Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara 
Storytelling for the Screen: Licorice Pizza
- Saturday, November 7, 2026 / 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM (PST)
- Pollock Theater
- Screening Format: 35mm projection (133 minutes)
- With Andy Jurgensen (editor)
-
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Starring: Alana Haim, Cooper Hoffman, Sean Penn, Tom Waits, Bradley Cooper
Licorice Pizza (2021) is writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson’s lively and earnest love letter to 1970s Los Angeles and Hollywood. A loose, episodic coming-of-age story, the film shifts seamlessly between intimate moments and comic detours, returning to the obsessions that have defined his cinema: ambitious strivers, eccentric outsiders, and the strange allure and nostalgia of American life. The film follows Alana Kane (Alana Haim) and Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) as they grow up, fall in love, and scheme of ways to make money in the San Fernando Valley in 1973, encountering aging movie stars and other restless teenagers in their orbit. Sean Penn, Bradley Cooper, Tom Waits, and Benny Safdie round out a revolving cast of colorful characters that Gary and Alana come across as their lives become increasingly entangled. Warm and irreverently funny, Licorice Pizza distills Anderson’s knack for expansive ensemble storytelling and richly drawn characters into one of his most playful films.
The Carsey-Wolf Center is delighted to welcome UCSB Film and Media Studies alumnus and recent Academy Award winner for Best Film Editing Andy Jurgensen back to the Pollock Theater for a special 35mm presentation of Licorice Pizza. After the screening, Jurgensen will join moderator Ross Melnick (Carsey-Wolf Center, UCSB) to discuss his work as the film’s editor.
This event is free but a reservation is recommended in order to guarantee a seat.
Biographies
Andy Jurgensen (editor)
Andy Jurgensen is a Los Angeles-based film editor and a graduate of UC Santa Barbara’s Department of Film and Media Studies. He started his career working as an assistant editor on both studio and independent features, including The Campaign, Afternoon Delight, All The Way, Bombshell, and Bad Boys For Life.
His collaboration with director Paul Thomas Anderson began on Inherent Vice (as assistant editor) and continued with Phantom Thread (associate editor), leading to his feature-film editing debut on Licorice Pizza (2021). Andy has also cut many of PTA’s short-form works, including Junun, Anima, and music videos for artists such as Radiohead, Joanna Newsom, HAIM, and The Smile. Most recently, he edited Anderson’s One Battle After Another, earning Academy Award and BAFTA wins for Best Editing.
Moderator Ross Melnick (Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center)
Ross Melnick is Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center, Presidential Chair in Media Studies, and Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He was named an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Scholar and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow for his book Hollywood’s Embassies: How Movie Theaters Projected American Power Around the World (Columbia University Press, 2022). He is the author of American Showman: Samuel ‘Roxy’ Rothafel and the Birth of the Entertainment Industry (CUP, 2012), co-editor of Rediscovering U.S. Newsfilm: Cinema, Television, and the Archive (AFI/Routledge, 2018), and co-author of Cinema Treasures (MBI, 2004). His research has appeared in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Film History, The Moving Image, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and in numerous other journals and edited collections.
This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center.
Storytelling for the Screen
Since their emergence, cinema and television have been in a state of constant technological and industrial flux. But even as our ways of distributing and accessing moving images have changed, and even as tastes and styles continue shifting with the times, our passion for compelling onscreen storytelling persists. At the Carsey-Wolf Center, we are committed to fostering a nuanced understanding of cinematic and televisual storytelling across genres, formats, styles, and historical periods. To this end, we sponsor a wide range of events, programs, and workshops designed to cultivate a new generation of media storytellers, and to help audiences better understand the evolving role of narrative across diverse media forms.