The Sharper Image from “When Harry Met Sally”

Movies don’t typically surprise me, as far as locations go.  But When Harry Met Sally has me absolutely shocked as of late!  Ever since first seeing the romcom when it debuted back in 1989, I had been under the impression that it was lensed entirely in New York.  The city is so woven into the fabric of the film – it is practically a character in the story! – that I couldn’t imagine even one frame of it being shot elsewhere.  That all changed in 2016, though, when I contacted a crew member regarding a locale from a different production – the crab restaurant from A Few Good Men.  As I chronicled in this post, said crew member not only informed me that the eatery I was looking for was in the San Pedro area, but that it had also appeared in When Harry Met Sally!  Gobsmacked, I immediately started researching the matter further and discovered several more WHMS sites in Los Angeles, one of which being The Sharper Image where Sally Albright (Meg Ryan) karaoked with Harry Burns (Billy Crystal).  Sadly, it’s no longer in business, but I figured it was still blog-worthy nonetheless.

As has long been documented online, the exterior of The Sharper Image store at 4 West 57th Street in New York (which today houses an Ermenegildo Zegna boutique) was shown in an establishing shot at the top of the When Harry Met Sally karaoke scene.  I had always assumed interior footage had been shot there, as well.

During my deep dive into the film’s L.A. locations, though, I was stopped in my tracks by a comment from a man named Colin Stone on the On the Set of New York’s When Harry Met Sally page who stated, “The interior scene of The Sharper Image was actually filmed at the Los Angeles (Wilshire and Grand) store.”  A quick Google search for further information on the shop yielded absolutely nothing, which told me it was long since out of business.  So I hopped over to Newspapers.com in the hopes of pinpointing its exact former address and found several ads (like the one below from 1986) noting its location as 601 Wilshire Boulevard, right on the corner of Wilshire and Grand, as Colin had said.  (Also noted?  The fact that it was a non-smoking store!  Were people honestly allowed to smoke in retail shops back then???  I certainly don’t remember that as a kid!)

I ran out to stalk it shortly thereafter.  At the time (July 2018), the site housed a print shop named LA Grafix.

Per Google Street View, it sits vacant today.

But back in the ‘80s, it was home to the mecca of all-things-yuppie, The Sharper Image.  It was there that Harry and Sally headed to find a housewarming gift for their respective BFFs, Jess (Bruno Kirby) and Marie (Carrie Fisher).  While shopping, the two test out a “singing machine” with a duet of “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top” and, in the process, run into Harry’s ex-wife, Helen Hillson (Harley Jane Kozak), and her new boyfriend, Ira Stone (Kevin Rooney), thereby setting Harry on a downward spiral.  Quite a lot of the interior is shown in the scene (which you can watch here).  Sadly though, other than the store seeming quite large (which goes against it being located in New York City), there really aren’t any identifying factors like doors or windows visible which would have helped me verify its use in the film.  So I, of course, went straight to the source and tracked down Colin!  As it turns out, he couldn’t have been nicer or more informative!  Currently, he is a professional relaxation therapist and composer, but during The Sharper Image’s early days, he worked in the DTLA store creating health and fitness products, which is how he knew of its big-screen cameo.

I am absolutely kicking myself now for not having ventured inside LA Grafix during my stalk.  I (wrongly) assumed that due to the passage of thirty years and the change in occupancy, the space would no longer look anything like it did onscreen.  But as Colin wrote in his email, “I popped over to the location maybe 4 years ago and saw that it was a printing place (it was a Saturday and it was closed, but still in business then) and I was totally surprised and amazed to look in the windows and see they still had all the grey and burgundy fixtures, counters, displays, slatwall, everything, still intact from the TSI days!”  Talk about a fail on my part!

I did manage to dig up some interior images of the place from a past real estate listing which corroborate Colin’s observations.  As you can see, some of The Sharper Image’s grey slatwall, visible in When Harry Met Sally, was held over when the store closed.

There’s some more of it pictured below, though it is no longer grey.

The Sharper Image’s decorative triangular ceiling lining was retained by LA Grafix, as well.

You can also make some of it out here.

The Wilshire & Grand Sharper Image, which was the fifth of the company’s brick and mortar stores, opened its doors on November 12th, 1984.  Founder Richard Thalheimer chose the location in a rather unconventional way.  As he told the Los Angeles Times, “I just stand on street corners and count the number of people who walk by wearing suits and ties.”  Though he looked at spots in Westwood, Beverly Hills and Century City, the corner of Wilshire and Grand fit the bill for his SoCal venture.  As the article states, “There among the skyscrapers, he figured, were throngs of young professionals with a potential soft spot for gold-plated dumbbells, sculptured pillows designed to look like Porsche and BMW cars, guns that fire pulses of infrared light and even tummy exercisers, among other things.”  Colin said the methodology was backed by the “San Franciscan logic that people shop where they work,” which turned out not to be the case in L.A.  At least, not at the time.  Today, DTLA is a bustling live/work community, but in the ‘80s, ‘90s, and even the early 2000s, the city virtually cleared out as soon as offices closed.  And on weekends, it was practically a ghost town.  Not exactly a fertile environment for retail.  The downtown Sharper Image was apparently the lowest-performing in the entire chain.  Per Colin’s recollection, the store closed in late 1992/early 1993, though the other outposts in Sherman Oaks and Beverly Hills remained open for a time.  The company filed for bankruptcy in February 2008 and by the end of that same year, all of its retail stores had, sadly, closed, truly marking the end of an era.

Huge THANK YOU to Colin Stone for identifying this location and providing so much of the intel that appears in this post. 

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Until next time, Happy Stalking!

Stalk It: The Sharper Image from When Harry Met Sally was formerly located at 601 Wilshire Boulevard in downtown Los Angeles.  The space is currently vacant, but was home to the print shop LA Grafix when I stalked it last year.

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