American Beauty | Long Beach Polytechnic High School — The Corridors Ricky Filmed Through

Long Beach Poly stands at 1600 Atlantic Avenue, a big civic slab of a school with columns and a name that Southern California takes seriously — it has sent more players to the NFL than any school in the country and educated Cameron Diaz and Snoop Dogg in the same decade. American Beauty used it alongside South High in Torrance to build the single high school where Jane Burnham and Angela Hayes go to class.

This is the half of the film that gets forgotten because the adults are so loud. Jane, hunched and furious, walking corridors while a boy she has never spoken to films her from a distance. Angela performing a version of herself that she cannot sustain. Ricky Fitts moving through it all with a camcorder and the flat certainty of someone who has already decided the world is worth recording.

The location choice was practical — two campuses, one fictional school, better angles — but the effect is a school that feels like every American school and no particular one, which is exactly what production designer Naomi Shohan meant by "Anywhere, USA."

Poly's frontage on Atlantic is public and photographable from the street. Look at the size of it. The film shrinks a school this large down to three or four faces and a hallway, and that narrowing is what being seventeen actually feels like.

Photo: American high school facade and Long Beach cityscape (Pexels, free licence) — illustrative of the setting.