This is the story about “Licorice Pizza”Production design was first introduced in the Below-the Line Issue of ’s awards magazine.
For “Licorice Pizza”Florencia Mart, production designer, found that the COVID-19 Pandemic made her job harder but also more complicated. Easy because Paul Thomas Anderson was one of few productions that shot the film during lockdown in San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles. Locations were readily available and were open to cooperation from agencies and businesses. More complicated because people also used the break to remodel and update their homes and businesses — and when you’ve got a film that’s set in 1973 and wants to use real locations, that creates a problem.
“We were watching the Valley evolve right in front of our eyes,”Martin said. “As COVID started happening, people started remodeling. We were thinking, ‘Wait, wait, wait! Don’t do it yet!’ We actually lost a few locations that we had planned, because we came back and they had freshly painted walls and carpets.”
Modern and fresh-painted did not work. “Licorice Pizza,” a leisurely tour of the Valley circa the early ’70s. The area’s streets have seen a lot of renovation and have been plastered with modern signs. Street lights have also been upgraded to LED lighting. Anderson didn’t like the look.
“We worked with the city to bring in all the vintage cobra heads (lights), as they’re called,”Martin said. “The color of the light is really important, and we were looking at films to study the color of the mercury-vapor lights of the 1970s.”
She said that location scouting consisted of “just getting in the car and driving,”In search of bits of the past in a mass new. “It was finding those pockets that are still preserved, where people haven’t demolished their ranch houses to build white modern monstrosities,”She spoke. “We were looking for parking lots, alleys, gas stations, sidewalks, empty fields, cul-de-sacs. There are no fibs in this movie — everything was shot where it took place.”
One unexplored stretch of Chatsworth businesses was found, and this became the block in which Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman), opens a waterbed shop and then a pinball arcade (which required them to find dozens of pre-1975 working machines). For the mansion owned by producer Jon Peters (Bradley Cooper), they got a famous actor who remains nameless to let them use a house he was remodeling; they rebuilt a couple of rooms, shot the scenes and then removed their handiwork, since the actor wasn’t particularly interested in brown shag carpeting and gold damask wallpaper.
They also turned an abandoned restaurant adjoining the Van Nuys Golf Course into the legendary Valley institution Tail o’ the Cock, keeping the red leather booths but bringing in false walls and real stained-glass windows. Re-creating the look was possible thanks to anecdotes and photos from the Los Angeles Times archive. “fabulous postcards of restaurants from the period.”
The movie, by the way, is named after the Licorice Pizza record-store chain, a popular place to buy music with locations throughout Southern California in the ’70s. However, Licorice Pizza is not available in the film. “Licorice Pizza,”Film whose title was chosen after filming had finished. “We did have a record store for a while, but it didn’t have a name yet,”She laughed. “We could very well have had one if we had continued down that path.”
You can read more in the Below-the Line Issue here.
