locale with an attitude of sufficient, affirming grandeur, the region could yield action on a scale appropriate to other myths of American self-making. Anderson's rendering of the valley is hyperbolically vivid, a place teeming with 'characters' trying to find openings in their constricted situations and breaking out with incandescent gusto...Anything paltry can become large in the rendering, especially if the external world is depicted, intermittently, as an Expressionist fever chart of characters' gift for ardor. There is ample opportunity to meet likeminded dreamers on the social periphery, which in Anderson's Valley films seems thick with mystery, exotic danger, and human flow."

Here's the thing though — I'm not entirely convinced that's an apt description of either Boogie Nights or Magnolia. It's more applicable to the affective (i.e. emotional rather than chain-reactive) logic of Punch-Drunk Love, but that movie's themes put a pretty bleak spin on Toles' thesis. Based on what we're seeing in this trailer, though, I might venture to guess that we'll finally get something closer to the Valley that Toles describes, and I'm very much looking forward to it. (For the record, it wouldn't be the first time Toles called Anderson's shot from years in advance — he argues throughout his book that "the hidden mother" is the skeleton key to the entire canon of Andersonian themes and fixations, a credulity-straining subtext in 2016 that became text by 2017 with Phantom Thread).

More than anything, what I'm excited about in this slightest sliver of Licorice Pizza is a sense of newness, of fresh energy and imagery. For as varied as his movies have come to be in setting, tone, and style (even if he's continually drawn back to the Californian '70s) they're also often thematically homogenous, tracing and retracing the same handful of concepts in assorted configurations. This tendency has been a real asset to my book, which is organized around exactly those unusually persistent uniting themes. But for as easy as it's made my job, I'd love to see Anderson head into the next decade with some new colors on his palette, especially if he's making any version of the tack towards sentiment that's implied by this trailer — but, of course, Paul Thomas Anderson never shook your hand without having a joy buzzer in his palm. For better or worse, I can't imagine he'll be wandering too far from the mischievous tendencies that have lent him the sort of brand-name status you only see with a handful of auteur directors at this ebb in Hollywood history.

As Anderson broke onto the scene in 1999, producer Stacey Sher was quoted in the Los Angeles Times saying "directors are the rock stars at the end of this century." As we near the quarter-point in the following century, that's most decisively no longer the case. But there are at least a few directors who are troubadours, and Anderson is one. It's going to be a very exciting winter to be watching his career.

Before I go, I'm going to make one reckless prediction: this is the year Paul Thomas Anderson finally wins an Oscar. While his collaborators have won for their work on his films, Anderson has never won any of the marquee year-end awards, and while he's taken home hardware at festivals and critics' groups, he's had to content himself with eight Oscar nominations (four for screenplay, two for director, and two for picture) but no wins. I think with the right rollout and the right narrative, and with a movie that looks like it could be a real crowd-pleaser (if not another Lucy-and-the-football moment from the guy who still kind of wants to be Robert Downey Sr.) this could be his year for a Best Original Screenplay win. I don't see him getting director until later in his career; like Scorsese (the guy to whom Todd McCarthy picked him as successor in that infamous Esquire poll in which Andrew Sarris predicted Kevin Smith as Marty's heir apparent), I imagine he'll be taken for granted for a few more movies first. But especially with his hands getting increasingly involved in every element of the production — there's still no confirmed editor in this movie; has his editorial department become cooperative too? — it could be he's just determined to wind his way up to that podium by hook or by crook.

Licorice Pizza will have a limited release (likely only in NYC and LA) beginning November 25 before going wide one month later. It hasn't screened at a festival, despite being rumored for Cannes, TIFF, Telluride, Venice, and NYFF. We don't have a confirmed cast list, and we have only the barest synopsis. Until this trailer dropped, we didn't know Tom Waits was involved at all and it was unsure whether Sean Penn had been cast in the movie or was just visiting the set.

It's extraordinarily rare for a year-end prestige play — which any Anderson movie, even the defiantly scruffy and zany Inherent Vice, tends to be greeted as at least initially — to have so constrained a rollout. Anderson is bucking the typical show business trend of providing a slow and steady drip of information — by this point in a prestige movie's release cycle, we've typically seen glossy stills, a robust synopsis, and an easily consultable cast-and-crew list, as well as a festival premiere either on the books or already in them, with all the attendant hyperbolic premiere-night reviews and social media sturm und drang churning away in fits and starts for months before general release. If Paul Thomas Anderson intends to continue flouting that conventional release rhythm — and he's groused before, at least as of 2017, about how much information tends to be out in the ether before a movie can be seen — it'll be really interesting to see how the gamble pays off for him.

In August, MGM executive Mike DeLuca presented some material from the studio's Q4 slate at CinemaCon in Las Vegas, and while some hoped there might be a trailer premiere or other exclusive scoop concerning a movie then still going by the working title Soggy Bottom, Anderson was not forthcoming. "We will have news about Paul Thomas Anderson's movie," DeLuca told the CinemaCon attendees, "when he tells us what it is." The line was treated as newsworthy in some corners, with CinemaBlend running a bulletin headlined "What's Up With Paul Thomas Anderson's New Movie? Even The Studio Doesn't Seem To Know," but what that coverage tended to elide is the fact that DeLuca was an early patron of Anderson's, who turned New Line into a proving ground for young auteurs in the 90s and so afforded Anderson virtual creative autonomy on Boogie Nights and secured him final cut on Magnolia. After the reckoning caused by that movie, the two went their separate ways, but to see them now, both older and wiser, reunited at MGM has an exciting sort of getting the gang back together feeling to it.

There are a couple of less sentimental wrinkles surrounding this whole mysterious rollout, and chief among them would be MGM's recent acquisition by corporate megalopoly Amazon. Leaving aside the Jeff Bezos of it all, Amazon has managed effective theatrical rollouts for plenty of movies bearing the company's name, from Kenneth Lonergan's Manchester by the Sea to Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria, but if Anderson's crusade to put butts in repertory seats with his trailer leads him to a streaming rollout, it would certainly be an enervating sign of the times (as well as being a sign of the COVID times — though Licorice Pizza was one of the first prestige productions to proceed with safety measures in place and fingers crossed while the world tried to reestablish equilibrium, and God bless them, they seem to have pulled it off without high-profile disaster).

If Licorice Pizza is on home media shortly after whatever theatrical rollout it manages, and ends up finding its primary audience on the couch, I can't imagine Anderson will be precious about it the way some of his peers might be. One of my favorite quotes of his comes from a 1998 interview, in which he describes popping in on a screening of Boogie Nights in a Santa Monica multiplex.

    "​​It was a Fuji print and it just looked terrible. The scope, the ratio were fucked up...[But] at the same time, I was thinking...If I can't enjoy [the film under these conditions], have I done my job? This movie should still come off, the story should still work. So, do I want to be the guy who's got a Kodak print that's precise and perfect, and that's the only way it can work? Or do I want to be the guy who says, Yeah, I know it looks like shit and it sounds like shit. But you liked it, didn't you?"

It's an admirable sentiment, and it sums up the spirit of unpretentious integrity inherent to Anderson's storytelling. It's that spirit that's kept me motivated in writing about his work these past few years, and it's that spirit that inspired me to write this truly outrageous number of words about a two-minute trailer. It may all be red yarn on a bulletin board, but I hope it's given you something to chew on while we all keep waiting to find out exactly what Licorice Pizza is all about. I have a strong suspicion it's going to be worth the wait.