Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, into the bird.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm.

My guest, George Tolls, has written his first full-length book of criticism.

It's a book about the film director Paul Thomas Anderson,

the director who gave us, among other things,

Boogie Nights and Magnolia, Punch Drunk Love,

There Will Be Blood and the master.

That would be, in a sense, good enough.

But George is a reader and film writer,

who I've been talking to since I was an undergraduate.

We've been talking for, that would be 40 or 50 years.

50.

50.

And it's a real pleasure to have him on the show, especially because both George and I have among the

funniest, most unradio-worthy voices that you can think of. George is one of the most insightful people I've ever met,

the most articulate, and best of all, unusual and strange of mind.

...