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La La Land
La La Land, released in 2016 and directed by Damien Chazelle, revived the classic Hollywood movie musical format for a contemporary audience, telling an original, non-adapted love story between an aspiring actress and a jazz musician set against modern Los Angeles. The film's extended single-take opening number, filmed on a closed Los Angeles freeway on-ramp, required extensive rehearsal with a large ensemble cast of dancers and represented one of the most technically ambitious dance sequences filmed for a mainstream studio movie in decades. La La Land's 2017 Academy Awards ceremony became infamous for a major presentation error, in which the film was mistakenly announced as the Best Picture winner before producers realized the award actually belonged to Moonlight, a mix-up that unfolded live on stage and became one of the most widely discussed moments in Oscars broadcast history. The film's combination of an original, non-adapted musical narrative with genuine homage to classic Hollywood musical filmmaking techniques helped revive mainstream interest in the movie musical format, which had become a considerably less common major studio genre in the decades before its release.
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West Side Story
West Side Story, released in 1961, adapted the Broadway musical's reimagining of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet into a story of rival New York City street gangs, and its filming took place on real Upper West Side blocks that were being demolished at the time to make way for the construction of Lincoln Center. The film's Jerome Robbins choreography, blending ballet technique with street-inspired movement, set new technical standards for film musical dance sequences, and Robbins's insistence on extensive rehearsal time and multiple takes reportedly contributed to significant production delays and budget overruns during filming. Its score, composed by Leonard Bernstein with lyrics by a young Stephen Sondheim in one of his earliest major professional credits, is widely regarded as one of the greatest musical theater scores ever written, blending Latin rhythms with more traditional Broadway orchestration to reflect the story's Puerto Rican and Anglo-American character conflict. The film won 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and Steven Spielberg's critically acclaimed 2021 remake introduced the story to a new generation of audiences, reflecting the original's lasting influence on how film musicals could address serious social themes like racial tension and urban gang violence within a musical theater format.
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