Director-writer Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, the long-awaited, buzzed-about adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s period crime novel, will be world-premiered on Saturday, October 4th, at the 52nd New York Film Festival. Hollywood Elsewhere will be there with bells on. The Warner Bros. release will open theatrically on 12.12.14 so this is a big deal — a look at a presumably major film 10 weeks in advance. Set in Los Angeles in 1970 (and not 1969, which is what I’ve been erroneously saying all along), pic is about Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix), a pot-smoking, space-case private dick involved in a complicated effort “to prevent his ex-girlfriend’s current lover being committed to a mental asylum”…or a plot to kidnap the guy or something like that. (The Manson Family murder trial was a backdrop in Pynchon’s novel so it presumably flashes in and out of the film also.) Costarring Josh Brolin, Benicio del Toro, Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon, Martin Short, Jena Malone, Katherine Waterston and Maya Rudolph.

Inherent Vice costars Joaquin Phoenix, Martin Short during filming.