Palisades High School Featured in ‘Carrie’ & ‘Freaky Friday’ Burned in L.A. Wildfires
The Palisades fires are currently spreading through the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles, damaging countless buildings and homes and forcing thousands of people to evacuate. Among the buildings impacted is a high school that has been featured in several notable films, including 1976’s Carrie and 2003’s Freaky Friday.
Parts of Palisades Charter High School, including the football field and several structures, have caught fire, though the full extent of the damage is currently unclear. A local Fox 11 broadcast showed footage of classrooms on fire.
The school was used for several Hollywood productions, including the 2003 remake of Freaky Friday and the series Teen Wolf. But it may be best known for its role as Bates High in the 1976 Brian De Palma film Carrie. The school’s football field can be seen in the clip below.
In addition to its usage as a setting for numerous films and television shows, many famous stars also attended the school, including J.J. Abrams, Forest Whitaker, Katey Sagal and Amy Smart, among others. The school, founded in 1961, was the most expensive school to be built at the time, coming in at $6 million. The school was named one of America’s best high schools by Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report in 2015.
Walt Disney/Everett Collection
While actor Steve Guttenberg did not attend the school, he currently lives in the city, is under evacuation orders, and admitted that the fire is “the most unbelievable I’ve ever seen.” He shared that there were “mothers who were having panic attacks [and] little kids crying. … The cars were bumper-to-bumper traffic for over two miles and it was dangerous, the police were coming. … I spent all day moving these cars up on the hill, trying to [move them] so the fire trucks could get through.”
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