Fun movie. Regarding the controversy about the female lead being a pedophile, PTA said that the first inspiration for the movie was him seeing a high schooler hitting on a woman taking his school photos and thought that would be a funny premise for a movie.
However, a lot of the scenes in the movie are based on the experiences of his real-life friend Gary Goetzman, who
did open a waterbed store that later became a pinball store... but Goetzman was
18 when he opened the store, not 15.
If the character of Gary in this movie was made to be 17/18, I think it would've felt a lot less weird (you could still have the "comedy" of a high schooler trying to hit on a woman almost 50% older than him and she could still be resitant about it at first with a line like 'you're a high-schooler). But the whole time I was watching, I had this nagging at the back of my mind that it
could be a vehicle for trying to push for pedophile or "MAP" tolerance. Maybe it's just bad timing on the film's part.
Paul Thomas Anderson seems like a normal dude, but you just never really know...
Bonus: the official Amazon promo still for this film contains Alana Haim's nipple:
Was hoping it was about a music store in so cal from the 80's that shared the name.
It is - tangentially, anyways. It's basically
Fast Times or
Dazed and Confused, but with specific emphasis on being in the valley. Most of the locations the characters go to and most of the events in the film were places that existed and things that really happened, but they're so small in scale that I didn't understand that they were significant until I read up on them later.