Office Space is a 1999 American satirical black comedy film written and directed by Mike Judge. It satirizes the office work life of a typical 1990s software company, focusing on a handful of individuals weary of their jobs. It stars Ron Livingston, Jennifer Aniston, Gary Cole, Stephen Root, David Herman, Ajay Naidu, and Diedrich Bader.
Office Space was filmed in Dallas and Austin, Texas. It is based on Judge's Milton cartoon series and was his first foray into live-action filmmaking. The film was Judge's second full-length motion picture release, following Beavis and Butt-Head Do America. It was released in theaters on February 19, 1999, by 20th Century Fox. Its sympathetic depiction of ordinary information technology workers garnered a cult following within that field, but it also addresses themes familiar to white-collar employees and the workforce in general. It received critical acclaim but was a box office disappointment, making $12.5 million on a $10 million production budget; however, it sold well on home video, and has become a cult film.
Several aspects of the film have become Internet memes. A scene in which the three main characters systematically destroy a dysfunctional printer has been widely parodied. Swingline introduced a red stapler to its product line after the character Milton used one painted in that color in the film. Judge's 2009 film Extract is also set in an office and was intended as a companion piece to Office Space.
Plot
Peter Gibbons is a frustrated and unmotivated programmer who works at software company Initech. Unprepared to stand up to his highly critical girlfriend, Anne, he has become infatuated with local waitress Joanna, but is afraid to speak to her. He is friends with co-workers Samir Nagheenanajar, who hates that no one can pronounce his last name, and Michael Bolton, who hates having the same name as the famous singer. Other co-workers include Milton Waddams, a meek collator who mumbles to himself and is mostly ignored by the rest of the office, and Tom Smykowski, a jaded product manager who is routinely scared of being fired. The staff suffers under callous management, especially from vice president Bill Lumbergh, a tedious micromanager who humiliates Milton and demands Peter work almost every weekend.
Anne persuades Peter to attend a hypnotherapy session led by Dr. Swanson, who hypnotizes Peter and tells him to feel relaxed and stop caring about his job until he snaps his fingers. However, Swanson suddenly dies of a heart attack before snapping Peter out of it. Peter sleeps soundly through the next day, ignoring phone calls from Lumbergh and Anne, who angrily breaks up with him while confirming his suspicions that she was cheating on him.
Business consultants Bob Slydell and Bob Porter—jointly known as "the Bobs"—are brought in to help the company downsize, and Peter begins dating Joanna. She works at a Chotchkie's restaurant where she is required to wear "pieces of flair": buttons allowing employees to "express themselves". Her boss Stan hassles her for only wearing the required minimum of 15.
Peter shows up to work and casually disregards office protocol, stealing Lumbergh's parking space, violating the dress code, and removing a cubicle wall that blocks his view out the window. Impressed by Peter's insights into Initech's problems, the consultants promote him despite Lumbergh's misgivings while laying off Michael, Samir, and Tom. While attempting to do the same to Milton, they learn that he was laid off five years prior but was not notified and is still receiving his salary due to a payroll glitch. They stop Milton's salary payments without telling him, while Lumbergh confiscates his beloved red stapler and repeatedly relocates his desk, eventually down to the basement.
Tired of their own mistreatment, Peter, Michael, and Samir take revenge by infecting Initech's accounting system with a computer virus designed by Michael to divert huge numbers of fractions of pennies into a bank account. On Michael and Samir's last day, Peter steals a frequently malfunctioning printer, which the three destroy in a field. They also learn that Tom attempted suicide prior to being laid off, but then changed his mind, only to get into an accident that resulted in him winning a large amount of money from a lawsuit. At a party at Tom's house, Peter hears rumors from a colleague that Joanna slept with Lumbergh. When Joanna affirms this, a heated exchange leads to them breaking up. Frustrated with her job, Joanna quits when Stan gives another lecture about her minimal "flair".
On Monday, Peter discovers that a bug in Michael's code has caused the virus to steal over $300,000 across the weekend, which guarantees they will be caught and sent to federal prison. Unable to conceal the crime, Peter decides to accept full responsibility, writing a confession and slipping it under Lumbergh's office door after hours, along with traveler's checks for the stolen money. Peter learns that the "Lumbergh" with whom Joanna slept was Ron Lumbergh, another software engineer unrelated to Bill Lumbergh. He meets Joanna, who has started working at another restaurant, to apologize, and they reconcile.
The next morning, Peter drives to Initech to turn himself in, but the problem has solved itself: Milton has committed arson and burned down the building as revenge against the company. With the evidence of his crime destroyed, Peter begins his new job working in construction with his neighbor Lawrence, while Samir and Michael join Initech's rival, Initrode. Milton escapes to Mexico after finding the traveler's checks, and continues to be denied respect there.
Cast
Production
Development Office Space originated in the series of three animated Milton short films that Judge created about an office worker by that name. They first aired on Liquid Television and on Saturday Night Live. The inspiration came from a temp job which he had that involved alphabetizing purchase orders and another job as an engineer for Parallax Graphics for three months in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1980s, "just in the heart of Silicon Valley and in the middle of that overachiever yuppie thing, it was just awful."
Peter Chernin, head of 20th Century Fox, where Judge had a deal, wanted to make a film out of the Milton character, inspired by a former coworker of Judge's in Silicon Valley who had threatened to quit if the company moved his desk again. "You don't want to know what he does at home after work", Judge replied. Instead he suggested an ensemble cast–based film; someone at the studio responded with Car Wash but "just set in an office."
Milton was not the only character inspired by someone from Judge's past. During his jobs in Silicon Valley, where he barely made enough to afford his rent, he had a neighbor who was an auto mechanic. Not only did the man make more money, he had flexible work hours and seemed to Judge to be much more content with his life and work than he himself was. The neighbor inspired Lawrence, Peter's neighbor in the film.
The setting of the film reflects a prevailing trend that Judge observed in the United States. "It seems like every city now has these identical office parks with identical adjoining chain restaurants", he said in an interview. "There were a lot of people who wanted me to set this movie in Wall Street, or like the movie Brazil, but I wanted it very unglamorous, the kind of bleak work situation like I was in".
Judge wrote a treatment in 1996, and the script after the first season of King of the Hill. Fox president Tom Rothman was happy with the draft as he was looking for lighter material to balance the event movies like Titanic that dominated the studio's output at the time. He considered it "the most brilliant workplace satire I'd ever read". Despite that, Judge hated the ending and wished he could have completely rewritten the third act.
Casting
David Herman was the only actor Judge had in mind for a specific part: Michael Bolton. Herman had been trying to leave his seven-year contract at MADtv, but the show would not let him. So, at its next table reading, he managed to get himself fired by screaming all his lines. Greg Daniels said they could always find a place for him on King of the Hill, where he had been doing some voice work; soon after he read Judge's Office Space script and was delighted with it.
At the first read-through of the script, Judge was pleased with Herman's performance, and felt Stephen Root improved on his own take on Milton, but was not happy with the rest of the cast. He considered abandoning the film, but Rothman said it worked and just needed the right actors. According to Judge, while Fox at first told him to just get the best actors possible since the film's budget would not be large enough to consider bankable stars, the studio soon changed its mind.
In the wake of the success of Good Will Hunting, he was advised to get that film's stars, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. Again, he almost changed his mind about the film (Rothman said in 2019 that while A-list stars are often unlikely to take roles in low-budget productions, those films should nevertheless make the effort to attract them). He had agreed to meet with Damon in New York, but then Ron Livingston's agent asked if his client could audition for the lead. Casting director Nancy Klopper was impressed, and after Judge saw the video he told the studio that he wanted Livingston in the part.
Jennifer Aniston was cast to accommodate Fox's desire to have a recognizable star in the film, although they were concerned that her part was so small; the subplot involving her battle with her boss over her "flair" was added as a result and she was written out of the sex-dream sequence, along with dialogue indicating she actually had slept with Lumbergh. However, she had liked the script since she was not getting many other films like that at that point, and she had gone to the same high school as Herman, Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School in New York. Kate Hudson also read for the part.
After casting the Indian American Ajay Naidu as Samir, who had originally been written as Iranian, the character was rewritten to be Jordanian, and Naidu worked with a dialect coach to get the accent right. John C. McGinley auditioned for Lumbergh, but was ultimately cast as Slydell. Judge says that after Gary Cole read for Lumbergh, there was no doubt as to who would play him. "He made the character 10 times funnier." A casting search in Texas yielded Greg Pitts for Drew, but no one who could play the Chotchkie's manager, so Judge took that role himself.
Principal photography
Judge made the transition from animation to live-action with the help of Tim Suhrstedt, the film's director of photography, who taught him about lenses and where to put the camera. Judge says, "I had a great crew, and it's good going into it not pretending you're an expert". Principal photography began in Texas in May 1998.Macor, A., 2010. Chainsaws, Slackers, and Spy Kids: Thirty Years of Filmmaking in Austin, Texas.
Several issues arose during filming. By the third day of shooting, temperatures had risen to over 100 °F (38 °C), and smoke from fires in Mexico was filling the sky over Austin, making it white. Suhrstedt says that forced the postponement of the opening traffic-jam scene until it cleared.
Studio executives who saw the dailies were not happy with the footage that Judge was getting. Judge quoted studio executives as stating, "More energy! More energy! We gotta reshoot it! You're failing! You're failing!" They also asked for Livingston to smile more. But at that point, only the early scenes had been filmed; Judge told the studio that happier scenes would come later. Livingston says he heard they believed he was on drugs and were considering firing him.