Los Angeles, California | December 8th, 2021
Places Photos
December 8th, 2021
Look at this… I guess I’m starting to write about my travel/places photography now.
Anyways…
I was in Los Angeles on December 8th for an engagement session, and, once the job ended, I had a couple of days to spend in Southern California.
While working a wedding before the trip, it hit me. I could actually go see “Licorice Pizza” in a theater before the nationwide release at Christmas.
So, with that as a definite must-do on the trip, I headed near the campus of UCLA to check out the film at the historic Fox Westwood Village Theatre.
This gave me a chance to do a little bit of night photography, which was fun considering the theater’s marquee was all lit up. The neighboring Bruin Theater was also illuminated nicely, so I couldn’t pass up on photographing it as well.
While killing time before the showing of “Licorice Pizza”, I noticed there was a pinball arcade next to the theater. Once I walked inside, it hit me. This was a pop-up arcade designed to look like one that features in the film (Full disclosure: I knew about this plot point before seeing the movie because, yeah, I read spoilers).
The attention to detail on the pop-up arcade was fantastic, and I’m sure Paul Thomas Anderson had a huge part in its design. After all, we were told the Fox in Westwood is his favorite theater, and that’s why it was chosen as the early home for “Licorice Pizza” in Los Angeles.
Getting to photograph all the vintage pinball machines was an unexpected treat, and I probably could have shot a lot more… but that would have been overkill.
For the editing and processing, I wanted to bring out the colors on the marquees while also invoking a feel of the 1970s for the pinball photos. The photos used a version of a Cinestill base edit with some tweaking along the way. My trusty Fuji X-T4 performed magnificently.
