As Good As It Gets | 1997
Oscars for both Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt in this enjoyable but soft-centred feelgood movie, as waitress Carol Connelly (Hunt), gay neighbour Simon Bishop (Greg Kinnear) and Verdell the dog soften up infuriating obsessive-compulsive writer Melvin Udall (Nicholson).
It’s set in New York, but locations are shared between the East and West coasts.
The block, which Udall and Bishop reluctantly share neighbouring apartments, is 31-33 12th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in the West Village, New York.
Carol lives over the East River in Brooklyn, at 1 Windsor Place in the rather nice Prospect Park district.
The fictitious ‘Café 24 Heures’, where Carol Connelly patiently waits tables, is actually way over on the West coast. It was constructed on the ground floor of the rundown Barclay Hotel, on the corner of Fourth Street and Main Street, in a decrepit area of downtown (this junction regularly appears as New York in such films as Armageddon).
The seafront restaurant, supposedly in ‘Chesapeake Bay, Baltimore’, can be found down in Long Beach, south of Los Angeles. It’s Khoury’s Restaurant, 110 North Marina Drive on the Alamitos Bay Landing Center.
The seafront pier is Seal Beach Pier, Main Street, Seal Beach in Orange County. Main Street also stood in for ‘Grand Harbor, Michigan’ in American Pie 2.
