The Amazing Spider-Man|Taft High School, Woodland Hills — Midtown Science with a San Fernando Valley skyline

Midtown Science High School is supposed to sit in Queens. It sits on Winnetka Avenue in Woodland Hills, twenty-five miles up the 101 from downtown Los Angeles, and the giveaway is the light: hard, flat Valley sun on low buildings and wide-open blacktop, nothing like the brick-canyon shadows of an outer-borough school.

William Howard Taft Charter High School opened in 1960 and looks the part — long single-storey wings, open-air corridors, breezeways instead of hallways, the postwar California idea that a school should be built for a climate rather than against one. Production found the exteriors here at 5461 Winnetka Avenue: the front approach, the walk-ups, the outdoor spaces where Peter gets shoved into a locker and later shoves back. The interiors went to soundstages in Culver City, and the gym sequence was shot at another school entirely, in Bellflower. Taft supplies the face.

The place has done this before. Its low profile and wide frontage have carried plenty of productions, and none of it has changed what it is: a working LAUSD public high school with two thousand-odd students in it on a Tuesday.

Which sets the terms of the visit. This one is looked at from the Winnetka Avenue sidewalk, not walked into. Come after last bell, when the lot empties, and the frontage flattens out into the shot you remember.

Location confirmed by movie-locations.com and The Cinemaholic.