La La Land filming locations: the real Los Angeles spots behind every big scene, and how to visit them
Damien Chazelle shot La La Land on real Los Angeles ground — a freeway interchange, a Griffith Park hiking road, a Hermosa Beach jazz room that has been booking bands since 1949. Here's the address for each big scene and what you'll find there now.
Almost nothing in La La Land was built on a soundstage. The freeway, the funicular, the planetarium, and the jazz club are all real places with real addresses, and most of them are still open.
The freeway and the hilltop
"Another Day of Sun" was filmed over two days on the ramp linking the 105 Century Freeway and the 110 Harbor Freeway, south of downtown towards Compton. Production took over both directions of the carpool lane and parked half the cars facing backwards. The same stretch supplied the bus-jump sequence in Speed in 1994.
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"A Lovely Night" — the tap number that carried the entire marketing campaign — was shot at a bend called Cathy's Corner on Mount Hollywood Drive in Griffith Park, looking out over the San Fernando Valley. The Mulholland-style street lamps and the bench were props, brought in and taken away again.
Cathy's Corner is not a residential street and you cannot drive to it. It's roughly 2.5 miles up a paved trail, in a park that has rattlesnakes and mountain lions. Daylight only, and bring water.
Griffith Observatory and the Rialto
Mia and Sebastian go to the Observatory, 2800 East Observatory Road, because the projector has broken during a screening of Rebel Without a Cause — the 1955 James Dean film that made the building famous in the first place. The Observatory interiors are the genuine article. The planetarium was not: that set was built on a stage, with a vintage Minolta projector hired from the Planetarium Projector Museum at Big Bear Lake.
The cinema they walk out of is the Rialto, 1023 Fair Oaks Avenue in South Pasadena, which opened in October 1925 to a design by Lewis A. Smith and stopped showing films to the public in 2007. Owner Izek Shomof restored the exterior in 2020, with new neon fitted to the marquee and vertical sign that November; the interior is leased to the Mosaic church group. You can photograph the front. You can't buy a ticket for a screening.
The montage, address by address
- Grand Central Market, 317 South Broadway — the 1917 market hall, across from the Bradbury Building of Blade Runner fame.
- Angels Flight, 351 South Hill Street — the 1901 funicular, out of service when the film shot and running again from 31 August 2017. Fare is $1.50 each way, or $3 for a souvenir return.
- Colorado Street Bridge, Pasadena — the 1913 arched span over the Arroyo Seco.
- Watts Towers, 1765 East 107th Street — Simon Rodia's scrap-and-tile spires, built over 34 years.
- Fern Dell, Western Canyon Road — the shaded end of Griffith Park, entered off Los Feliz Boulevard.
- Hermosa Beach Pier, Pier Avenue — where Sebastian dances alone at dusk.
The jazz, the shows, and the fakes
The Lighthouse Café at 30 Pier Avenue in Hermosa Beach, where Sebastian tries to convert Mia to jazz, has been booking live music since 1949 and still does. The restaurant where J.K. Simmons orders him to stick to Christmas standards is the Smoke House, 4420 West Lakeside Drive in Burbank, directly opposite the Warner Bros lot. The Messengers play the El Rey Theatre at 5515 Wilshire Boulevard; Mia stages her one-woman show at Club Fais Do Do, 5257 West Adams Boulevard. Her flat is Rose Towers at 1728 East 3rd Street in Long Beach. "Seb's" is two venues stitched together — the exterior is Black at 6202 Santa Monica Boulevard, the interior is The Blind Donkey at 149 Linden Avenue, Long Beach.
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Two things you can't visit as they appear. Mia's coffee shop was a set dressed on the Warner Bros lot in Burbank, on a street whose opposite window had served as the Paris flashback in Casablanca — which is where Chazelle got the idea of making Mia a Casablanca obsessive. It's now a stop on the studio tour. And her Chateau Marmont suite was shot at Orcutt Ranch in Canoga Park, a Spanish-style adobe better known as a wedding venue.
"You can't have a better tourism brochure than this movie," then-mayor Eric Garcetti said of the film. The city has been cashing that in ever since.