Jay Mohr – IAMNOTASTALKER

I wish I could say I’ve never met a Jennifer Aniston movie I didn’t like, but that is not the case. In fact, the opposite is more true – I’ve rarely met one I truly did enjoy. Picture Perfect fits into the “didn’t like” category. If you haven’t seen the film, this review Paul Tatara wrote for CNN perfectly encapsulates the not-so-titillating storyline. The 1997 romcom did manage to get a bit more interesting years after its release thanks to a 2010 Elle magazine interview with Jen’s costar Jay Mohr in which he had this say to say when asked about his most awkward interaction with a female celebrity – “Being on the set of a movie where the leading woman was unhappy with my presence and made it clear from day one. I hadn’t done many movies, and even though they screen-tested some pretty famous guys, I somehow snaked into the leading role. The actress said, ‘No way! You’ve got to be kidding me!’ Loudly. Between takes. To other actors on set. I would literally go to my mom’s house and cry.” The interviewer immediately surmised the female celebrity Mohr was referring to was JA, but he refused to confirm or deny the hunch. It did not take long for him to spill the tea, though. You can listen to various interviews he’s since given on the subject here and here. Jen’s animosity toward the comedian apparently stemmed from the fact that she wanted then boyfriend Tate Donovan to play her love interest, Nick, in Picture Perfect, but Mohr snagged the role instead. As he tells it, she made him pay dearly for the purported slight. The duo’s onscreen chemistry definitely attests to some friction. Aniston, as plucky ad-exec Kate, really plays the whole being-annoyed-at-Nick-thing a little too well throughout the film. Her disdain for him is palpable in practically every scene and the movie kind of suffers for it, to the point that it is not really believable when she inevitably falls for him at the end. Regardless, when I came across the address of Kate’s apartment from the flick in the book Manhattan on Film, I added it to my stalking itinerary for my April 2016 trip to the Big Apple and headed over there one (rather rainy) morning while in town.

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In Picture Perfect, Kate calls a charming building situated on the corner of West 21st Street and 8th Avenue in Chelsea home.

With its red brick edifice, arched detailing, carved columns, and teal-paned entrance doors, the structure is – dare I say it – picture perfect. It is not hard to see how it came to be used as the residence of the movie’s young, free-spirited, bohemian heroine.

In real life, the 5-story complex, which was originally built in 1900, boasts 13 units, a roof deck, a ground floor nail salon, and an elevator.

The building shows up twice in Picture Perfect. It first pops up in the scene in which Kate coaches Nick, who is posing as her boyfriend for a work event, on the ins-and-outs of their fake relationship.

The site then appears again toward the end of the movie in the scene in which an on-top-of-the-world Kate leaves her apartment to head to work after very publicly “breaking up” with Nick. Little does she realize, though, how much she’s going to miss him.

For whatever reason, at some point after the movie was shot, a secondary door situated just west of the one Kate was shown exiting in the scenes, was added to the building. As you can see in the photographs below as compared to the screen captures above, the white limestone-framed entry with the arched glass awning that stands to the left of Kate’s door was not in existence when Picture Perfect was lensed.

The interior of Kate’s apartment was just a set, which I learned via Mohr’s podcast was built on a soundstage at Silvercup Studios in Queens – a soundstage that Jen walked into on the first day of rehearsals and then promptly and loudly announced to Illeana Douglas (who played Aniston’s friend Darcy in the film) right in front of Jay, “Six guys they screen-tested. Six! The one f*cking guy I hate, that’s the one they hire!” Yikes. In the immortal words of Cher Horowitz, “That was way harsh, Tai!” The scenes shot inside of the apartment set were some of the last of Picture Perfect to be lensed and by that time Jen had decided she liked Jay and instead switched her vitriol to director Glenn Gordon Caron, though Mohr never forgave her for the hell he experienced during the tumultuous shoot. Who knows if Jay’s account of the situation is true, but, for reasons I am not going to get into here, I tend to believe it is. You can check out what the interior of one of the apartments in Kate’s building looks like in real life here and here. The actual units are much less colorful and far sparser than their onscreen counterpart.

For more stalking fun, follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Los Angeles magazine and Discover Los Angeles.

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: Kate’s apartment building from Picture Perfect is located at 301 West 21st Street in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood.

Today’s post is a long time in the making. Off and on for years now I have been trying to track down the restaurant where Jerry Maguire (Tom Cruise) got fired in the 1996 romcom of the same name. I decided to actively revisit the search a couple of weeks ago and, this time, got Mike, from MovieShotsLA, involved. He wound up finding the place shortly thereafter. As it turns out, Jerry was let go from Sports Management International while at Café Figaro at 9010 Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood. Sadly, the eatery was shuttered in 1997, but Mike and I headed right on out to stalk its former location nonetheless.

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Mike pinpointed the locale thanks to the unique trees visible outside of the restaurant during the firing scene. Those trees can only be found on a few streets in the L.A. area, one of which is Melrose Avenue. So he began his search at the start of Melrose (just east of where it intersects with North Doheny Drive) and, sure enough, found the right spot within a matter of minutes. The only trouble was, the space had gone through so many iterations in the years since Jerry Maguire had been shot, that it was a bit of a struggle for me to figure out what restaurant had been in operation at the time of the filming. Finally (after scanning through at least 25 Google search results pages), I came across this 2007 article which stated that an eatery named Café Figaro had once been located at 9010 Melrose Avenue and that its walls had been covered with “ticky tacky newspaper decoupages.” Eureka! With that information in hand, I did a Google search for “Jerry Maguire” and “Café Figaro” and turned up this post which confirmed the find. Woot woot!

Café Figaro first opened its doors in 1969. (Apparently, Bill Cosby was one of the initial investors.) It was founded by Tom Ziegler, who, in the 1950s, had pioneered a coffee shop of the same name on the corner of MacDougal and Bleecker Streets in Manhattan. When a rent hike forced Tom to close that eatery in 1969, he packed up all of its interior decor and migrated west to Los Angeles where he launched a new, larger Figaro. You can read a 1970 news article about the L.A. site shortly after its opening here. (Interestingly, a man named Ben Fishbein re-opened the Manhattan Café Figaro in 1975, six years after Ziegler had been forced out. The re-vamp proved extremely successful and remained in operation until 2008. You can read more about the East Coast Figaro’s history here.)

Café Figaro closed down in 1997, a whopping 28 years after its founding. The interior of the space was subsequently gutted and the Kass Bah steakhouse, which you can see of a photograph of here, opened in its place. By the summer of 2001, the Kass Bah had called it quits. Following that closure, the property went through numerous iterations – it was the Parisian Room, then Santo Coyote and then Murano, prior to which it was completely gutted once again. When Murano shuttered, the site became The Artichoke’s Heart, then, after yet another remodel (this one not as major as the first two, which were complete overhauls), Smoke. Since Smoke’s closing in 2013, the venue has remained vacant. It absolutely boggles my mind that Mike was able to locate a spot that had not only changed hands no less than six times, but had been completely gutted twice. Hats off to him!

In Jerry Maguire, Café Figaro stood in for Cronin’s, the “crowded” restaurant where Bob Sugar (Jay Mohr) rather comically fired Jerry. During the scene, Bob delivered this diatribe, one of my favorite from the movie – “What about me? You know what I went through knowing I was gonna have to fire my mentor? Carrying that around in my head for a week! Could you get past yourself for a second?”

Not surprisingly, while the general structure and set-up remain the same, the restaurant’s interior looks completely different today than it did onscreen. You can check out some photographs of Café Figaro’s interior from the early 1970s here and here, though, and see that it did indeed match what appeared in Jerry Maguire.

Café Figaro’s exterior (which was only seen in a limited view in Jerry Maguire) has also been remodeled since filming took place, but is still somewhat recognizable.

Thankfully, the space across the street, which was a children’s gym at the time that Jerry Maguire was filmed, has not changed over the years and still looks pretty much exactly the same as it did onscreen.

As does the building located next door to Café Figaro, which Jerry rushes by in the scene while on his way back to his office.

Mike and I were both floored to see that the manhole cover that was shown in the close-up of Jerry running was still there. Love that!

Me doing my best Jerry impersonation. Winking smile

For more stalking fun, be sure to follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Los Angeles magazine online. And you can check out my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic, here

Big THANK YOU to Mike, from MovieShotsLA, for finding this location! Smile

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: The former Café Figaro space from Jerry Maguire is located at 9010 Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood. The building that Tom Cruise runs by in the movie is located next door at 9006 Melrose Avenue. The manhole cover that he walks over can be found just east of that building’s front door.

Tag: Jay Mohr

Kate’s Apartment from “Picture Perfect”

Café Figaro from “Jerry Maguire”