Q.  Where is it supposed to be?

1:32:46: This is the house where Mia grew up, in her home town of Boulder City, Nevada, the one she told Sebastian was across the street from the library (where her aunt used to take her as a child, to watch classic movies).

We see Mia dining inside the house with her family.  It's after dark, when suddenly she hears a familiar horn honking outside.  She goes to the window and looks out, only to see Sebastian's car parked out front, with Seb leaning on the horn:

Mia goes outside and talks to him. He tells her the great news about the casting director loving her one-woman play, and wanting her to audition for a big movie.

But Mia has given up, and doesn't want to go back and try again. She's been hurt through repeated rejections, she's afraid she's just not good enough, and she just wants to call it quits.

But Sebastian is having none of it.

He tells her she is good enough, and that he will be outside her house at 8 AM, and for her to be there if she wants to take advantage of her big break.

The next morning, we see Seb sitting in his car outside Mia's house, looking at his watch as he waits for her to show up.  It is already past 8 AM. When she doesn't show, he starts to drive away, only to have Mia pop up at the last moment and gets in his car.

In case you were wondering,, there is an actual Boulder City, Nevada  Its about 25 miles southeast of Las Vegas, and 5 miles southwest of Lake Mead & the Hoover Dam.

But this isn't it.

La La Land''s camera's never really left Greater Los Angeles
 while shooting this movie.


OK, let's go back over those "Boulder City" locations one by one,
 and see where they really are.

But first, I should mention that all three locations are at the same corner:

It is the intersection of Carrizo Drive & Mendoza Drive, in Santa Clarita, CA.


First, the supposed Library, across from Mia's home:



No, this is not really a library.  They just put up a fake sign on the corner.

That sign, reading " Del Prado Library", on a patch of grass across from the houses, is actually the lawn of the Valencia Valley Elementary School, at the northwest corner of that intersection, at 23601 Carrizo Drive, Valencia.

The camera, in the shot above, is looking west from Mendoza Drive.

OK, what about the neighbor's house, across the street
where Seb was honking his horn?

Truth in advertising, at last.  It is indeed right across the street from Mia's house, it is a residential home, and the view we see out her window (above) is exactly what you would see from that house.

The screencap above shows that he is parked in front of the house at
25902 Mendoza Drive ( which is at the northeast corner of that intersection ).

The camera is looking northeast ..

  And last but not least, Mia's house itself:



Mia's family house is at 25851 Mendoza Drive,
at the southwest corner of Carrizo Drive & Mendoza Drive.

The camera ( in the shot above ) is at the northeast corner ( near the neighbor's house ), and is looking southwest (across the intersection) towards Mia's home.

Here is a blown-up view:



And here is a matching StreetView:

And that last shot, where Seb picks her up in the morning when she decides to go back to L.A. and take that one last chance for stardom? 

That's the same blue house, we're just looking at its east-facing side this time, with the camera looking west from Mendoza Drive.

Pull back a bit on the StreetView below, and you'll notice that
the silver car in the StreetView is parked almost exactly where
Sebastian is parked in the screencap above:




[ Warning: these are private homes. Do not trespass on their property,
knock on their doors, or do anything else to disturb the residents. ]

So, how did I figure out where it was? Well, I knew this was somewhere here in So Cal.  I just had to find it.  One out of a few million houses in Greater Los Angeles... That's "needle-in-a-haystack" impossible, of course.  To have any hope, I needed a starting point, of some kind, to have any hope of finding the house. It was frustrating.  I could almost read the street sign outside the house, but not quite. So, I tried something different. I went googling for photos of them filming the scene where they were wearing the same clothing that they were wearing in that scene outside her house. And after much Googling, I came up with this: Yes, it was just a photo on a Ryan Gosling fan website, but the paparazzi shot not only showed this nighttime same scene being shot - it also came with this caption: "AUGUST 21 - SANTA CLARITA, LOS ANGELES". So, I had my starting point.  At least I now knew that they filmed it somewhere in Santa Clarita. [ In case you're not familiar with the L.A. area, Santa Clarita is way up north, past the San Fernando Valley, in its own little valley.  It's about 30 miles northwest of downtown L.A., and about three miles southwest of Six Flags Magic Mountain, sort of the last big town before you start heading out into the mountains & the desert. ] But knowing that wasn't a huge help, because greater Santa Clarita ( which is composed of a number of smaller towns such as Valencia, Newhall, Saugus, Canyon Country, Stevenson Ranch, and Castaic ) is a pretty big area in itself, and I didn't have much else to go on.  No house number, no street name, no distinctive landmarks in the scene... All I had to work with was the general look of the houses in that neighborhood ( earlier in the movie, Mia mentioned that all of the houses in her home town look the same ), so I started looking at online real estate listings for Santa Clarita, trying to find houses that looked somewhat like the ones we see in the  movie. I found some.  But not surprisingly, I wound up with a lot of different neighborhoods that had homes that resembled like Mia's supposed family home.  So I had to start looking at each of those neighborhoods, one by one, via Google StreetView, trying to figure out which one might be the right one. Finally, I thought I had narrowed it down to an area south of the Valencia Towne Center mall and east of the 5 Freeway, that seemed the best match, where most of the tract houses looked a lot like the homes we see in that scene. But after giving it some more thought, I realized that I did have two  other clues to help me narrow things down a bit: It was obvious that her house was on a corner, and that there was a similar house on the corner right across the street. Also, they put that fake library sign across the street, on one of the other corners, which meant that there couldn't be houses on all four corners;  at least one of those corners had to have either a library, a school, a vacant lot… something that would allow them to out up their sign and pretend it was a library. So I started looking for intersections in those residential neighborhoods that didn't have a house on one of the corners. And after days of looking at every intersection in that area, I finally found it, at the corner of Carrizo Drive & Mendoza Drive.

Here is a link to a Google Earth of that corner,


    

    

"La La Land" and its images are copyright Summit Entertainment
The rest of this page is copyright © 2017-Gary Wayne - All Rights Reserved




Or return to the Seeing-Stars home page.