Where Was 'Grease' Filmed? Every Filming Location for the Beloved Movie

For starters: three different schools were used for Rydell High.

Like a lot of musicals filmed in Los Angeles, the team behind Grease didn't want to stick to sound stages and film lots for most of the iconic movie's filming locations. Instead, they found real schools, homes, and even parking lots that could double as some of the most important spots in the movie.

Director Randal Kleiser told the Los Angeles Magazine that his team was inspired in part by film adaptation of the musical West Side Story, which also used a number of real-life locations instead of stages. He said, "West Side Story was one of the films we looked at. Robert Wise gave us his print to look at. If you look at Guys and Dolls, that was all done on stages and it had a different feeling from West Side Story, which, a lot of it, was done on location. The grittiness and the reality, I think, helped West Side Story and in Guys and Dolls, [the stage] made it more of a fantasy."

With that in mind, here are the filming locations for Grease.

Related: The 20 Most Memorable Quotes from Grease

Where was Grease filmed?

Inevitably, parts of Grease were filmed at Paramount's stages and lots, but a lot of the movie was shot on location at real schools, neighborhoods and homes in Los Angeles.

Is Rydell High School a real school?

Not only is Rydell High School fictitious, but the school scenes in Grease were also actually filmed in three different places—Venice High School, Huntington Park High School and John Marshall High School.

Of the three schools, Venice High was used for its aesthetics. As the background for external school scenes, Venice just worked. Location manager Alan B. Curtiss told Los Angeles Magazine, "It really played well [for] the first day of school when the girls and everybody are arriving in the parking lot, and being able to do some nice walk-and-talks getting them towards the front of the building. … Photographically, it worked."

The only problem with using real schools is that production was limited to the summer, when students wouldn't be around.

Interior scenes were filmed at Huntington Park High, where production was granted three weeks to work. Curtiss recalled that the experience there was pleasant and added, "They sort of had to work around us and we were trying to work around them. I had a very good liaison with the assistant principal, who was very, very helpful."

John Marshall High was tapped when the team needed a football field for the final school carnival scene. Curtiss felt that the fields at Venice and Huntington Park weren't quite right, and after visiting several schools, production settled on John Marshall. As he said, deciding on the school was truly a moment of "when you know, you know." Curtiss explained, "When I saw John Marshall, there was something that was very different about it."

What beach is in Grease?

That would be Malibu's Leo Carillo Beach, one of the most filmed beaches in cinematic history.

The movie opens with a love story: teenagers Danny (John Travolta) and Sandy (Olivia Newton-John) have met at a California beach. After an emotional couple of months together, the pair have to go back to their real lives—he to Rydell High, and she back home to Australia.

If the beach in the opening scene seems familiar, that might be because it has been used in Gidget, The Karate Kid and 50 First Dates.

Curtiss said the beach made the job easy. As he said, "The rock formation there kind of gives it some character that maybe some of the other L.A. County beaches don’t have—that are beautiful, but flat. It’s nice to have some architecture there with it."

Related: How Old Was John Travolta When He Played a Teen in Grease?

Where is Frenchie's house in Grease?

Grease also visits the home of aspiring hair stylist Frenchie. It turns out that the movie used a real-life house straight out of the early 1900s for the scenes. Curtiss emphasized that production didn't necessarily want to stay away from homes that felt like Los Angeles, but that this particular home had a feel to it that felt like it could be anywhere.

He said, "I know that we weren’t shying away from feeling like Los Angeles, but I think that house had sort of a Midwestern flavor to it. It was interesting, but it was a house that could have been in a lot of different areas of the country." The house sits at 4524 Kingswell Ave. in Los Feliz, California.

Where is the drive-in movie theater from Grease?

Despite the fact that the movie was shot in the 1970s when drive-in theaters were a bit past their prime, the production team on Grease was able to find the perfect theater for the movie: The Pickwick Drive-In in Burbank, California. The theater has also been used in other movies like Blue Thunder.

At the time, director Randal Kleiser said that The Pickwick was the only theater around. He told Los Angeles Magazine, "That was the only one that we thought of because it was close, it was open, and it was working. I don’t remember looking at anything else."

What are the other filming locations for Grease?

There are a number of additional locations for Grease. These include the L.A. River, which doubled as racing location Thunder Road, and the Bel Air Church, where teens snuck off to get up to no good at Lover's Lane.

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