American Reunion|Heritage High School, Conyers — Friday Night Lights on Loan

Two Georgia high schools split the job. Newton High in Covington got the reunion. Heritage High School, at 2400 Granade Road SW in Conyers, gave up its football stadium and its band room to the same production in the summer of 2011, part of a shoot Universal spread across four counties east of Atlanta.

A band room is an underrated set. Instrument lockers along one wall, tiered risers, chairs standing at odd angles where the last period left them, sheet music dropped on the floor, the smell of valve oil and old carpet. Every American teen comedy needs one and most of them build it. This one was already there, worn in by twenty years of ninth graders, and it shows.

The stadium outside does the other half of the work. Concrete and aluminium bleachers, a press box roughly the size of a shed, a scoreboard with the school's name across the top, chain-link running the length of the track. This is the ordinary architecture of a Southern Friday night, and on film it passes for Michigan without a single change of dressing.

Granade Road is public and the stadium sits in plain view of it. Come during a home game in autumn, when Rockdale County plays its full schedule, and you will hear a drumline warming up in the same room the crew filmed in. No tour gets you closer than that.