Office Space - WikiHQ

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 $12.2 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. Unable to stand up to his overcritical girlfriend, Anne, he is in love 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 top-heavy, callous management, especially from vice president Bill Lumbergh, a tedious micromanager who regularly humiliates Milton and makes Peter work almost every weekend. Peter hates Lumbergh but avoids confronting him.

Anne persuades Peter to attend an occupational hypnotherapy session led by Dr. Swanson. Swanson 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 has been cheating on him.

Two business consultants are brought in to help the company downsize, and Peter begins dating Joanna. She works at a chain restaurant where she is required to wear "pieces of flair": buttons allowing employees to "express themselves". Her boss hassles her for not wearing more than the required minimum.

Peter eventually 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 frank insights into Initech's problems, the consultants promote him despite Lumbergh's misgivings; however, they lay off Michael, Samir, and Tom. While attempting to do the same to Milton, they learn that he had already been laid off five years prior but had not been notified and was still receiving his salary due to a payroll glitch. They fix the glitch and stop Milton's salary payments without telling him, while Lumbergh continues to mistreat him by confiscating his beloved red stapler and repeatedly relocating his desk, eventually down to the basement.

Tired of their own mistreatment, Peter, Michael, and Samir decide to 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. Peter successfully installs the virus, and on Michael and Samir's last day, he steals a frequently malfunctioning printer, which the three proceed to destroy in a field. They also learn that Tom attempted suicide prior to being laid off, but then changed his mind, and in the process got into an accident that resulted in him winning a large amount of money in damages from a lawsuit. At a party at Tom's house, Peter hears rumors from a colleague that Joanna had slept with Lumbergh. When Joanna confirms this, a heated exchange leads to them breaking up. Frustrated with her job, Joanna quits in response to another lecture about her lack of "flair", giving her boss the middle finger as she does so.

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 a new job 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 an act of 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. Having found the traveler's checks, Milton escapes to Mexico but continues to be denied respect.

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."

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. 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.

Production design

Judge was very exacting in his demands for how the Initech set looked; he said regularly that it had to seem "oppressive". The production went as far as screen-testing different types of gray cubicles; Judge also wanted the cubicles to be tall so that Lumbergh would have to lean in to be seen from Peter's desk. Livingston, when he visited the cube for press events, found that most reporters preferred to talk to the man in the cube and not him. He was not surprised, as tracking for the movie was not good and "there was a foregone conclusion that it wasn't going to open well." Producer Michael Rotenberg elaborated that "[i]t took a few research screenings to realize that audiences often have issues with satire." Herman said he was elated after seeing the film in Los Angeles and hearing it had made $7 million, until friends more familiar with the movie business told him that was considered a poor performance. According to Judge, a studio executive blamed the movie exclusively for the failure, telling him "Nobody wants to see your little movie about ordinary people and their boring little lives."

It went on to make $10.8 million in North America.

Reception

Critical reception

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 82% "Certified Fresh" based on 103 reviews and an average rating of 6.8/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Mike Judge lampoons the office grind with its inspired mix of sharp dialogue and witty one-liners." Metacritic gives the film a weighted average score of 68 out of 100 based on reviews from 31 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore during opening weekend gave the film an average grade of "C+" on a scale ranging from A+ to F.

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three out of four stars and wrote that Judge "treats his characters a little like cartoon creatures. That works. Nuances of behavior are not necessary, because in the cubicle world every personality trait is magnified, and the captives stagger forth like grotesques." In his review for the San Francisco Chronicle, Mick LaSalle writes, "Livingston is nicely cast as Peter, a young guy whose imagination and capacity for happiness are the very things making him miserable." In USA Today, Susan Wloszczyna wrote, "If you've ever had a job, you'll be amused by this paean to peons."

Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly gave the film a "C" rating and criticized it for feeling "cramped and underimagined". In his review for The Globe and Mail, Rick Groen wrote: "Perhaps his TV background makes him unaccustomed to the demands of a feature-length script (the ending seems almost panicky in its abruptness), or maybe he just succumbs to the lure of the easy yuk...what began as discomfiting satire soon devolves into silly farce." In his review in The New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote, "It has the loose-jointed feel of a bunch of sketches packed together into a narrative that doesn't gather much momentum."

In 2008, Entertainment Weekly named Office Space one of "The 100 best films from 1983 to 2008", ranking it at #73.

Cult status

Disappointed in the film's $12 million domestic gross, Judge decided to move on and began work on what eventually became Extract, a similarly themed followup to Office Space. Fox suggested that next time, he pay more heed to the studio's casting suggestions. However, he soon learned that the film had not gone unnoticed within the industry. "Jim Carrey invited me to his house. Chris Rock left me the best voicemail ever. I had dinner with Madonna", who found the Michael Bolton character's anger "sexy", Judge said. In the same year, it was in the top 20 best-selling Fox DVDs. , it had sold over six million DVDs in the United States alone.

Four years after the film's release, Judge recalled that one of his assistant directors on the film told him they had gone out to eat at a TGI Fridays and noticed that the waitstaff were no longer wearing buttons on their uniforms, the "flair" Joanna quits her job over in the film. Asked why, the manager told him that after Office Space had come out, customers started making jokes about it, so the chain dropped the requirement from its dress code. "So, maybe I made the world a better place" he told Deadline Hollywood in 2014.

In 2008, Entertainment Weekly ranked it fifth on its list "25 Great Comedies From the Past 25 Years", despite having originally given the film a poor review. In February 2009, a reunion of many of the cast members took place at the Paramount Theatre in Austin to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the film. Rothman said in 2019 that despite his connection to several films that won the Academy Award for Best Picture, he hopes Office Space will be mentioned before them in his obituary. and the comic book series Chew, with the film's main characters cameoing in its third installment, Just Desserts.

In 2022 software engineer Ermenildo Valdez Castro was inspired by the movie Office Space, conducting a similar scheme from the movie by editing code to divert shipping fees to a personal account. A report from the Seattle police mentions that a folder named "OfficeSpace project" was found on Castro's work laptop and Castro admitted he was indeed inspired by the movie. Castro stole over $300,000 from the company Zulily.

In 2024 at the South by Southwest conference, there was an Office Space Reunion panel with Judge, Livingston, Root, Naidu and Herman.

In culture

thumb|right|An actual PC LOAD LETTER error message|alt="PC LOAD LETTER" in a printer console's [[LED display.]]

Several elements of the film have become memes reused in other contexts. "TPS report" has come to connote pointless, mindless paperwork, and an example of "literacy practices" in the work environment that are "meaningless exercises imposed upon employees by an inept and uncaring management" and "relentlessly mundane and enervating". According to Judge, the abbreviation stood for "Test Program Set" in the movie. In 2015, the comedy website Funny or Die put together several videos in which it spliced in the actual Michael Bolton over Herman in scenes from the film. Most of them were ones that referenced the confusion coming from the character and the singer having the same name. Bolton performed the scenes exactly as Herman had, with one exception: in his conversation with Samir, he turned to the camera and substituted the words "extremely talented" for "no-talent" before "ass-clown".

Printer scene

Before the 2009 Austin reunion screening a printer was destroyed outside the theater, in reference to the scene in the film during which Peter, Michael, and Samir destroy the dysfunctional printer on the latter two's final day at Initech That scene has frequently been parodied, often by amateurs, using a similar electronic device, in an open space somewhere, emulating the original's character blocking, camera angles and moves, sound effects and use of slow motion, all set to Geto Boys' "Still".

The Fox animated series Family Guy did its own parody of the scene in 2008, during the show's seventh season. In "I Dream of Jesus", the season's second episode, Brian and Stewie Griffin (both voiced by Seth MacFarlane), tired of Peter Griffin constantly playing The Trashmen's "Surfin' Bird", steal his 45 rpm single of the song and demolish it in a similar scene. For television, a clean version of "Still" had to be used.

During the campaign for the Republican nomination in the 2016 presidential election, Texas senator Ted Cruz ran a political advertisement parodying the scene, showing an impersonator of likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and two assistants destroying her personal email server with a baseball bat in an open field.

Red stapler

thumb|right|[[Swingline made a red stapler in response to demand created by the film.|alt=A small red stapler with the badge reading "Swingline" atop, seen from above on a white background with shadow at the top of the image]]

Stephen Root says he realized the movie's impact when people started asking him to sign their staplers. The red Swingline stapler featured prominently in the film was not available until April 2002 when the company released it in response to repeated requests by fans of the film. Its appearance in the film was achieved by taking a standard Swingline stapler and spray-painting it red.

Video game

Kongregate released a mobile game based on the film, titled Office Space: Idle Profits, on iOS and Android in 2017. It was a free-to-play idle clicker that offered in-app purchases. In 2022 it was shut down.

Soundtrack

;Track listing

Possible sequels

Shortly after the release of Office Space, Judge, despite his disappointment at the movie's lackluster box office, began writing the script for Extract, which he describes as a companion piece. The studio later asked him to put it aside to work on Idiocracy, which it believed would be more commercial. After that film, like Office Space, failed at the box office but became a cult favorite, Judge returned to Extract and it was released in 2009. It similarly makes light of workplace dysfunction, but from the perspective of a manager rather than a worker.