A Valley icon (PT Anderson) taps another (Dennis McCarthy) for latest cinematic love letter to area – LA Daily News
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The envelope, please. The Oscar for the best performance in a motion picture role lasting 10 seconds or less goes to…
I had two lines, 27 words to deliver playing a reporter in “Licorice Pizza” — award-winning auteur Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest ode to the San Fernando Valley.
I nailed it in 10 takes.
Okay, maybe closer to 15, but the point is he was so impressed he asked me to stay on for a few weeks of extras work.
He needed an older guy sitting at a bar smoking a cigarette and drinking a cocktail in one of the Valley’s late, great watering holes — the Tail O’ the Cock on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City.
“Interested?” he asked.
I’ve been auditioning for this role for 50 years. Heck, yeah, I was interested.
This guy Anderson — “There Will Be Blood,” “Magnolia,” “Boogie Nights” and so many more — creates magic out of mayhem, there’s no other way to put it.
In 65 shooting days, in the middle of a pandemic and a sweltering heat wave, with a cast of “masks on, please” family and friends who had never acted in a movie, he creates this crazy, lovable, coming-of-age romp through the San Fernando Valley of 1973 that has “hand me the Oscar” written all over it.
The only real big names in the movie are Sean Penn and Bradley Cooper, who are both great in extended cameo roles, but they don’t carry the movie. The rookies without any previous screen credits do.
“I think back to all those rocky tryouts we had, looking over you rag tag bunch of rookies, and thinking we’re never going to get through this season,” Anderson said, playing along with a “Bad News Bears” baseball analogy I threw at him when we talked last week. He’s a huge Dodger fan.
“But you watch them practice repeat, practice repeat, getting better over the course of 65 days, feeling more comfortable. And, eventually, at its best, they’re playing loose. I think that’s the best way to put it – playing loose.”
I wasn’t. I was nervous as hell.
The first day of shooting I walked off the set at the end of the day, and went home wearing my wardrobe, which I came to find out is a big no-no. You’re supposed to leave it in the dressing room and change back into your street clothes before going home. Nobody told me.
I had to find out the next morning from a guy sticking a 15-foot-long, Q-tip up my nose. He was wondering why I had gone to wardrobe before getting COVID tested? I pled ignorance, my usual fall-back position.
You learn a lot on a movie set talking to the extras, like who’s the best director to work for. Anderson scores off the charts. Here they were, about 50 extras, masked up eight hours a day in a typically miserable Valley heat wave, having a humongous Q-tip shoved up their nose every morning, and they were glad to do it because they were working on a Paul Thomas Anderson film.
“I wouldn’t be here for any other director, I’ll tell you that,” said a well-coiffed, older woman searching for some shade before her background scene inside the old Billingsley restaurant in Van Nuys that doubled as the Tail O’ the Cock.
Anderson, they all agreed, is Mr. Cool on the set. Nothing rattles him. He doesn’t shout or throw tantrums when things aren’t coming together, like other directors with whom they’ve worked.
He takes five, and puts his arm around someone, maybe cracks them up with a joke, or leads them softly in the direction he wants them to go, always with a smile and “you’re doing great” — trying to get them to play loose.
“Many of the extras and I have worked together for a long time,” Anderson said, feeling genuinely touched by the comments. “I don’t think that happens very often. They’re a great group.”
Anderson’s made eight motion pictures before “Licorice Pizza,” three of them set in the San Fernando Valley. He’s been nominated for an Academy Award eight times for five of his movies. With a track record like that, every star and extra in the business wants to work with him.
And all he wants to do is work with the Valley.
“I can walk out my front door and have all the locations I need (to shoot a movie) right in front of me,” he said. “The last film I made (“Phantom Thread” set in post-war England), I was a complete novice, an interloper in a country I didn’t even belong in, or know anything about. It was really a joy coming back to a place I know and love.
“It was so obvious to me that I didn’t have to search far (for his cast). I’m surrounded by teenagers at home, all my (four) children’s friends, and I surround myself with people who are also residents of the Valley.”
His leading lady, Alana Haim, who steals the movie, grew up in the Valley and had no acting experience. Her mother, who was Anderson’s elementary school art teacher he had a crush on, and Alana’s father (who gets the movie’s biggest laugh) are in it, along with her two sisters from Haim, their popular rock group. None of them had been in a motion picture before.
The male lead is 18-year-old Cooper Hoffman, who was also a rookie, but has serious acting genes. His father was the late, great actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, a friend of Anderson’s. His mom, Mimi O’Donnell, also has a small part in the movie.
From the leads to the bit players, Anderson rolled the dice.
When he needed a maître d’ for the Tail O’ the Cock scenes, he used Henri Abergel, the popular owner of the French bistro, Mistral, in Sherman Oaks, who had never stepped before the cameras before, but knew a thing or two about welcoming people and taking them to their tables.
When he needed a reporter, he used a guy writing a column for the Daily News — the old Greensheet his parents subscribed to when he was a kid, along with the Times and Herald Examiner. He had never been in front of the cameras, either.
In baseball, they call this managing by the seat of your pants — trusting your own instincts, not what the book says. We were all untested rookies, but Anderson had been quietly auditioning us for years.
“I asked myself who do I know, who foots the bill?” he said. “Oh, my best friend Kevin’s brother, Phil, he’s perfect for that part. Or, you know who would be great as the reporter, my buddy’s dad. I wonder if he would ever do this?”
His buddy’s dad did do it and had a blast. My 10 seconds of acting is interviewing Councilman Joel Wachs (played by actor/director Benny Safdie) in his Canoga Park campaign office when he ran for mayor.
I’m trying to coax him out of the closet as the city’s first gay councilman, but he’s not budging. Not in 1973. Wachs was Anderson’s councilman growing up in the Valley, and with three newspapers in his parents home he read a lot about the councilman and became a big fan of his positions on grassroots issues.
“He’s a sliver of someone else’s story here when in fact his story is large,” Anderson said.
Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman at Portola Middle School in a scene from “Licorice Pizza.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/MGM via AP)
Alana Haim in a scene from “Licorice Pizza.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/MGM via AP)
Cooper Hoffman stands on Devonshire Street in Chatsworth in a scene from “Licorice Pizza.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/MGM via AP)
Sean Penn, foreground right, and Alana Haim in a scene shot at the Van Nuys Golf Course from “Licorice Pizza.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/MGM via AP)
Cooper Hoffman, left, and Alana Haim in a scene from “Licorice Pizza.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/MGM via AP)
Cooper Hoffman, left, and Alana Haim run along Burbank Blvd near Coldwater Ave. in a scene from “Licorice Pizza.” (MGM via AP)
Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim star in Paul Thomas Anderson’s coming-of-age comedy-drama “Licorice Pizza.” (Universal Pictures)
Wachs left Los Angeles in 2001 to run the Andy Warhol Foundation in New York City. In an interview recently, he told national public radio’s KCRW that he hopes those who see the film, which he liked, take away the fact that societal culture can shift for the better with time and hard work.
He had escaped that stifling, homophobic closet he was trapped in a long time ago in Los Angeles.
“When you’re making a film there’s no other anything, no other life at all for the couple of years it takes to do,” Anderson said. “When you’re writing, you’re so happy not to have the pressure of the time and the money, but you find yourself getting lonely and itchy for the social element.
“There are times you can’t write fast enough because you’re excited about how it’s going and you see the horizon line starting the film. When you finally relax and finish it, all you want to do is lock yourself away in a room with all the footage. You’ve got to say, ‘I think we’re done here, guys, we’re good.’
“You can write them well, you can direct them well, but you have to get a little drop of magic in there, too.”
Not that I’m biased or anything, but I swear I saw it early in the movie. There’s this older guy in the background sitting at a bar…
Dennis McCarthy’s column runs on Sunday. He can be reached at dmccarthynews@gmail.com.
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