A Valley legend set to film
EX-COUNCIL MEMBER JOEL WACHS TALKS UP HIS SLICE OF ‘LICORICE PIZZA’
AS P R E S I D E N T of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Joel Wachs often gets messages about licensing the iconic pop artist’s name and image. So when director Paul Thomas Anderson emailed, Wachs assumed Warhol was being featured in a new movie. ¶ “No, no. It’s you I want,” Wachs says Anderson later told him. Wachs has lived in Manhattan since 2001, but for three decades he was the City Council member for the same L.A. district where Anderson was raised. In “Licorice Pizza,” a rapturous coming-of-age tale set in the San Fernando Valley of the early 1970s, the filmmaker incorporated many of his memories of growing up in Studio City, from beloved landmarks Tail o’ the Cock and Papoo’s Hot Dog Show, to the local
politician Anderson’s parents championed — and whose office he passed every day, to and from school. “He’s an indispensable part of Valley history,” Anderson says.
Wachs read the script and got to the part most relevant to him: In it, the 20-something protagonist Alana Kane (played by Alana Haim), is searching for direction in her life and decides to campaign for an earnest, young and closeted gay city councilman who is running for mayor.
“I thought, ‘There’s only really one human being who was a city councilman in the San Fernando Valley in [the ’70s] who was running for mayor,’ ” Wachs says. “Anyone who wanted to find out could easily identify it as me. So I thought, ‘Why not?’ ”
Unlike Anderson, Wachs wasn’t a Valley native. He was born in Scranton, Pa. At 10, his father moved the family to Vermont Knolls in South L.A. and opened a string of women’s ready-to-wear clothing stores. Wachs went to high school with future Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti and got involved in student government.
“He was the A-12 class president and I was a B-10 senator,” Garcetti says. “So that’s how I got to know him.”
Wachs’ journey to the Valley began after he collected a Harvard law degree and landed at a downtown L.A. firm as a tax lawyer. In 1971, living in an apartment above the Sunset Strip — which, like portions of the San Fernando Valley and the Santa Monica mountains, fell into District 2 — Wachs aimed his sights on a Los Angeles City Council seat.
His mother ran his base of operations while his father stumped for him in front of Gelson’s and Ralphs supermarkets
holding a sign that said, “Vote for My Son, Joel.” Wachs took a hiatus from work and spent five months knocking on doors. When he won the election, he was 32, the youngest member of the 15-member body. He decided it was time to move over the hill to the Valley.
Wachs says Anderson was open to his script notes. “Some he took, some he didn’t,” he says, adding that the movie Joel Wachs was remarkably similar to the real-life Joel Wachs. Anderson was friends with film and TV producer Gary Goetzman, upon whom “Licorice Pizza’s” leading man Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) is based. Goetzman burst into Wachs’ life as a teen. “We were looking for volunteers and he had all these ideas. He wanted to make a commercial,” says Wachs. “I said, ‘We don’t have money.’ He said, ‘I’ll take care of it all.’ ”
There’s something inherently funny about a new politician putting his public image into the hands of a nervy adolescent for a political ad. The film version of the ad, set in the Santa Monica mountains, features Wachs delivering anti-developer promises as Gary films and Alana directs. According to Anderson, this moment was flagged by Wachs as erroneous — he told Anderson
that Goetzman also directed. “I had to correct him, and say, ‘No, believe it or not, it was Jonathan Demme,’ ” Anderson says, referring to the Oscar-winning “Silence of the Lambs” director who had yet to make a feature film.
Wachs had other notes for Anderson.“I’m not disorganized,” Wachs told him in reference to a scene where the candidate admits to Alana that he’s absent-minded. There was also the matter of the secret boyfriend who feels attention-starved. According to Anderson, “First off, he said it was completely implausible to be a city councilman and run for mayor and have a boyfriend at the same time! The moment Wachs saw that there was a love interest in the film for him, he wrote in the margin of the screenplay, ‘Yeah, right!’ ”
Speaking by Zoom from his elegant, white-walled Manhattan apartment, Wachs, who came out in 1999 at age 60, still feels compelled to explain why he felt he had to keep his true self hidden. “The suppression was enormous,” he says. “I knew a lot of gay people in the industry . ... People were hiding, because the consequences of coming out would be so great. So much has changed. I’m actually glad [Anderson] did use my name, because now we can have these discussions.”
Still, a guy’s got to have a life. Wachs and his friends would meet for dinner at restaurants like West Hollywood’s the Carriage Trade, where one could sneak in unseen through an alley. Or the Golden Bull steakhouse in Santa Monica Canyon. His fear of people putting two and two together, however, didn’t stop him from patronizing Oil Can Harry’s, the venerable gay nightclub on Ventura Boulevard. His cover,
he rationalized, was that he was a public servant.
“I’d say, ‘This is a business in my district,’ ” says Wachs, with a light shrug. “‘I have to see what it’s like and support it.’ ”
When Wachs was getting to know his constituents, he noticed that many were at home in the middle of the day. It didn’t take long for Wachs, who is chatty, to realize he was meeting grips, set designers and stagehands, out of work during a time when Hollywood was backing away from bigbudget epics. He made it a mission to help find federal and local resources for unemployed industry workers and people in the arts. “Not only do I love the arts, it’s important to the city,” says Wachs. “Creativity is one of the main resources in Los Angeles.”
On the wall behind Wachs is a piece by famed L.A. artist Betye Saar. Since the ’70s, he’s devoted a quarter of his paycheck to buying art. Most of his collection is stored in L.A. And despite his 20-plus years in Manhattan, there are things about the Valley that make Wachs’ voice fill with longing.
“I still miss the Smoke House,” he says of the redbooth restaurant across from Warner Bros studios. “Oh my God, I want their garlic bread. It was so good.”