Living in Los Angeles: The Financial Realities of a Hollywood Dream

What about the average date night with Sebastian? Surely, he isn't picking up the whole tab since his bills are overdue and he can't hold down a job as a pianist. (Not when they want him to play Christmas carols! He's got jazz in his blood!) The price of a movie ticket to see something like Rebel Without a Cause, just like Seb and Mia did? $12. Drinks and dancing? Roughly $35 dollars if they are going dutch.

The cost of Mia's dream:

At the beginning of the movie, as she sings "Someone in the Crowd," with her three roommates, she is beginning at a deficit on her salary based on rent alone. When she moves in with Seb, she's left with $183 after rent (and without taxes pulled from her paycheck) which is still not to enough to cover all that her dream requires. What's actually more likely is that even as Mia and Sebastian dance through L.A. (or, you know, La La Land), they don't actually live there, but in the greater Los Angeles area, like Burbank. Maybe her parents are helping her out a bit too. Even outside the heart of Hollywood, this ambition is an expensive one in an expensive area.

But, hey, let's also remember this: Mia becomes a big-time movie star. So, in her case, her investment pays off (but what she loses in love...we can't even go there). The real-life Mia, aka Emma Stone, has a reported net worth of about $8 million, and at the end of the movie, Sebastian also has a booming jazz club (and, presumably, not-too-shabby royalties from the success of The Messengers). So, for these folks, they may have ended up in the black — but it just goes to show that there's a lot of financial insecurity in getting there.