Office Space

Office Space grew out of three animated "Milton" shorts Mike Judge made about a mumbling office worker, which aired on Liquid Television and Saturday Night Live. The character came from Judge's own resume: a temp job alphabetizing purchase orders and three months as an engineer at Parallax Graphics in 1980s Silicon Valley, "in the middle of that overachiever yuppie thing." When Fox's Peter Chernin wanted a Milton movie, Judge pitched an ensemble film instead, and someone at the studio summed it up as Car Wash, but in an office. Judge wrote a treatment in 1996 and the script after the first season of King of the Hill; Fox president Tom Rothman called it the most brilliant workplace satire he had ever read.

Shooting began in Texas in May 1998, and the studio was nervous from the first dailies, demanding more energy and asking Ron Livingston to smile more. The famous printer execution in a field, set to the Geto Boys, came from Judge's own fantasy about the printer that tormented him while he wrote Beavis and Butt-Head Do America. Fox's marketing did not help: the poster showed a man covered in Post-it notes under the tagline "Work Sucks," which Judge said looked like an Office Depot ad.

Released on February 19, 1999, it opened eighth with $4.2 million, was pulled from most of its screens within weeks and finished with about $10.8 million in North America. Judge recalled a studio executive telling him nobody wanted to see his little movie about ordinary people and their boring little lives. Then it found its audience at home. By 2003 it had sold 2.6 million VHS and DVD copies, and Comedy Central, which premiered it in August 2001, aired it dozens more times over the next two years; Livingston credits those airings for the cult.

The afterlife is the point. "TPS report" became shorthand for pointless paperwork, the printer scene has been parodied by Family Guy and a presidential campaign, and Swingline, which did not sell a red stapler at the time (the prop was spray-painted), finally released one in 2002 because fans kept asking. Judge even heard that TGI Fridays dropped its "flair" buttons after customers would not stop joking about them.