Michael Fairbanks
I was a junior screenwriting major in film school when Damien Chazelle’s La La Land opened in 2016. At that time, Los Angeles was more of an idea than a tangible place in my mind. It was likely that I’d move there someday once I got a post grad job, but since Chapman University was in Orange County, my only real reason to visit (aside from the internships I was lazily avoiding) was to see limited engagements of buzzy movies that demanded a special experience. La La Land was one of them. My friend Nick and I drove up to the now defunct Landmark Theater at the Westside Pavillion. We were both rabid fanboys of Chazelle’s Sundance darling Whiplash, whose score frequently haunted our Chapman Radio show Movie Songversations. It was our most anticipated film of the year and it was sacrilegious to imagine it being out for even a day without getting our eyes on what Chazelle’s full-blown musical had in store.
Seeing a movie at the Landmark or Arclight Hollywood always felt a bit more grown-up. For decades, these two theaters served as upscale hubs for industry folks to get first eyes on the big guns for awards season. As we sat down, we chatted with a middle aged gentleman in a Warner Brothers jacket who told us stories about working on the lot in his younger years. We had been conditioned to network whenever in orbit with any entertainment professional. After all, someone in the crowd could be the one you need to know. I handed him one of my tacky business cards. Alas, he was not the someone.
Even though there is nothing I love more than seeing movies, it often feels procedural. Even by this point in my life I was inhaling any release I had time for and pumping out self-published reviews. When the medium you love becomes academic study, a bit of wonder gets lost in the process. As Andrew Garfield once said about Emma Stone – La La Land was a shot of espresso, it felt like being bathed in cinematic sunlight. When that cavalcade of angelinos stuck on the 110 Freeway exited their cars and broke into Another Day of Sun while being conducted by Linus Sandgren’s virtuosic camerawork, I realized that this was going to be one of my definitive encounters with movie magic. It was the only film I could talk about for months. At the time, I would’ve distilled my adoration of it down to it being an exhilarating, romantic, perfectly crafted musical. However, as it has aged along with me, I’ve realized just how bone deep my emotional connection to Chazelle’s masterpiece truly is.
La La Land is often simplistically described as a love letter to Hollywood. While this sentiment does put it in conversation with classics like Singin’ In The Rain or A Star Is Born, it can also be perceived as navel gazing. A calculated awards play meant to butter up academy voters by adulating the canon they’ve devoted their lives to. Chazelle would later delve into this territory with his cult-classic box office bomb Babylon but La La Land’s focus is far more universal. This story is a love letter to, as beautifully expressed during the climatic number, the fools who dream. The people who constantly find themselves missing out on recognition for their passionate pursuit of creating art. The very act of staying in Los Angeles is framed as a lifeline. As long as there is proximity to movies or music, there is possibility.
Mia (Stone) and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) find each other during a time when nothing is going right. Mia is an actress hacking away at auditions for dismissive casting directors between barista shifts on the Warner Brothers lot. Sebastian isn’t satisfied with being a gig jazz musician. He wants to make an impact on a dying genre by opening his own club, which he insists will be called Chicken on a Stick named after Charlie Parker’s love of chicken. The venue he wants to use constantly torments him in its current iteration as a samba/tapas joint. The love that they share pushes them towards growth. Mia encourages Sebastian to join a band led by Keith (John Legend), a man whom Sebastian shares a contentious history with. Sebastian pushes Mia to write her own material and stage a one-woman show about her childhood. These endeavors bring about a conversation about “growing up.” Maybe the more attainable career for Sebastian is touring with Keith and making steady money playing generic jazz adjacent music. Perhaps if nobody comes to Mia’s show, she should take that failure as a final harsh rejection from the universe and return to Boulder City to find a more adult career. The very notion of shriveling into these duller iterations strains their relationship, even if they in fact end up making their ambitions realities in unexpected ways.
They don’t stay together. Mia’s fateful audition requires her to go to Paris to film and Sebastian is unsure if he will ever have feet firmly planted in LA. Five years later, the two come across each other by chance in Sebastian’s newly minted club that Mia and her new husband stumble into. The two of them share an unspoken reminiscence about what could’ve been, bolstered by a shattering montage where the two bound through a life together that they’ll never know scored by some of Justin Horowitz’s most evocative music. Many view this ending as tragic, but I see it as beautiful. These two people come together for the exact moment in time that they need each other and once apart, blossom into exactly who they were supposed to be.
It’s a relationship that I have perceived in entirely different ways over the course of this decade. In my younger years, everything about La La Land was aspirational. The alure of finding such an undeniable romance. The thrill of chasing a career in the arts. The potential stability that comes with a bit of compromise. It felt like an idealistic preview of a future that I was growing to fear as college was starting to wrap up. I’d spend nights panicking about what the future would hold for me and then throw on La La Land and remind myself that some version of this was coming my way. A bit idealistic and naive of me, but a comforting fantasy.
In 2018, I moved to LA. I got about a year and a half of the adventure I imagined. Waiting tables at Wokano. Doing temp work at glitzy Hollywood events. Chasing romance that ended up being unrequited. Eventually, I landed a steady marketing job and a promising new relationship, just in time for the world to freeze in 2020. I spent a few years in stasis, unable to get a job closer to the industry. That relationship I thought could last forever floundered. I lived in La La Land but the life it had given me was far less than I imagined.
As I caught La La Land’s recent re-release – I had a life affirming realization. I am in fact a Sebastian or Mia after all. My job hunt isn’t going very well, but I’ve rekindled a passion for film criticism that has already sent me on a couple adventures to events like AFI Fest or South By Southwest. Places that bring me closer to the world I’m so desperate to be a part of. Reviewing movies makes me feel as though I’m contributing in some small way to the narrative. Sharpening my writing skills has inspired me to start a new screenplay, my first since school. Hopefully, like Mia with So Long Bolder City, I’ll be able to finish it even if its impact is not immediately felt. Perhaps I’ll eventually start some kind of personal project or business that inspires as much passion in me as Sebastian’s club. It’s all a bit uncertain and since I’ve now crossed 30 years old, there’s a bit of pressure to find stability. I’m thankful to have now found that in love and hopefully the career will follow. Crazy as it may seem, I still have hope. All that is certain right now is that I can always turn to La La Land when I need a reminder of what my future still could have in store.
