This following cover story appeared in the December 7th issues of Awardsline
Try naming an original Hollywood musical in recent years that has worked at the box office.
No, not Broadway adaptations like Les Miserables and Mamma Mia!. We can thank 2002 Oscar Best Picture winner Chicago for reigniting the then-dormant Great White Way genre on the big screen. Enchanted doesn’t count because that’s a title propped by the Walt Disney princess brand. And Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge!, Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe and Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You—all of them are technically jukebox musicals.
Chris Chapman
We’re talking original, big song-and-dance titles, like MGM’s 1952 Singin’ in the Rain or the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers 1935 vehicle Top Hat, that were built for the big screen, and once upon a time resonated with the masses.
Chances are you’ve named few, if any original Hollywood musicals, which only provides production executives with statistical box office evidence to thumb down any greenlight of the genre, in a superhero and Star Wars dominant time that’s created a two class system of the haves and the indie have-nots at the box office (at date of post, few if any arthouse movies from indie labels cracked $26 million at the domestic box office).
Desperate times call for broken rules, and La La Land’s creators—and Lionsgate executives—are looking to defy all expectations with the release of Whiplash Oscar nominee Damien Chazelle’s original musical, an ode to the City of Angels, the MGM musicals of yore and Jacques Demy’s French new wave trio of Lola, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort.
For Lionsgate, La La Land is a $20 million-plus gamble—shot in 35mm, in 93 location sets and 48 exterior locations, with 1,600 extras, on two cameras, with anamorphic lenses, over 40 days—that could potentially deliver the studio’s first Best Picture Oscar win in 11 years, since Crash surprised voters. La La Land is also being released under the Summit logo, and the last time that banner collected a Best Picture Oscar win was in 2009 for The Hurt Locker (Summit would merge with Lionsgate in 2012).
As of this weekend, La La Land is off to a promising start looking at an opening of $850K at five New York and Los Angeles locations; a figure that beats the opening of Fox Searchlight’s indie 2014 indie wonder The Grand Budapest Hotel ($811K). Though La La Land has a long way ahead of it to dance, Grand Budapest Hotel went on to gross $59.3M, a bulk of which it made before even arriving at the Academy Awards. With a per theater of $170K, La La Land will own the best opening theater average of 2016, and the third best opening PTA ever for a non-major studio release behind Kevin Smith’s Red State ($204K) and Grand Budapest Hotel ($202K).
Achieving Oscar glory with La La Land should be enough to make Lionsgate executives dance like the extras in the film’s opening LA highway musical number, “Another Day of Sun”, giving the distributor some long-needed esteem in a year where they’ve battled such $140 million big budget disasters as Gods of Egypt, and the cinematic demise of their once popular YA franchise The Divergent Series with Allegiant.
“An original Hollywood musical is an unusual decision for any studio in this day,” explains Lionsgate Motion Pictures Group co-president Erik Feig, “but at Lionsgate and Summit, we often make left-of-center decisions. When you look at the success of both companies under one roof, whether it’s a Tyler Perry comedy, The Hunger Games, Twilight or Warm Bodies, or on the TV side with Orange is the New Black, what’s interesting is that most of what’s worked has been unconventional bets across the board in most genres. When we first made Now You See Me, prior to that, no other movie about magic had been successful.”
For Chazelle, his best friend composer Justin Hurwitz, and producers Fred Berger and Jordan Horowitz, La La Land is a testament to passion paid off, having developed the movie over the last six years; a complete defiance of odds in a town where putting round pegs into round holes is the legit way to play it safe on screen. Flight scribe John Gatins wisely said a few years ago that, when it comes to the challenges of getting a great screenplay on the big screen, “Great movies aren’t born. They fight their way to life”.
Chris Chapman
The same could be aptly said about La La Land. One would think closing down the 110-105 interchange twice during its production, with a slew of extras, for the “Another Day of Sun” sequence was the most grueling moment during filming, complete with scorching 100-degree plus temperatures, and a traffic jam of cars blocked for the shot. However, getting La La Land off the ground was indeed the hardest. As Chazelle couches the six-year production of La La Land from soup to nuts, “It’s the longest-running passion project.”
Says the director: “There wasn’t a lot of excitement in the room when we initially pitched La La Land around town. Here we are with an original musical, one that incorporates jazz, and a love story where the protagonists may not wind up together; everything was a further death knell. The genre itself, when it’s not based on a pre-existing property, is a scary thing, but the fact that there haven’t been any in a while was part of the appeal.”
La La Land was built before Whiplash became a reality. That movie initially started as a Sundance Film Festival short, and later became a feature that won the Audience Award and Grand Jury Prize at the Park City, UT fest before embarking on its Oscar quest.
Buddies since their Harvard days, when they performed in the indie pop band Chester French, Chazelle and Hurwitz soon left to pursue their love of film and score, making a black-and-white $50k 16mm musical film in college entitled Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench. In many ways, that film laid the template for La La Land. Similar to their latest endeavor, Guy and Madeline was inspired by Demy’s work and the MGM musical canon, with a logline that bears similarity to La La Land, which follows Emma Stone as aspiring actress Mia, who falls for burgeoning jazz pianist Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) who yearns to own his own club. Their glowing romance is set against the sunset of modern day LA, but their careers soon take precedence and complications ensue. In Guy, a jazz trumpeter meets Madeline, and although he embarks on a quest for a more gregarious paramour, ultimately the two seem destined to be together.
“Boston as a romantic metropolis isn’t a role that city traditionally plays in movies,” says Chazelle about Guy and Madeline, “but in La La Land, here was a chance to take a city that disappears behind-the-scenes in most films and use it for a romantic playground for lovers.”
It was during Guy and Madeline that Chazelle also found his cinematic style, with his ‘whipping’ camera visuals; a jerking shot between two subjects. In Guy and Madeline, we see it used between a musician and a dancer, while in Whiplash it’s employed during the intense final concert scene between J.K. Simmons’ acerbic conservatory instructor Fletcher and Miles Teller’s masochistic drummer Andrew. In La La Land, ‘the whip’ is used for dramatic purposes between Mia and Sebastian at The Lighthouse Café.
Guy and Madeline received great reviews coming out of its premiere at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival. Chazelle and Hurwitz would move to Los Angeles around 2007, and within less than four years began cracking La La Land. During the James Schamus/John Lyons era at Focus Features in 2011, the classic label had an in-house program that paired young producers with young filmmakers. Matthew Plouffe, now an SVP of production at Tobey Maguire’s Material Pictures, was a Focus executive who brought Chazelle and Hurwitz together with Berger and Horowitz.
“We sat down with Damien and he pitched us an original musical set in Hollywood,” remembers Horowitz. “It’s a love story between an actress and a jazz pianist. We were just like, ‘Literally everything about that is probably wrong, so let’s do it.’ The program was pushing us to take risks and do ambitious projects. The intention was to do it for a low budget, and we were like, ‘Let’s actually just make the version of this film that we think feels rights.’”
From the onset, Chazelle and Hurwitz knew that there would always be an opening dance on an LA freeway, as well as a lift-off-into-space moment in the middle, set at the Griffith Observatory. Not to mention the twist ending between Gosling and Stone’s star-crossed lovers. Another element that remained intact from early pre-production was Hurwitz’s “Mia and Sebastian’s” melody, which he calls “the emotional heart of the movie,” a melody that’s initially heard when the actress spots the pianist plucking away in the nightclub in a love-at-first-sight moment.
La La Land would eventually stall at Focus, however the rights easily reverted back to Chazelle, Berger and Horowitz. At this time, Chazelle’s Whiplash script was going around town and gaining traction. After the short won at Sundance, the La La Land producers knew it would be another year before any movement was made on the musical. Whiplash’s feature wins at Sundance in 2014 marked the arrival of Chazelle to the wider world, and La La Land “became a real conversation,” says Horowitz. The project was on fire with a number of suitors, particularly those on the foreign sales side.
Cut to a WME party in Park City that year where Feig met Chazelle. Lionsgate had a bid in on Whiplash, but Sony Pictures Classics would ultimately acquire U.S., Germany…