American Reunion|128 South Broad Street, Monroe — The Bar on the Courthouse Square

A block south of the coffee shop, at 128 South Broad Street, the production took over a bar. The reunion crowd needs somewhere to drink badly and behave worse, and those scenes were shot here on Monroe's courthouse square in the summer of 2011.

The square is the point. The Walton County courthouse anchors it, and the marker out front notes that seven Georgia governors have lived in this county. The commercial buildings around it are National Register stock: brick fronts, iron lintels, pressed-tin ceilings still visible behind the plate glass. A bar in one of those rooms is long and narrow by default, because that is the shape an 1890s storefront was built in. You get a counter down one side, a brick wall down the other, and no way at all to avoid whoever came in behind you.

Which is exactly what a reunion film wants. There is no back room to escape into and no second door. Everyone who walks in walks past everyone who is already there.

Walk the square at dusk, when the courthouse lights come on and the storefronts start to glow. One square, four sides, everybody visible from everywhere. That geometry explains more about how the film stages its collisions than any location list ever will.