The Best Scenes From 'Office Space,' Which Turns 20 Years Old Today
Diedrich Bader, the actor who played protagonist Peter Gibbons’ mulletted neighbor in Office Space, had a “really rough time” after the comedy was released in 1999. He’d “loved every frame of the movie,” he reflected in a Rolling Stone oral history of the film published Tuesday, but the corporate satire was a box office disappointment-a fact reflected by the nearly empty theater he and his wife first saw the final cut in on its opening weekend.
“I thought, I have different taste than America,” he told the publication on the 20th anniversary of the film’s release. “I was really like, ‘You know, fuck movies. I don’t even know why I do it. It’s so painful. This build-up is so huge and then it doesn’t hit and then nothing.’ It’s just a real disappointment.”
But something started to change. Soon, Bader had strangers quoting Office Space lines at him, a reflection of the cult following of disaffected office workers that was building around Mike Judge’s film. “What’s going on with Office Space?!” he recalled asking his wife at the time.
In the two decades that have followed, the film has become an undisputed cult classic for its existential sendup of mind-numbing corporate culture, with its TPS reports and casual Fridays and dull, meaningless conversations about a coworker’s “case of the Mondays.” But, as the Rolling Stone 20th anniversary retrospective reminds us, the flick didn’t always seem destined for greatness-despite strong reviews.
“I definitely didn’t expect it to do well in the theater,” writer-director Judge told the publication. And he was right: the film was a box office failure, with Judge once claiming that a studio executive had told him that “nobody wants to see your little movie about ordinary people and their boring lives.”
But things shifted over the years, with office drones everywhere relating to the plight of Ron Livingston’s slacker who becomes fed up with the banality of his cubicle life and-after a hypnosis session gone awry-goes into open revolt.
“Every once in a while, rarely, somebody would come up and say, ‘Hey, I saw that movie. I really liked it,’” Livingston told Rolling Stone. “Then that started happening a little more often and a little more often and a little more often and then you’d see a piece about how … ‘it’s this cult movie that people are watching at office parties.’ And it just kept going.”
“That’s the thing for me that’s been kind of wonderful about it,” Livingston added. “We’re still talking about it.”
The oral history also includes reflections on some of the film’s most famous scenes, including the iconic scene in which characters demolish the office’s frustrating printer with a baseball bat, which Judge revealed almost resulted in an injury to actor David Herman, who played the unfortunately-named Michael Bolton in the film. “I told Dave, like, ‘Yeah, maybe you can just run up to it and just like jump up in the air and smash down on it with your foot,’” Judge recalled “And Dave almost really injured himself. It’s in the movie. He slips on it and really could’ve messed himself up.”
Twenty years later, the film remains not just a pitch perfect satire of corporate culture, but also just plain funny, its classic lines-“I believe you have my stapler,” “Yeah...I’m gonna need you to come in on Saturday-as quotable today as they’ve ever been.
“A lot of people live in an office with a terrible manager,” Bader told Rolling Stone. “But what Mike brought to it was his own sense and sensibility, and it’s that perspective that makes it a classic.”
“His jokes stand the test of time,” Bader added. “The more you watch them, the funnier they get.”
Here are three of our favorite scenes scenes from the 1999 classic:
Peter’s meeting with “the Bobs”
Peter Gibbons’ typical day? “Well, I generally come in at least 15 minutes late. I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can’t see me. And, uh, after that, I guess I just space out for about an hour.” Livingston’s character is likely speaking for a lot of officer workers when he tells the company’s consultants that “in a given week, [he] probably only [does] about 15 minutes of real, actual work.”
Milton gets moved again
A running gag throughout the film involves the Milton character-who, it turns out, had been fired earlier but not informed-being moved to increasingly unideal workspaces...which would be bad enough, except that droning boss Bill Lumbergh also takes his beloved red stapler.
The copy machine scene
Characters, particularly Herman’s Michael Bolton, have spent the whole movie warring with the uncooperative printer. In this iconic scene, the guys get their revenge on it.
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