La La Land (2016) Script Review | #92 WGA 101 Greatest Scripts of the 21st Century
Damian Chazelle's love letter to musicals meets the hard reality of chasing one's dreams in this bittersweet and heartfelt romance.
Logline: Mia, an aspiring actress, serves lattes to movie stars in between auditions, while Sebastian, a jazz musician, scrapes by playing cocktail party gigs in dingy bars. As success mounts, they are faced with decisions that begin to fray the fragile fabric of their love affair, and the dreams they worked so hard to maintain in each other threaten to rip them apart..
Written by: Damien Chazelle
Pages: 85
Number of scenes: 159
It’s unfortunate that La La Land will most likely be remembered as the film that won the Best Picture Oscar for two minutes before it turned out to be an error. It’s also unfortunate that La La Land will be depicted as a member of the old vanguard in contrast to Moonlight breaking new ground because it distracts from the fact that the screenplay for La La Land is both good, original, and an excellent example of writing what you know and love. It tells the tale of an aspiring actress and a broke jazz musician and the price of chasing dreams, covered in the shiny wrapper of a musical. Given that the musical genre is all but extinct, the inclusion of La La Land on the WGA’s Greatest Screenplays of the 21st Century feels like a miracle1.
The screenplay clocks a brisk 85 pages, a far cry from the finished film’s running time of 128 minutes. That’s mainly because it doesn’t include the song lyrics (in contrast to the script for the 2021 remake of West Side Story) or go into detail about the choreography. For the songs, the script might include a few scraps of what lines are absolutely required, like the final words to “City of Stars” (page 49)...
... for the dances, it merely indicates the destination- for instance, wanting one number to climax with a guy plunging into a pool and ending with fireworks (page 8).
The script provides the destination and the context- it’s up to the composer and choreographer to figure out how to get there.
What is the script structure in La La Land?
La La Land is structured around the four seasons and takes place mostly across three-fourths of a year, with the final section set five years later:
Winter - 15 pages
Spring - 23-24 pages
Summer - 11 pages
Fall - 25 pages
Winter - 9 pages (Five years later)
The seasonal structure also corresponds to the emotional arcs of the characters and their relationship- Mia and Sebastian are at their lowest points at the beginning (Winter), their frostiness thaws as they began to spend more time together (Spring) before they are in the honeymoon phase and at their happiest (Summer) until their relationship slowly comes undone (Fall). The final section, Winter (again), is a juxtaposition between their respective success against the realization that they got what they wanted separately.
The number of characters is surprisingly small, creating an intimate- almost indie-like, atmosphere. The main characters are Mia and Sebastian. The supporting characters are Laura (Sebastian’s sister) and Keith (Sebastian’s former bandmate), while Mia’s roommates appear in two scenes. Every other character is on the periphery. This is most likely to keep the focus on the lovers and help to keep budget costs low. This is always useful when writing your own scripts, especially if it requires a little scale: Ante up the scale but keep your characters few.
The screenplay was written by Damien Chazelle, a French-American writer and director. At the age of 32, he became the youngest person to win the Best Director Oscar for La La Land, a passion project he’d been trying to mount for more than half a decade. La La Land was also nominated for Best Original Screenplay; two years earlier, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Whiplash2. For the latter, Chazelle drew on his experiences as an aspiring but failed jazz drummer; for La La Land, he channeled his struggles of moving out to Los Angeles to chase his dream as a filmmaker and the frustrations of repeatedly encountering failure. If it feels like a passion project, that’s because it was— he loves cinema, jazz, and musicals, and he found a way to combine all three with the specific intention of grounding the musical genre in real life where nothing works out exactly as you want it to (as opposed to the musical’s conventional ‘happily ever after’ ending). When he realized no studio would finance a jazz musical, Chazelle put La La Land aside and made Whiplash; that film’s financial and critical success gave him the cachet to finally bring to life the story he’d been carrying around since 2010.
Chazelle has an active writing style that conveys the energy he is aiming for. At times, it almost feels like an action movie, using a lot of double hyphens especially to break up lines and, since he’s directing, camera directions to impress the idea that this is a story that is constantly on the move. The dialogue flies like a tennis volley, and it never feels weighted or bogged down by exposition.
He’s also extremely adept at conveying character through description. Here’s Chazelle showing us who Sebastian is by describing his apartment:
And here he is describing the brutal grind of the Hollywood machine as Mia is put through the audition wringer:
But how does the screenplay for La La Land measure as a musical?
Here’s the thing: On paper, it’s impossible because the songs aren’t written. Instead, it focuses on the story and uses the musical sequences as a way to propel it forward, functioning in the same way as an action sequence. The songs and dances aren’t the centerpiece (in a lot of great musicals, the plot exists as a clothesline); the characters are. I know some big musical fans who deplored La La Land because they thought the dance numbers were subpar. Perhaps, but as a screenplay, La La Land is as solid as they come. I would describe it as very good for three-quarters of the way, and excellent for its final section where we learn that Mia and Sebastian never stayed together, and have a silent reunion in the end. It’s a hell of a heartbreaker, one that evokes the ending from Roman Holiday.
I’d also argue that the part where Sebastian imagines what his life with Mia might have been like had he followed her to Paris is on par with the Carl and Ellie montage from Up. It does a wonderful job at depicting how we conjure up the “what ifs”, scenarios and fantasies that only exist in our heads and are perfect. Even more, you could take out the musical numbers— and it’d still work! For all his nostalgia, Chazelle is open-eyed and realistic about the brutal cost of chasing your dreams. I’m not entirely surprised why musical fans would be put off by it.
There’s a common adage that when writers are starting out, they should write what they know. It's funny but Chazelle really took it to heart because La La Land is the perfect encapsulation of that advice! It’s about the struggle of chasing your dreams in Hollywood (something Chazelle knew all too well about), it’s about jazz (something Chazelle is passionate about), and it’s in the form of a musical (a genre Chazelle loves). Put together, La La Land is an original and daring feat of writing, and a model to give hope to aspiring writers. It’s a screenplay for the ones who dream3.
Especially when you consider that in 2016, La La Land made more money at the box office than: Jason Bourne, The Legend of Tarzan, Star Trek Beyond, and Alice Through The Looking Glass
Whiplash is also on the WGA’s Greatest Screenplays of the 21st Century list at #32
But if you want to get your original idea made, especially if it’s not seen as a commercially enticing project, do what Chazelle did and write a script that financiers will back first!