American Reunion|Newton High School, Covington — The Gym Dressed as a Reunion

The class of 1999 comes back to East Great Falls High, and East Great Falls High is Newton High School at 1 Ram Way in Covington, Georgia. Rams, not Trojans, though nobody on camera says so. The Newton County Board of Education approved the shoot at its meeting in June 2011 and the crew worked the building from the 5th to the 20th of July, taking the gym, the football field, the commons area and the hallways. Two hundred extras filled the reunion.

The gym is the part worth picturing. A high school gymnasium dressed for a class reunion is a strange, specific thing. The same varnished floor that squeaked under basketball shoes, the same retractable bleachers folded flat against the wall, and over all of it a rented dance floor, string lights and a banner with a year on it. Everyone in the room is thirteen years older. The room is not. That gap is the whole joke and the whole ache of the film, and the location did most of the work before an actor said a line.

It is a working public school, so the calendar decides what you can see from the road. Drive Ram Way on a Friday evening in autumn and the field is lit and the bleachers are full of people who have never seen the movie. That is the honest version of the reunion, the one that happens every week without a crew.