John Krasinksi – IAMNOTASTALKER

June 19, 2020December 3, 2020

The Best Buy Parking Lot Where Jim Proposed to Pam on “The Office”

Like much of the world, I have been re-watching The Office while quarantining. There’s nothing quite like the silly shenanigans of the Dunder Mifflin gang to provide laughs during a trying time. And it’s even inspired me to do some stalking! In viewing Season 5’s “Weight Loss: Part 2,” I realized I had never stalked the roadside service station where Jim Halpert (John Krasinski) finally proposed to Pam Beesly (Jenna Fischer). As most fans know, the station was not real, but a set built specifically for the shoot in the rear parking lot of a Los Angeles Best Buy. Though several sources note the Best Buy as being in Los Feliz, I quickly discerned it was actually the outpost at 2909 Los Feliz Boulevard in Atwater Village. I headed out to stalk the lot shortly thereafter (donning a mask and gloves, of course!) and took photos of practically every square inch of it. Per co-executive producer Gene Stupinsky, even the hills in the background were digitally replaced with trees indigenous to the East Coast for the scene, so I did not have high hopes for being able to pinpoint exactly where the set stood. But then I received The Office: The Untold Story of the Greatest Sitcom of the 2000s: An Oral History by Andy Greene for my birthday last week and my prayers were answered! There in the image section of the book was a photo of the proposal set with a backdrop of mountains visible, allowing me to ID the spot where Jim got down on one knee! Though I only took one selfie during my stalk, it turned out to be in the perfect position! Talk about fortuitous!

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In “Weight Loss: Part 2,” Jim spontaneously IMs Pam, telling her to meet him “halfway” for lunch (Pam was attending art school in New York at the time) at “the rest stop where that soda exploded on me.” As soon as he arrives, he drops to one knee and proposes, saying he can’t wait any longer. Series creator Greg Daniels chose to shoot the romantic segment at such a mundane setting because, as noted in Greene’s book, “Momentous events can happen to us in a place that we least expect it.” Daniels was actually inspired by a real service station he patronized. In the book, producer Randy Cordray explains,“ What he had in mind was an actual rest stop that he and his family visit when they visit his in-laws in Connecticut. They would fly into LaGuardia and hop in their rental van and they would always stop at this one ExxonMobil station along the Merritt Parkway to use the bathroom and get a bite to eat and grab a drink.” 9/11, of all things, thwarted the show making use of the actual station thanks to a moratorium on filming the oil company implemented following the attacks. When a similar location could not be found anywhere on the West Coast, Daniels and Cordray sent production designer Michael Gallenberg on a mission to photograph and measure the Merritt Parkway site and then subsequently re-create it back in L.A.

I’m sure you can guess what’s coming next! As soon as I read that the famous gas station set was based upon a real locale, I, of course, set out to find it! It proved a bit tough being that all six Merritt Parkway rest stops bear a similar aesthetic and all were remodeled in 2012/2013. In doing some detective work via historic Google Street View imagery, though, I am fairly certain that the rest stop in question is the one located in Fairfield on the southbound side of the parkway.

Though it boasts a side wing that the set station did not have, the roofline, octagonal windows and front door positioning all match what appeared onscreen. Not to mention The Office station was named “Fairview”, which is very similar to Fairfield. Again, this is just a hunch, though. I reached out to Michael Gallenberg for confirmation, but unfortunately he does not have access to his office or his files right now due to COVID-19. He is going to get back to me as soon as that changes, though.

Once Gallenberg had his measurements in hand, the production team looked to where the set replica would be constructed. Building it on an actual highway was given a quick veto by the California Highway Patrol, so Michael instead zeroed in on the Best Buy parking lot. In The Office: The Untold Story of the Greatest Sitcom of the 2000s: An Oral History, Cordray says, “There’s five acres of black asphalt behind a Best Buy store in Glendale, California. It is completely barren, unstripped and unpainted.” And it is well-known to location managers, having appeared in the Shibuya Square race segment of 2006’s The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.

Using the below photo from Andy Greene’s book, I lined up the hills in the background and was able to determine that the gas station was constructed in the middle of the lot’s western edge.

The set was extensive! The mini-mart portion of it was actually just a façade with a scant eight-foot depth, the fridges and coolers visible behind Jim and Pam merely hi-res photographs. In front of the mart was an overhang canopying four pumps.

And in front of the pumps, a faux freeway was created! In Greene’s book Cordray says, “We built a four-lane freeway out in front and we used colored tape to mark the lanes. And we built a median strip with Astroturf and guardrail. This was designed in a giant dog bone shape so that cars and trucks could pass through the shot at fifty-five miles an hour, and then go way out into the distance, arc in a big circle and come back through the shot the other direction. I had thirty-five precision drivers.” The set also boasted extensive rigging to supply the rain the segment required. (That rigging is visible in the photo of the set from Andy Green’s book above.) Of it, Cordray states, “The nearest water was a fire department hydrant in front of Best Buy, which was several hundred yards away, so we had giant construction cranes holding up water tankers over the whole set so that we could rain [on] four lanes of freeway and the whole top of the gas station.” (As it turns out, my friend’s company, Underwood Water Trucks, was responsible for the rigging, which I was so thrilled to learn!) While it may sound like far too large an undertaking to take place in an electronics store parking lot, the Los Feliz Best Buy lot is quite possibly the biggest I have ever encountered!

Aerial views truly do not do it justice.

Neither do my photographs!

It.is.huge.

While the lot is situated behind Best Buy, I learned from Nick Carr, of Scouting New York, that it is actually owned by the adjacent New Life Vision Church.

A portion of it, though, appears to be utilized as parking for employees of the nearby Costco, so I am guessing it is partially leased out to the wholesale company. But, as my pictures attest, it was almost completely vacant when I stalked it mid-day on a weekday.

Amazingly, The Office gas station segment was pulled off in only nine days! It seems like a ridiculously short amount of time, but as Gallenberg told Andy Greene, “We had nine days to scout, design, build and shoot a rest stop with a four-lane parkway.” It’s pretty incredible – and was so well-executed that here I am, twelve years later, stalking and blogging about the vacant, wholly unrecognizable parking lot where it all occurred! Magic definitely happened on this site!

If you want to learn more about “Weight Loss: Part 2,” as well as other Office episodes, be sure to pick up a copy of Andy Greene’s book The Office: The Untold Story of the Greatest Sitcom of the 2000s: An Oral History! It is fabulous!

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: The Best Buy parking lot where Jim proposed to Pam on the “Weight Loss: Part 2” episode of The Office is located at 2909 Los Feliz Boulevard in Atwater Village. The lot is situated directly behind and to the north of Best Buy. The exact spot where the rest stop set stood is denoted with a pink box below.

June 16, 2011June 15, 2011

Chili’s Grill & Bar from “The Office”

Another location that the Grim Cheaper and I stalked two weekends ago while in the San Fernando Valley was the site of the former Black Angus Steakhouse in Panorama City which masqueraded as a supposed Scranton, Pennsylvania-area Chili’s Grill & Bar in two different Season 2 episodes of fave show The Office. I first found out about this location from fellow stalker/Office aficionado Snidley Whiplash who posted a comment about it on my site a little over a year and a half ago and, even though the structure was unfortunately torn down shortly after The Office episodes were filmed, I was absolutely dying to stalk the place. For whatever reason, though, the GC and I just never made it out there. Then, when I was randomly asked about the restaurant on three separate occasions over the past two weeks, I decided that I had best get a move on and stalk it, which I finally did two Sundays ago, shortly after grabbing lunch at Barone’s Famous Italian Restaurant which I blogged about on Tuesday.

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The Panorama City Black Angus Steakhouse was first featured in the Season 2 episode of The Office titled “The Dundies” as the site of the Dunder Mifflin staff’s 2005 Dundie Awards ceremony. The real life restaurant had shuttered its doors shortly prior to the filming, making it easy for the production staff to come in and dress it to look like an actual, working Chili’s. In TV Guide’s Office Gossip blog about “The Dundies” episode, series stars/co-executive producer/writer B.J. Novak, said, “In the show, the awards ceremony takes place at a local Chili’s restaurant, which we thought would be fun and true to the show. We didn’t want to invent a fake, similar-sounding restaurant, like “Peppers,” or “T.G.I. Wednesday’s.” Since this is supposed to be a realistic show, about realistic offices, we thought setting [it in] a place like Chili’s would be refreshing. We got permission from Chili’s and spent weeks, with their help, reconstructing with painstaking detail a Chili’s restaurant in an empty abandoned building.” The results of their efforts are pictured above.

Both the interior and the exterior of the former Black Angus appeared in the episode.

And it was there that Pam Beesly (aka Jenna Fischer), after consuming far too many margaritas, spontaneously kissed Jim Halpert (aka John Krasinski) for the very first time. Sigh! So cute!

A few weeks later, the very same former Black Angus masqueraded as the Chili’s where Michael Scott (aka Steve Carell) and Jan Levinson (aka Melora Hardin) took prospective Dunder Mifflin customer Christian (aka Tim Meadows) for lunch in order to woo him in the Season 2 episode titled “The Client”. Of the restaurant, Michael says, “Chili’s is the new golf course. It’s where business happens.” LOL

And while I was hoping that some portion of the former steakhouse would still be standing, that was sadly not the case. As you can see in the above photographs, the area where filming took place is now just a large vacant field sandwiched between two strip malls in the middle of Downtown Panorama City. I am not sure why the building was torn down and not just leased out to a different restaurant chain (like maybe Chili’s Winking smile ), but I am guessing that the vacant land must have been worth more than the lease for a new restaurant would have been. Such an incredible shame!

Amazingly enough, though, as you can see above, the former steakhouse is still visible on Bing aerial maps.

It is also still visible on Google Street View, as well. And while I had originally assumed that the restaurant was painted red while it was still in operation, I happened to stumble across this Facebook page about the former eatery in which the structure is shown to be brown.

Which got me to thinking that the restaurant must have been painted red solely for the filming and, sure enough, while poking around on Google Street View, I noticed that only the front and side of the eatery were red, while the backside was left the original brown, as you can see above. It is so incredibly cool that the building was captured by the Google Street View camera while in its filming state! Oh, how I wish I could have seen it that way in person, too! Sad smile

And on an Office locations side note – sweetheart that he is, fellow stalker Owen recently tracked down one of the series’ crew members who informed him that the interior of Louis Vople’s Italian Restaurant, where the Season 7 episode “Michael’s Last Dundies” was filmed, was in actuality just a set that had been built at Chandler Valley Center Studios where the show is filmed. So that mystery is finally solved! Thank you, Owen! Smile

Big THANK YOU to fellow stalker Snidley Whiplash for finding this location! Smile

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: The Black Angus restaurant which stood in for Chili’s Grill & Bar in the Season 2 episodes of The Office titled “The Dundies” and “The Client” was formerly located at 14640 Roscoe Boulevard in Panorama City.

June 14, 2011June 15, 2011

Barone’s Famous Italian Restaurant from “The Office”

One location that I have been on the lookout for for quite a few weeks now is the Italian restaurant where the Dunder Mifflin gang hosted the annual Dundies Awards ceremony in the Season 7 episode of fave show The Office titled “Michael’s Last Dundies”. I had an inkling that the eatery was most likely located somewhere in the Van Nuys area, near Chandler Valley Center Studios where the series is lensed, so one of my first lines of attack was to do a Google search for the terms “Italian restaurant”, “Van Nuys”, and “filming”. My query kicked back numerous results, most of which pointed to an eatery in Valley Glen named “Barone’s Famous Italian Restaurant” and when I looked at an exterior image of the place on fave website LA Time Machines, I saw that it indeed matched up perfectly to what had appeared on The Office. So I dragged the Grim Cheaper right on out to stalk the place and grab some lunch two Sundays ago.

Barone’s Famous Italian restaurant was originally founded way back in 1945 by brothers Tony, Frank, and Mike Arpaia, all of whom had just returned home after finishing a stint in the Air Force during World War II, and their sister, Josephine Barone. The siblings purchased a defunct eatery named Barto’s at the corner of Beverly Glen and Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks and, in order to to save a bit of money, simply dropped the “T” and added an “N” and an “E” to the former restaurant’s exterior signage, thus creating “Barone’s Famous Italian Restaurant”. The establishment became so popular that just four years later the family was forced to move it to a larger space located at 14151 Ventura Boulevard, where it remained until 2006, at which time it was moved to its current home on the corner of Oxnard Street and Mammoth Avenue in Valley Glen. It was that Valley Glen location that I set out to stalk two weekends ago.

Barone’s Famous Italian restaurant, which has served such luminaries as Huntz Hall, Leo Gorcey, Lucille Ball, John Wayne, and Jane Russell, is still family-owned and operated to this day, 66 years after its inception. The eatery has long been known for its rectangular-shaped pizzas, an idea which was born out of a need to fit more pies into the restaurant’s tiny oven, but because I am diabetic and have to stay away from carbs, the GC and I were unfortunately not able to sample any. I instead opted for the Chicken Marsala entree, while the GC sampled Barone’s “Famous Stuffed Mushrooms” and a Caesar salad, and, sadly, I have to say that none of it was especially tasty. Sad smile I had such high hopes for the place, too! Being that we saw no less than thirty pies make their way out the door for delivery in the short time that we were dining there, though, I am guessing that it is the pizzas that have kept people coming back to this place time and time again for over six decades.

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In the “Michael’s Last Dundies” episode of The Office, Michael Scott (aka Steve Carell), Deangelo Vickers (aka Will Ferrell), Pam Beesly (aka Jenna Fischer), Jim Halpert (aka John Krasinksi) and the rest of the Dunder Mifflin Scranton Branch employees gather at the supposed Scranton, Pennsylvania-area Louis Volpe’s Italian Restaurant to celebrate the 2011 Dundie Awards. Chaos, of course, ensues and they all end up getting kicked out of the establishment by the restaurant’s manager after Deangelo screams out the word “vomit” numerous times during his acceptance speech.

Upon entering the restaurant, though, I was shocked to discover that it looked NOTHING at all like what had appeared on the show. From what I was able to discern after talking to the restaurant’s super-nice hostess, while the “Michael’s Last Dundies” episode did use the exterior of Barone’s for some filming, all of the interior scenes were filmed elsewhere – at a location that I am unfortunately still on the hunt for. UPDATE – fellow stalker Owen recently tracked down one of the series’ crew members, who informed him that the interior of Louis Volpe’s was in actuality just a set that was built at Chandler Valley Center Studios.

Some filming has taken place inside of the Barone’s space over the years, though. The eatery was the spot where Mark “Rat” Ratner (aka Brian Backer) took Stacey Hamilton (aka Jennifer Jason Leigh) out on a date, for which he forgot his wallet, in the 1982 movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High. At the time, the restaurant was a German establishment named Hoppe’s Old Heidelberg, which was originally founded in 1958.

Thankfully, as you can see in the above screen capture and photograph, even though the establishment has gone through several ownership changes throughout the years, very little of the interior has been altered since Fast Times at Ridgemont High was filmed almost three decades ago. So incredibly cool!

In 1995, Hoppe’s Old Heidelberg was sold to a new owner, Switzerland native and Chef-of-the-Year-awardee Ueli Huegli, who renamed the place Matterhorn Chef and gave the menu a Swiss flair. In 2005, the restaurant was featured in the Billy Bob Thornton movie Bad News Bears.

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: Barone’s Famous Italian Restaurant, which served as the exterior of Louie Volpe’s restaurant from the “Michael’s Last Dundies” episode of The Office, is located at 13726 Oxnard Street in Valley Glen. You can visit the restaurant’s official website here.