Q.  Where is it supposed to be?

When Mia (Emma Stone) exits the pool party early, leaving her three roommates behind, she discovers that her car (in a no-parking zone) has been towed, and she is forced to walk home.

This scene follows Mia as she walks home alone to her Hollywood courtyard apartments.

( Now, if you've read my previous pages about the actual locations of that apartment house and the pool party house, you'd realize that - in the real world - Mia would be in for a very long walk...)

Along the way, she walks past two Hollywood murals (which are real, by the way).  But she only gets as far as "Lipton's" restaurant/club, where she hears the music of Sebastian's (Ryan Gosling's) piano, seems fascinated by it, and stops to go inside.

Here is the scene.  Pay attention to the various locatons:




Q.  Where was it really shot? 

This walking scene involves several brief shots of different locations as she makes her way towards home -  and we'll explain every one of them along the way:

0:15:24:  After Mia leaves the party, we see her alone on a residential street:

This is actually the same street as the pool party house: Estrondo Drive, in Encino, with the camera looking northwest., just a few yards away from the house. 

The tiered/jagged wall you see on the right side belongs to 4540 Estrondo.

0:15:35:  That is followed by a shot of another hilly street, where she's walking,
but we have left the previous residential neighborhood and are now in the city.

This is actually a long way from where she started in the Valley.  In fact, she's completely out of the Valley and is now on the east side of Hollywood, just north of the landmark Capitol Records building, and about three blocks north of the famous corner of Hollywood & Vine.

 In the shot above, we're looking east down Vine Street, from 1900 Vine.

Now, if you're familiar with Vine Street, that may seem confusing, because Vine is a north/south street, at least for most of its length through Hollywood.  But farther north, Vine is cut in half by the Hollywood (101) Freeway, and this is the separate north half of Vine, north of the 101 freeway. 

That north half of Vine curves to the east (at its south end), where it crosses Argyle Avenue and is renamed Dix Street to the east.   The bigger building seen near the center of the shot is the Hollywood Tower Apartments, at 6200 Franklin Ave.

The camera is on that north half of Vine, just west of Argyle, and just north of the 101 freeway, next to a freeway onramp. The camera is looking east down its slope. 
( For that to make sense, you may have to take a look at the map of the area. )



Here is a matching Google StreetView:




Built in 1929,  the Hollywood Tower was where Humphrey Bogart stayed when he first came to Hollywood.  Actor George Raft was a partial owner.  And it appeared in the Brian DePalma thrller, "Body Double".  It was also the inspiration for the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror at Disneyland.

Here is a video of the Hollywood Tower:

Hollywood Tower_full version_HD from MWest Holdings on Vimeo.

And here is a link to a 3-D Google Earth View.

   

0:15:47:   And a few seconds later, we see a different shot of her walking home.

It won't surprise you to learn that this was shot from just a few hundred feet from the previous location.  We're looking north up Argyle Ave, from the intersection of Argyle & Franklin Aves.
(If you turned the camera slightly to the left, you'd be looking back at the previous area.)

That large building to the left is the Castle Argyle. at 1919 Argyle Ave, in Hollywood.
Built in 1928, the "Castle" once housed the likes of Clark Gable, Howard Hughes, Ronald Reagan and Cecil B. DeMille. But like other buildings in the area, it fell into disrepair.  Today,  it's a Presbyterian apartment house,  which  mainly serves low-income seniors.





Here is a link to a matching Google Earth 3-D view.

0:15:52:  As Mia continues her walk home, she walks past an unusual mural,
featuring portraits of silent movie personalities.

In this shot, she is walking south, down the west side of Argyle Avenue,
where it passes under the Hollywood (101) Freeway, just south of Franklin Ave.

This is an untitled Hollywood mural by artist Dan Collins, created in 1986.

You'll find it on the west  (east-facing) wall of the "Hollywood Bowl Self-Storage" building, at 1847 Argyle Ave, in Hollywood.  It's part of a series of Hollywood-related murals that adorn the walls of this storage facility.  The mural is just to the right (north) of that building's main entrance.

As the business's name suggests, it's less than a mile southeast of the Hollywood Bowl.



Here is a Bing Streetside View,  Click on it to explore.

( Google's overzealous censors blurred out the faces on this mural in their StreetView,
so I resorted to using Bing StreetSide rather than Google's StreetView.)



Here is a video of the filming of this mural scene, with Emma Stone:





The real-life logic of her walking path makes sense, for the last three shots.  She headed east down the hill on Vine Street to Argyle Ave, then turned right to walk south on Argyle, crossing Franklin Ave, then followed Argyle under the 101 Freeway.

But that logic breaks down a bit in the next shot...

0:15:58:  Mia then immediately passes this second mural, featuring likenesses of
Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin, Shirley Temple, W.C. Field's, & James Dean.

The problem?  In real life, the two murals are about three miles apart.

This is the "You Are The Star" mural, at 1661 Wilcox Ave, in Hollywood,
on the east side of Wilcox, just south of the famed Hollywood Blvd.

(That is the west-facing wall of the building which houses Playmates Shoes.)

Painted by Tom Suriya, in 1983, the mural shows an entire movie theatre full of Hollywood stars, only this time, they are sitting in the theatre seats, and are watching you, the star!

Alas, the mural has been allowed to badly fade over the years.  In these screenshots, I brightened it up a bit in Photoshop. to make it look more like it used to, but its true sad state can be seen in the Google StreetView below.





You can  see a photo (which I shot) of the mural, showing what it used to look like,  here.

0:16:19:  Mia then stops by a doorway, next to a glass-brick wall, where she hears piano music, coming out of a door with a sign over it reading "Lipton's".

That doorway, which is right next to the "You Are the Star" mural,  doesn't lead to a club or  restaurant in real life.  It leads only upstairs to the offices of the "Muse Lifestyle Group" (a company which  organizes events and runs a number of hotspots), at 1648 Wilcox Ave.



Here is a link to a Google Earth 3-D view of the building.

0:16:49:  Entranced by Sebastian's piano theme, Mia opens "Lipton's" door...

in a wide shot which gives us a look at both the mural and the "Lipton's" doorway.
( As you'll notice, they also added some red neon near the door to spice things up a bit. )






Here is a video of the live filming of this mural scene, with Emma Stone:

But as I mentioned, this doorway doesn't really lead inside Lipton's.

(And this page is getting too long... to go into details here.)

To see where they actually filmed the interiors of Lipton's, click NEXT below.

    

    

"La La Land" and its images are copyright Summit Entertainment
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