Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘Soggy Bottom’ Aiming for New York Film Festival World Premiere

You can -almost- forget about Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Soggy Bottom” premiering at Venice or Telluride. I’m being told that the New York Film Festival is very close to nabbing the world premiere to the film.

As we speak, the Venice and Telluride lineups are close to 90-95% completed. There is still an open slot at both fests reserved for the film, just in case PTA’s latest decides to go that route, but it does look as though New York has won the “Soggy Bottom” sweepstakes. A major catch.

If you remember, it was also at NYFF that PTA’s “Inherent Vice” had its world premiere. It was the catch of the fall festival season as a swarm of press, from all over the world, went to the Big Apple just to catch that screening. A similar thing happened in 2019 when NYFF nabbed the world premiere for Martin Scorsese’s incredibly anticipated “The Irishman.”

“Soggy Bottom” is, without a doubt, the most anticipated movie of the year. IMDB has it listed as having a November 26th, 2021 release date in the United States, U.K. and Canada. That is not surprising news at all since production had officially wrapped in late November on PTA’s ninth feature film.

Little is known about director Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest, except that it is set in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley during the 1970s and centers on a high school student who is also a child actor. Bradley Cooper was cast in the film just a few weeks ago and, this past weekend, the 45-year-old actor returned to the set with his Jon Peters-inspired get-up.

There have been rumors pointing towards the character Cooper plays in the film actually being Peters, the producer of 1976’s “A Star is Born,” leading to speculation that this could be about the making of the Streisand-Kristofferson film (cheeky kind-of-casting when you realize Cooper also wrote, directed and starred in his own remake of the film back in 2018). Based on leaked pictures from the secretive set, actress-musician Alana Haim’s does, in fact, look like Barbra Streisand’s from the same era.

Also seen on-set during the shoot in Encino, California, writer-director-actor-editor Benny Safdie who will play real-life politician Joel Wachs. A Los Angeles Councilmember, Wachs was a closeted gay man with a larger-than-life personality who didn’t come out until the late ‘90s. 

Phillip Seymour Hoffman son, Cooper Alexander Hoffman is in the film as well, possibly as the lead. The casting of Cooper is quite touching when you come to realize that his father and PTA had a legendary four-film director-actor partnership (“Magnolia,” “Boogie Nights,” “Punch-Drunk Love,” and “The Master.”) Hoffman Jr. is not a trained actor, he doesn’t even have an IMDB page to his name, and we don’t really know if he has landed a prominent role in “Soggy Bottom,” but this is the kind of casting that can’t help but put a smile on any movie fan’s face.

Principal Photography on “Soggy Bottom” began around 6 months ago, with a shooting schedule of 3+ months expected. They seemed to have barely made that deadline. Everyone, from the cast to the crew, has been COVID tested weekly. on-set There was no stage shooting planned for the film, as everything has already been shot on location — I expected nothing else from PTA.