American Wedding|St. Anthony High School, Long Beach — The Gym Where Stifler Taught the Waltz

Stifler teaching Jim to waltz is the scene people remember from this film, and it was shot in a Catholic high school gym in downtown Long Beach. St. Anthony has stood on Olive Avenue since the 1920s. The gym is the hall every American school has — sprung wooden floor, painted line markings, roll-out bleachers, high windows throwing hard light across the middle of the room. Nothing was built for it. The crew brought a boom box and a folding chair and let the room do the rest, which is why the scene plays as awkwardly and as honestly as it does. This is a working school, so the gym is not open to visitors. What you can do is stand on Olive Avenue and take in the brick massing and the arched entrance that bracket the building. Downtown Long Beach has changed hugely around it, towers rising within a few blocks. The school has not. Come at three in the afternoon, when the doors open and the noise coming out of them is the noise the scene was cut to.