Torrance High School: The real-life school that has been used in countless teen movies
No single movie or TV show can lay claim to monopolising a particular location, especially one that’s close to Hollywood and presents the perfect backdrop for a high school setting, given its real-life credentials as an educational establishment.
Ironically, arguably the most famous alumni of Torrance High School ended up getting the biopic treatment from an A-list director, but it wasn’t part of the shoot when Angelina Jolie opted to shoot virtually the entirety of 2013’s Unbroken in Australia instead.
Louis Zamperini was a track star who competed at the 1936 edition of the Olympics in Berlin before surviving a plane crash and 47 days adrift at sea during World War II, where he was promptly detained in several prisoner-of-war camps before finally being released. He was a Torrance student, but the film based on his remarkable life didn’t return to add some extra authenticity.
Not that it stopped the campus from becoming a hotbed for multiple different genres, though, with everything from comedy and drama to fantasy and horror descending upon Torrance to make the most of its distinctive architecture and prime California real estate to roll cameras.
In 1990s small screen sensation Beverly Hills, 90210 – not to mention the spinoff sequel series that went by plain old 90210 – Torrance was the exterior of the fictional West Beverly High School, and it embedded itself even deeper into the decade’s pop culture consciousness by providing the original façade for Sunnydale High School in Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer for its first three seasons.
Patricia Arquette’s supernatural drama Medium also made use of Torrance, as did Shailene Woodley’s five-season coming-of-age teen story The Secret Life of the American Teenager. In fact, it’s such a stereotypically ‘American high school’-looking building – which is intended as a compliment in this case – that it was picked as the perfect setting for the hit parody Not Another Teen Movie.
Freddie Prinze Jr and Rachel Leigh Cook’s rom-com She’s All That, Rob Schneider’s The Hot Chick, Wes Craven’s disastrous lycanthropic slasher Cursed, Jim Carrey’s box office smash hit Bruce Almighty, Olivia Wilde’s short-lived TV series Skin, and the Cameron Crowe-penned comedy The Wild Life are among the other notable productions to have set up shop at Torrance over the decades.
The city at large – with a modest population of under 150,000 – has been deemed prime real estate for Tinseltown dating back just as long, considering some of the movies and TV shows to have captured footage in Torrance without descending upon the high school extends to Brian De Palma’s crime classic Scarface, Sam Mendes’ American Beauty, Ron Howard’s Ransom, and Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, to continue illustrating just how much the studios love the unassuming coastal locale.