In these times of stress and turbulence, the musicals of the 1930s-1950s with their notes of hope and escape may end up providing a relevant model for some of today’s movies. Certainly our dystopian movies of the last ten years have run their course. And the Golden Globe voters agree, having lavished the movie with a record seven awards.

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He gets dressed up for a date,” continued Zophres. “I love that he has a shirt, a tie, and a blazer on when he meets Emma at the movie theater. And she’s wearing a dress. To me, that’s the most romantic moment, from a clothing point of view, in the movie, because they both dressed up for that date. People should do that more often, as far as I’m concerned.” Of La La Land’s two main characters, Mia evolves most personally and professionally—a point Zophries was careful to telegraph.The elusive truth of the movie’s palette. In La La Land, red is used as a manifestation of reality; a way to either wake characters up to the truth they’re living, or dangle the promise of something greater above them. Below is Frank Sinatra’s stand-in dancer and Carol Haney dancing , with Gene Kelly waiting his turn. Perhaps the most interesting way Chazelle builds up reality’s power through red is by mixing it with other colors. Our main characters find themselves in rooms and streets bathed in warring blue and red lights, like when when Mia and Sebastian discuss her show’s first draft and his club’s name. Though the creativity and authenticity of red and blue mix to make purple, a personification of love (see the first rendition of “City of Stars,” or the stunning waltz in through the galaxy), Chazelle all too often doesn’t let the colors mix. Their clothes, their light, their neon – it rarely finds a place to comingle. Below are some of the original costume design sketches from some of those Golden Age Hollywood Musicals. The late great Debbie Reynolds had her first starring role in Singing in the Rain, considered by many to be the greatest movie musical.

La La Land Costumes Were Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling’s La La Land Costumes Were

Mia and Sebastian are encircled within a green hue. This vibrant colour can draw multiple interpretations within this scene. It could signify a new development for Sebastian’s path and his dream to open his own Jazz club. It can also highlight Mia’s envy as she struggles to find her place in her own path while she witnesses Sebastian’s new coming success. From the production-design perspective, there was one scene harder to bring to life than that heavily choreographed, freeway opening shot: the pool-party scene.As it plays, the movie uses the full color range to explore that something was always missing from their relationship; just as you can’t have rain without the sunshine or success without the hard work, Mia and Sebastian couldn’t live their lives in only one color scheme. By strategically deploying colors throughout the film, Chazelle makes the case that they were, in some sense, doomed to fail because they could never fully find their footing. At the end, her dance dress is white, no doubt inspired by Cyd Charisse’s dress from the “Dancing in the Dark” scene in Band Wagon. It’s what makes the “Epilogue” sequence so striking, visually and emotionally. We return to the old scenes of their relationship, Sebastian reconsiders his decisions, and for the first time we see Mia and Sebastian surrounded by a full rainbow. The technicolour world of La La Land is an instantly memorable one, and that's in no small part thanks to Mary Zophres' Oscar-nominated costume designs, which bring the classic glamour of director Damien Chazelle's Hollywood inspirations to modern Los Angeles. La La Land features intertextual references from the Musical Golden-Age of Classical Hollywood cinema. Chazelle captures the old Hollywood feel and pays homage to Classical Hollywood musicals including,

Costume Inflatable Laa-Laa Adult Teletubbies Fancy Dress Costume

While the choice to film in real locations adds to the sense of nostalgia and escapism for an older Hollywood. The colour manipulation of the lighting foreshadows the future of the characters’ paths. Overall, the techniques used in La La Land range from montage sequences to using primary colours, intertextuality and paying homage to the musicals of Classical Hollywood. See, details matter in La La Land. The fact that Mia changes out of heels to matching tap shoes when Sebastian and her have their twilight dance is important; we won’t see her in heels again until she’s left Sebastian. That Sebastian drives a classic, brown Riviera distinguishes him from Mia’s sensible, modern Prius. When you see yellow in La La Land it normally means there’s change ahead. Despite being one of the first colors we see in the technicolor dance sequence that opens the film, it’s not a color we see very often in the first part of the movie – why would it be? We’re only being shown Sebastian and Mia’s lives to-date; the establishing of the status quo. And so yellow appears mostly in spurts. Emma’s white dress had more volume and a more complicated pattern than her other costumes,” explained Zophries. “It had a silk chiffon top and a very lightweight silk charmeuse underneath, so it was like two layers, all hand sewn. It’s beautifully done. I’ve seen the movie seven or eight times, and that white dress slays me every time. . . . It’s funny, because the movie is so known for its color. But the white dress . . . I get teary-eyed when it is on camera, because it’s everything I wanted it to be. It just rises up in the air as you spin in it.” Helen Rose designed the costume below for the dancer Carol Haney in On the Town. The movie was a vehicle for some of MGM’s stars, including Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Ann Miller and Vera Ellen.

The planetarium: Mia's green dress

Damien Chazelle offers a nostalgic vision of Los Angeles’ past and makes the story relevant today by grounding the narrative in modern-day reality. La La Land offers an experience of immersive escapism where Mia and Sebastian’s goals, dreams and pathways are easily relatable. The use of primary colours represents the feelings and emotions of their characters. Damien Chazelle takes on a Postmodernist approach to the end sequence. Postmodernism in film is defined as moving against typical techniques, expectations, and narrative structure. La La Land subverts the expectations of a typical Hollywood happy ending by having multiple endings. The first end scene leaves Mia watching Sebastian playing the piano in his own jazz club and living his dream. Mia has started her own family and their romantic journey has reached its ultimatum. They both sacrificed their love story to achieve their individual dreams. As afterall, they came to Hollywood to discover their dreams, not to discover their romance. The preferred reading is intended to remind the audience that although life in a musical can have its fantastical elements, there is always a darker side to the consequences of dreams, when the story is grounded in reality. In Conclusion

Lala Costume - Etsy

The Coronado Island Film Festival, Reframed, is happening November 11 -15, 2020. We deliberated for most of the last year on what the Festival, our 5th Annual, should be like considering the pandemic, and decided on a mix of mostly virtual events with few live events highlighted below. Instead of passes as in previous […] christian esquevin In the final epilogue, when they’re thinking ‘What if we stayed together?’ there’s a white dress that Emma wears in the Paris fantasy sequence. The waltz is a very obvious reference to Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, who made such a brilliant [screen] partnership. There’s a dress that Ginger wears in Swing Time (1936) that just looks so fluid: it specifically has a very 1930s feel to it, but the way the dress moves feels like it has an anti-gravity effect. I was trying to get that same effect with the dress we made for Emma, which is actually my favourite. All the dresses that Mia wears were designed with dance in mind. As we get progressively further into the film, the volume in the skirts gets bigger and bigger: the white dress’s skirt wasn’t just a whole circle, it was a circle and a half.' That party scene foreshadows Mia’s creative potential early on. Unlike her partner, Mia isn’t quite distinctive right off the bat; up until then the movie has painted her as just another hopeful starlet. And while Sebastian gets a few scenes that demonstrate his skills as a pianist, Mia’s talent is a bit more obscure. Some of that is just part of the nature of a musical; it’s a lot easier to showcase someone’s instrumental expertise than it is someone’s acting talent within a film. Likewise, the color pallette of a scene matters. Director and writer Damien Chazelle’s bright, detergent-commercial colors are (like many mechanics of the movie) an homage to big Hollywood musicals of old. But the primary color choices he makes also conveys much more about the pair of artists, and the lives they choose to lead.

Shown above is Mary Ann Nyberg’s original costume design sketch for Cyd Charisse in Band Wagon, 1953. Charisse plays the younger ballet trained dancer to Astaire’s older (now somewhat tarnished) star. But sparks fly as they walk and then Dance in the Dark in Central Park. The costume sketch design has been somewhat modified for the film as the top has the front décolleté. Remaining is the free-flowing pleated skirt shown below. The costumes are blasted in primary colours – green, red, yellow, and blue to represent the fantastical world. These bright and bold colours highlight the drivers’ real emotions as all they wish to do is escape reality and express their feelings through movement and dance. The bright colours bring a stark contrast to the typical business attire and suits of people’s everyday workplaces. If viewers take one thing from her La La Land costume design, Zophres laughs that she hopes they will encourage people to ditch their athleisure wear. Another Walter Plunkett costume sketch is shown above, this one for Cyd Charisse in the “Broadway Melody Ballet” number with Gene Kelly. She has been Kelly’s femme fatale in the previous scene and now she comes out dressed as a bride. As the scene morphs into a fantasy the bridal outfit gets stripped of the skirt and she is bare-legged in their dance. A full spectrum means balance and work. From the beginning, the film suggests there was always something they had to sacrifice with their relationship, whether it was their creative drive, the possibility for change, or the promise of living the dream. As the Epilogue’s final notes hang in the air, Seb’s club is dimly lit by only three colors: red, yellow, and blue. For once La La Land gives Sebastian and Mia a balance. In hindsight, it was just always making it clear that it was something they could never have found with each other.