21 Jump Street|Grace King High School — The Auditorium of 2005 and Peter Pan

Before the badges and the undercover work, there is a prologue set in 2005. Schmidt with bleached hair and a chain, doing his best Slim Shady, walking up to a girl in a hallway and asking her to prom. Jenko laughing at him. The rejection so complete that it defines the next seven years of the character's life.

Location guides to the film place that flashback material, and the auditorium scenes of the school's stage production, at Grace King High School, 4301 Grace King Place in Metairie. The campus opened in 1968, named for the New Orleans historian and novelist Grace Elizabeth King, and it ran for fifty-five years on this block off Airline Drive before Jefferson Parish closed it in 2023 and redrew its attendance boundary into neighboring schools.

Crews liked it. It turns up in more than one Louisiana-shot production, because a big suburban campus with a proper auditorium and long institutional corridors gives a designer everything a fictional American high school needs and nothing anyone has to hide.

The school is closed now, so this is a look from the sidewalk at a building with no bell schedule left in it. Come in the afternoon, when the light is on the front elevation and the parking lot is empty.

An auditorium that once held a real graduating class every spring is best remembered as the room where a movie staged the worst night of a teenager's life. Both things happened here. Only one of them was written down.