In the late nineties, a movie came out about a slick-talking, hot-shot developer who is about to destroy a small but cherished neighborhood institution when he reads the letters of a woman who's trying to save it and falls in love with her. I'm not talking about "You've Got Mail," Nora Ephron's classic ode to indie bookstores and Upper West Side quaintness. I'm referring to the box-office bomb "Til There Was You," an agitprop rom-com about zoning laws written by Winnie Holzman, the creator of "My So-Called Life." In the film, Jeanne Tripplehorn plays Gwen, a struggling ghostwriter looking to rent a place in Los Angeles. She finds an apartment in La Fortuna, a historic building—based on the real-life El Cabrillo condominium in Hollywood—where a bohemian, multigenerational coterie of residents gathers in a shared courtyard to smoke, play music, and reminisce about old flames. Gwen keeps to herself, though; this is just a "temporary shelter" until she moves to New York City to be a real writer. Then one day news arrives that La Fortuna is being demolished to make room for a high-rise condominium designed by a trendy architect named Nick (Dylan McDermott), and Gwen starts writing anonymous letters to a newspaper in protest. Nick reads them, at first incensed but eventually charmed. He and his landlord girlfriend (Sarah Jessica Parker) break up, he implores his firm to keep La Fortuna intact, and he races to the courtyard to find the woman behind these passionate appeals for tenants' rights.