Mean Girls | 2004
- DIRECTOR |
- Mark Waters
Nominally set in the 'Chicago' suburb of 'Evanston', the high school classic was filmed in the dependable old standby of Toronto, aka 'Anywhere, USA'. Find out exactly where.
Brought up in Africa and homeschooled, Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) finds her self learning to adjust to the terrifying feral culture of the middle-class US high-school, with its tribes, laws and customs.
Supposedly set in 'Evanston, Illinois', the film was made around the pleasant environs of Toronto, Ontario.
The leafy suburb in which Cady's family lives is in The Beaches district on the shore of Lake Ontario, east of Downtown Toronto.
The home is 4 Balsam Road, near Glen Stewart Park.
Cady is dropped off by her overly anxious parents for her first day at 'North Shore High School' on Montgomery Road in Etobicoke, the western district of Toronto.
In reality, this school frontage is Etobicoke Collegiate Institute, 86 Montgomery Road. The Institute also supplied the playing fields at the rear to which Cady is taken on her first day by outsiders Janis Ian (Lizzy Caplan) and Damian (Daniel Franzese), but the school's interiors are a mash-up of several different locations.
The hallways and bathrooms were those of the old Shaw Street School in the West Queen West area, which closed in 2000 and has now become a community cultural hub called Artscape Youngplace at 180 Shaw Street.
In the heart of Downtown, the office of Principal Duvall (Tim Meadows) was filmed in the old Laughlen Centre, a former 'workhouse' which became an elder care home, at 87 Elm Street, and had already closed by 2004. It was demolished in 2009, but if you're really fascinated, its facade has been preserved as part of a YWCA.
The school auditorium – used for the Christmas show (Jingle Bell Rock) and the Spring Fling King & Queen announcement – along with the gymnasium where everyone reads their apologies and performs the 'trust' ritual, is Malvern Collegiate Institute (formerly East Toronto High School), 55 Malvern Avenue, back to the east of Downtown in East Danforth, and only a couple of blocks north of Cady's home.
'Old Orchard Mall', the inevitable shopping galleria in which the school's dominant clique, The Plastics (a new generation of Heathers for the 21st century) led by Regina George (Rachel McAdams), hang out was Sherway Gardens Mall now CF Sherway Gardens Mall, 25 The West Mall back in Etobicoke. It stayed relatively untouched for years but eventually succumbed to a makeover – so good luck in trying to find the 'watering hole'.
Regina, as befits her Queen Bee status, lives in a pillared mansion (we're not told if those pillars date all the way back to the Seventies) at 11 High Point Road, in an area called Bridle Path, in North York. Dubbed "Millionaires' Row", this is supposedly the most affluent neighbourhood in Canada.
There's a final resolution to the dramas, which sees Cady doing penance for her actions by joining the nerdy Mathletes team for the final of an inter-schools maths competition held in Convocation Hall, a domed rotunda reminiscent of Oxford's Sheldonian Hall, on the St George Campus of the University of Toronto.
As the winning team exits the hall, you may recognise the campus from such Toronto-based productions as 1988's Cocktail with Tom Cruise, Guillermo del Toro's Mimic (1997), 1998's Urban Legend and 2008's The Incredible Hulk.
Now, I have to mention the claim that school interiors were filmed at Montclair High School, Montclair in New Jersey. This jaunt to the USA isn't mentioned in the Director's Commentary and I can't find any first hand confirmation of it. Although the school has appeared in several other films, it seems odd to have used this one location outside Canada.
