In the summer of 2021, a year after Cooper Hoffman finished filming Licorice Pizza — the movie that would make him a movie star practically overnight — he was on the set of Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, working one of the lowest jobs on the crew’s hierarchy. His official title was COVID production assistant, which meant that he sat at a folding table, clipboard in hand, checking in the cast and crew as they arrived for their daily nasal swabs. Hoffman had been dispatched to the production by Licorice Pizza director Paul Thomas Anderson, who knew about the attention, praise and potential for ego inflation that would come when that…
