La La Land follows Emma Stone as an aspiring actress who hits one roadblock after another on her quest for success and stardom. Now, somebody may have figured out just why she had so much trouble getting attention. In the film, Mia tries to carve her own path by putting on a one woman show. Unfortunately, almost nobody shows up to the thing. It turns out the reason for this may be that her email etiquette is absolutely terrible.
Since Mia Dolan is doing all the work herself to promote her show she has to email all the media outlets and casting agents directly to try and get some attention for her show. This is totally fine, it's part of the business. However, as comedian Emily Heller points out, normally when you're mass emailing a bunch of strangers, who also don't necessarily know each other, the proper thing to do is blind copy them. That way, everybody gets your email, but you haven't broadcast the addresses of everybody to else to the entire mailing list.
This move could have led to a pair of different problems. First off, not using the bcc function absolutely screams "amateur" to everybody receiving the email, potentially leading the recipients to assume that the email isn't worth their time. Beyond that, anybody else could have simply been so annoyed by the faux pas that decided to ignore her out of spite.
It's quite a relief to see that I'm not the only one who noticed this. While it escaped my first viewing, I've seen La La Land twice, and the second time through I noticed this exact same thing. It's one of those things that really does strike you if you ever send or receive mass emails like this.
To be fair, Mia is an amateur when it comes to this sort of thing. She's been going on auditions for some time when La La Land opens but the one woman show she writes is a new idea born of the inspiration from Ryan Gosling's character Sebastian. Unfortunately, there's no reason for Sebastian to necessarily know this either, so while Mia's show might be incredibly well written and acted, there's nobody around to help her with marketing, a skill she clearly doesn't have.
It works out in the end, however, as one of the few people who does show up to So Long Boulder City is a casting director who eventually gives Mia the big break she's been looking for. The casting director apparently didn't mind having her email address sent to the entire world. You can actually see in the image the email address for a.brandt@amybrandtcasting.com. Amy Brandt is, in fact, the woman who calls looking for Mia and gives her the audition.
