Bloomington's Assembly Hall, Armstrong Stadium and Kirkwood Avenue: Where Little Five was filmed

On Saturday July 25, extras began filling the bleachers of Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall — IU's 17,000-seat basketball arena — for filming. Participants were encouraged to wear 1980s-style clothing, and the crowd that arrived delivered: high-waisted acid-wash denim, denim jackets and IU shirts filled the stands in a scene designed to recreate the atmosphere of late 1980s collegiate Indiana. Assembly Hall, opened in 1971 and one of the most iconic venues in college basketball, was transformed into a period-accurate 1988 crowd scene. 

Bill Armstrong Stadium — IU's outdoor athletics and football facility — provided the race sequences. The Little 500 is a 200-lap, quarter-mile track race, and the production needed a venue that could accommodate not just the racing itself but the period crowd atmosphere surrounding it. Armstrong Stadium, with its open-air character and Bloomington setting, gave the race scenes their genuine collegiate athletics environment.

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The production closed sections of Bloomington's streets across multiple days in July and August. On July 20 and 21, Grant Street between 8th and 6th Streets and 7th Street between Lincoln and Dunn Streets were closed for filming. Park Avenue from 10th to 9th Street was also closed on July 20. On August 3 and 4, Kirkwood Avenue from Walnut to Indiana and Dunn Street from 6th to 4th Street were used for filming. The alley between College Avenue and Walnut Street, between 7th and 6th Streets, was also employed on August 4. On August 1, filming took place in the Griffy area — the natural landscape of Griffy Lake and its surrounding woodlands on the north side of Bloomington.

Kirkwood Avenue is Bloomington's main street — the commercial strip running from the IU campus gates to the downtown square, lined with restaurants, bars and shops that in 1988 looked very different from today. Closing it for filming and dressing it for the 1980s gives the production one of its most visually specific period environments.

After wrapping the Bloomington location work in mid-August, the production moved to Chicago for interior shots.

Little Five is a Bloomington film about a Bloomington story, made by a Bloomington company in the actual places where the story happened. That is rarer than it sounds. And the thousands of people who showed up in their acid-wash denim on a July Saturday understood it.

Little Five is expected to premiere in fall 2027.