Justin Hurwitz sits behind a piano in a house in Hollywood, California, down the road from the Paramount Pictures studio lot, where Cecil B. Demille shot The Ten Commandmentsand Dr. Phil currently films his daytime talk show. With his Adidas sneakers and jeans, Hurwitz looks like an average dude who would watch X-Men movies, but then he frowns and stares at the keys. His fingers start flying across the piano, forcing out of the instrument the jazzy melody that runs throughout La La Land, the polarizing movie musical poised to win Best Picture at the Oscars in February.His score has turned La La Landinto the Stranger Thingsfor musical fans and cinema freaks. As the Netflix sci-fi series' theme triggered viewers' memories of 1980's kids movies like E.T.and Stand by Me, La La Land's music has sent audiences into a technicolor spiral of nostalgia for 1950's movie musicals— Singin' in the Rain, An American in Paris—and the 20th century dream of moving to Los Angeles and becoming a star. Although the film has been predicted to win Best Picture since its debut at the Venice film festival, its romanticism has alienated some critics who find the musical vapid in the era of Trump, a time of serious political danger. Hurwitz, though, wrote the score to tell a story, and explore themes about art and ambition, instead of conjuring images of movies long past. "It can make you nostalgic for a time when those musicals were commonplace, but it hopefully doesn't feel like an old fashion movie," he says. "It was never intentioned to feel or sound old-fashioned."La La Land tells the story of two artists: Mia (an actress) and Sebastian (a jazz pianist). Emma Stone is the female star, Ryan Gosling is the male lead. Both characters are struggling to make their dreams come true in contemporary Los Angeles, and over the course of the film, they fall in and out of love with each other and their respective arts. Throughout the movie, Sebastian struggles to freshen up jazz, while Mia fights to land a role—or even an audition for a role—better than a one-episode part on a bad network crime show. Although Hurwitz and director Damien Chazelle took inspiration from the scores of musicals directed by Jacques Demy (best known for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) or produced by Arthur Freed, the mogul who oversaw The Wizard of Oz and dozens of other MGM musical classics from 1939 to 1962, they aimed to use the music and plot in a way unseen in films like Freed's girl-meets-boy musicals, like Meet Me in Saint Louis."The movie gets at some interesting ideas about art and the idea of art being rooted in the past but needing to move forward," Hurwitz says. "That's an idea that I haven't seen in any of the older musicals we love."Read the rest on Broadly
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