The 40-Year-Old Virgin|17412 Ventura Boulevard — The Storefront That Sold Other People's Things

Trish's shop has the least glamorous premise in romantic comedy: she takes your junk, photographs it, lists it, and posts it. "We Sell Your Stuff on eBay." In 2005 that was a real business model with real storefronts, and the production found one on the south side of Ventura Boulevard, in the low strip mall almost directly across from the mall where Smart Tech stood.

The geography is the whole romance. Andy can see her window from his workplace. Catherine Keener plays Trish with the unhurried competence of someone who has already raised a teenager and has no patience left for games, and the shop suits her — fluorescent light, folding tables, cardboard.

The eBay drop-off store is a period detail now. Almost all of them closed within a few years of the film, undone by the thing that made them possible: everyone learned to list their own stuff. The unit has turned over more than once since.

Walk the block. Ventura Boulevard here is dry cleaners, nail salons, a bank, a taqueria — the least cinematic stretch of Los Angeles, filmed without apology. Then cross at the light, the way Andy does, and count how long it takes. That short walk is the entire plot.

Photo: Ventura Boulevard storefronts, Encino (Wikimedia Commons, panoramio archive).