La La Land - Filming Locations: The Church

(H.) 1:00:17: We get a brief glimpse of an ornate Spanish-looking church, with a tall

steeple.

(This is another one of those "blink and you'll miss it" shots.)

This could have been a very difficult location to track down, since there are countless churches in Greater Los Angeles.

But fortunately, I recognized this one almost immediately.

Why? Because long ago, I created a page about this church ( as one of my "Churches of the Stars" pages ) since it was the home parish of Bob Hope.

( Bob's house was just east of here, in Toluca Lake. )

And as part of the process, I drove by and shot this photo of the church:

So I instantly knew this to be
Saint Charles Borromeo Catholic Church,

at 10800 Moorpark Street, in North Hollywood, CA.

In that screenshot above, the camera is looking southeast (and up).

Although it looks it might be a very old building, this church was built in 1959, replacing the previous, mission-style church building ( which still stands, and can be seen just to the right of the current church ).

Over the years, the church has seen more than its fair share of Hollywood celebrities. You can read more about that here.

I'm not sure why they included it in this musical montage. I suppose they just thought that given the palm trees and the church's ornate, Spanish-Colonial architecture , it does have a certain Southern California-postcard look.

( For the uninitiated, North Hollywood is not Hollywood. It's a separate neighborhood on the other side of the hills, in the San Fernando Valley, not far from Universal Studios Hollywood, and the collection of studios in Burbank. )

Here is a Google StreetView of the church:

Here is that very short scene from the montage: