September 19, 2023 • 49 mins
In honor of the amazing writers of The Office, Brian shares a compilation of his favorite moments interviewing the creative minds behind the show. Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky talk about fan-favorite episodes: Dinner Party and Scott Tots, Mike Schur reflects back on the 2008 writers strike, and Jen Celotta remembers the love and passion every writer had for the show.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:16):
Well, hello there, friends, and welcome to a very special
episode of Off the Beat. I am your host, Brian Baumgartner.
Today we're going to take a little trip, a trip
to a place that I like to call memory Lane.
Believe it or not, I have now been podcasting for
(00:36):
over three years, and it all started out with me
talking to some of my old co workers on the office,
the actors, directors, makeup artists, camera operators, anyone I could
find basically to help me understand what made that show
so special. Well, the first line of attack in that
(00:57):
specialness was, of course, the writers. So today I wanted
to highlight some of the brilliant, hilarious minds who shaped
the stories and crafted the jokes that well that you love.
I'm calling this my WGA episode. Seems fitting at this
point in time, am I right? But you can think
(01:20):
of this as a best of some of my favorite
snippets from my conversations with some of my favorite people
on the planet. Whether you're a longtime listener to the
podcast or this is your first time hearing these, I
hope that you'll enjoy these stories about the inner workings
of the writer's room and the magical place that was
(01:43):
and still is the office.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Bubble and Squeak, I love it, Bubble and Squeakna.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
Bubble and Squeak.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
I cook it every month. Oh from the Nah people.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Let's start it off with this clip from my conversation
with Jeane Stupnitsky talking about how he and his writing
partner Lei Eisenberg, got to be in that room in
the first place.
Speaker 5 (02:25):
So one of the things that separated Lee and I
from everyone everyone, like a lot of those a lot
of the stuff went to Harvard. They were all kind
of like it was almost their birthright to write the sitcoms.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
Okay, you know.
Speaker 5 (02:36):
I was from Chicago. He was from Boston, and I
had just five years of just nothing. I was, like
I said, I'm just getting fired a lot. I was
terrible at everything. So not a good assistant, not a
good PA, just a huge fuck up. Really just a
history of failure in many ways. So there was no
(02:57):
like we didn't expect anything, We weren't didn't feel like
we should be there. But yes we got. I think
I was maybe twenty six or twenty seven, Yeah, started.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
What do you think you and Lee, both of you,
what do you think your greatest contribution to the show
was or how do you feel like you helped?
Speaker 3 (03:19):
Oh wow, what are you most proud of?
Speaker 5 (03:22):
Yeah, you know, there are certain jokes that I'm really
proud of that I remember writing. That feeling you get
when you just you're like this is this is this
feels like it could be really good. So I have
those moments in my mind of just remember writing certain
jokes and they were weren't even always from my episodes,
but like they're just jokes that I'm proud of.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
It feels so weird.
Speaker 5 (03:44):
This when the imposter syndrome really kicks in when you
start talking about stuff like this. But I think maybe
we kind of subverted. I think we like, you know,
we did things like when Jim kind of became like
not the greatest partner every She's like, oh, I gotta
I gotta leave. I gotta go to the houses on
fire or flood and you know, trying to leave camp
like you would really piss Officer and a segment of
the audience. But just things like that, I don't know.
(04:07):
I think we probably wrote. Everyone had their own, Like
I feel like Mike Sure wrote like Michael it is
almost most noble in a way, like the best version
of Michael version. Personally I like a lot, and like
everyone had like a different version. But I think we
probably wrote like the the most biggest British version of
the show in a way. Okay, maybe some of the
darker stuff.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Well that that was sort of where I was going.
I mean, the two episodes that you guys were responsible for,
Scott's Todd's and Dinner Party unquestionably considered the most cringiest
of episodes in the history of the show. Were those
your ideas or did you execute them? And what I
mean by that for those of you listening who don't know.
(04:48):
Sometimes there are stories that are decided collectively in the
writer's room and then you're assigned a script to write.
I'm curious about sort of the genesis for either one
or to those episodes.
Speaker 5 (05:01):
Yeah, so yeah, it's true. Some like writers will come
in with ideas after we'll have like time off in
between seasons. We're coming with new ideas, and the ideas
who come in come in with aren't always the ones
that you end up writing. Sometimes other writers write them
and you write other writers ideas. Neither one was our
idea Dinner Party. It might have been Greg's idea I
(05:21):
don't actually remember whose idea that was, but I remember
feeling very I knew how to write that episode, and
I remember Greg assigned it to Mindy, who like wasn't
that I don't think she she want to write a
different episode. I think at the time it was called
like Who's Afraid of John Levinson Gold? But Scott's Tots
was a Paul Lieberstein original that we were assigned.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Ok, you make your acting debut in the office correct
on television?
Speaker 5 (05:49):
On television?
Speaker 3 (05:49):
Yes, Yes, on television.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Leo and Gino the delivery guys, was this something you
were excited about doing or was this just fun for the.
Speaker 5 (05:59):
Right I did not enjoy at all, and it was
really the other writers kind of. I think Greg thought
it was funny, and the other writers, like I thought
it would be funny to force us to act. I
hated it, didn't want to do it, fought against it.
But if we were going to do it, we did
Lee and I did think it was funny for him
to play Geno and me to play Leo, which was
just really confused when the people work on the show,
(06:19):
you know what our names was? What our names were? Anyway,
at the beginning, I think by the end, we're really confused.
And sometimes if I felt someone didn't like, if I
knew someone wasn't sure, if I was leader Gene and
Lee would walk by and be like, hey Gene to Lee,
I would call him Gene, which would just doubly confuse
them and they think they finally have to haven't figured out,
and then I would just continue confusing.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
That's so good. I mean, look the show. The show
gave all of us so much. I mean, for you,
your first job in a writer's room, your acting career
on Delvion, whether you liked it or not, your directorial debut,
when you look back on that time, what feelings do
you have.
Speaker 5 (07:00):
I mean, I owe so much. It was my film school,
you know, I owe so much to the show. It
because you know easily you can easily get on a
show that last six episodes, and then you get on
another show and it kind of you know, gets canceled
or it's I mean, we got so lucky being hired
on the show, to be on a show that went
as long as it did, and we didn't stay the
(07:21):
whole time, but it changed our lives, met a lot
of amazing people.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
We learned so much.
Speaker 5 (07:25):
We learned how to become showrunners and how to write
and how to run a room and kind of one
of the things in the Writer's Strike that we talk
about is just and I know Mike Scohn record talking
about this just true. It was like, you know, for
the next genreal. You know, we learned from Greg how
to do these things, and a lot a lot of
people are aren't learning that anymore. But we just completely
(07:48):
change our lives, can change the trajectory of our careers.
I remember thinking before it became preessional writer, I thought, oh,
these writers are They're so lucky. They're so lucky that
they get to do this. And then when I became
one and I was like, it's all talent, lucky, has
nothing new with it. I'm just that talented. Now I
realized I'm back to the lucky part. There's talent, for sure,
but there's so much luck involved. There's just things you
(08:11):
can't control that we got on the show that it
went as long as it did, that we met these
made these connections and met these people. It just it's
you know, things are lot of our hands and I
feel so lucky. I feel so lucky.
Speaker 3 (08:23):
Well, I think we were all pretty lucky to be there. Jean.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
However, Lee remembers their early days on the staff as
a little less nostalgic. In fact, I think neurotic is
a better word for it. Here's Lee Eisenberg.
Speaker 6 (08:39):
We had never been in a writer's room before, so
we didn't know anything. And so in a writer's room,
if you pitch a joke and people don't like it,
they don't tell you they don't like it. It just
you're met with silence, and then you extrapolate the silence to.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
Mean move on.
Speaker 6 (08:53):
But we didn't know that, so we thought that maybe
like people couldn't hear and so like I remember Jean
saying to Paul once, like did you hear what I said?
And that like stuff like that would happen a lot.
And then I pitch, I pitched something and.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
Because you thought they were being rude, well I didn't
sea it was just like bond.
Speaker 6 (09:09):
Well, it's just not the way that people interact with
each other. You don't you acknowledge someone you say like, oh,
I'm not sure that's right for me, But like if
you did, you know you're generating thousands of jokes a day,
Like if you have every single joke and explain why
it's not right. You would get anything done.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
That's funny, Lee, I don't think it's works for this moment, right,
should we think of it?
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Yeah, no one does that. We keep going, right.
Speaker 6 (09:26):
It was just weird, and we didn't know what we were doing.
And then everyone will go out to lunch together. They
would all kind of like run to their cars and
like five people pile into a car, and then Gene
and I would like get into like our camera. It
just we felt like we were the new kids and
we didn't fit in. And so I think our contract
was like twenty weeks. It was ten weeks with an
option for another ten weeks or something like that. And
(09:48):
we were ten. We're getting close to ten weeks, and
we're we were nervous, but we also kind of felt like,
no one's that nice to us. I think we're gonna
get fired anyways, can we can we quit? And we
called our agent and we said, he's like, hey, so
you're you're almost up. You know you're going to you
know we're gonna try getting you those other ten weeks.
We said, well, what if we want to quit? He said, well,
(10:10):
I don't stand why you're asking and we said, well, like,
you know, people aren't that nice to us, like we're
fourth graders at the New School. And he was like,
this is the stupidest question anyone's ever asked me. And
he just was Mark Provozero, who represented me and Bean
and Mindy and BJ and he was like, dumbest question
I've ever been asked. And he hung up on us, right,
and then we stayed on the show for five more years.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
Were you close to being fired? Do you think? Or
do you Was that just your perception because people didn't
seem nice.
Speaker 6 (10:38):
I think that when you say people didn't seem nice,
I really feel young. I think that the you know,
when you're acting and when you first start acting and
you're like, the scene isn't about you, and you're like
you want to go up to the director and.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
Be like, hey, did you like what I was doing? Right?
Speaker 6 (10:50):
And you think the scene's about you even though no
one cares about you because the scene isn't about you.
That's the way I felt about the writer's room was
I was like, they're scrutinizing us every moment, and they
were Greg had eighty five thousand other things to worry
about than the staff writer's happiness or our contributions. We
were contributing, but I think for us it was like
Gene I would drive back and forth. We live together,
(11:12):
and we'd have like a forty five minute commute every
day each way, and all we would do is just say, like, hey,
Paul laughed a little bit at that joke I said
in the small room, how did it go with Mike
and Jen in the other room? Did bj acknowledge you today?
I mean, it was like we were parsing out the
smallest little things, and then Greg got pneumonia season two
(11:33):
while we were breaking the fight, so we had to
outline the fight. Everyone else got to outline the episode's
kind of more as a group, and for us it
was like me and Jean and Paul and everyone else
was off on script. And then we had to go
meet Greg at his house because he had walking pneumonia,
and it was like, Oh, they're setting us.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
Up to fail.
Speaker 6 (11:50):
They gave us this episode that's like goofy and different
from the rest of the show. There's like a fight
in a dojo, like they don't want us to do well,
and then when we handed a bad script, they'll fire
up us. This is what we were convinced of. I
think we didn't. I think we didn't feel confident that
we weren't going to be fired until three years in.
I'm not kidding. Every single time, Like when we wrote
(12:10):
the Secret, we were like, they gave us the secret
because there's not a lot of time, and then we
won't deliver and then they'll fire us. That's all we
went through the first few years. What Wait, We liked
everyone eventually, but we were terrified. It wasn't like a
culture of fear. It was just two insecure guys.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
You were just worried about yourself. Oh, we were terrified. Yeah. Wow, Yeah,
I'm really sorry to hear that. Thanks. I mean, it
doesn't surprise me.
Speaker 6 (12:36):
You're a bit neurotic, but I've monetized the neuroses.
Speaker 3 (12:39):
That's all that matters.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
Well, sure, I'm glad that they didn't quit or get fired,
because without them we wouldn't have had such delectable masterpieces
of cringe as Scott's Tots or even Dinner Party. In fact,
every writer contributed their own special element to the show.
(13:03):
But I wasn't there, at least not for that part.
So I'm gonna let Moe's shrewt. I mean, Mike, sure,
tell you all about it. So Lee talked about this.
I was talking to him about if there were specific
strengths because the episodes were different, were there ways that
(13:23):
either interested people or that they were better at And
what he said was that he felt like he and
Gene were much more in the sort of cringe comedy. Yeah, yeah,
which you know, if you look at Dinner Party, that
certainly fits that bill. And what they said about you
was that you were much more optimistic. Do you feel
(13:44):
like that's true?
Speaker 5 (13:45):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (13:45):
I do.
Speaker 4 (13:48):
I feel like my sweet spot on the show was, well,
Christmas Party's pretty optimistic episode. But like the episode Branch
Closing that I wrote that story because Jan walks in
on the first page of the episode and says, we're
shutting a branch down, and Michael has a complete collapse
(14:11):
and then he says, no, I'm not letting this happen.
I'm going to do something about this, and he and
Dwight head off and they go to David Wallace's house
in Connecticut and they're just like, I'm going to confront
him and I'm going to make him see that this
is not the right decision. It is utterly ineffectual Wallace
Network shows up. They just end up sitting there and
are miserable and completely unbeknownst to them, through a variety
(14:34):
of other machiness, the branch ends up getting saved. But
there's a scene in the end where Michael and Dwight
are sitting in the car and that all hope is lost,
and Michael says, okay, top three favorite moments ever at
the office, and Dwight says, like my first day when
you sprayed me with the fire extinguisher, and when yeah,
I got sick and you came into the MRI, you know,
(14:55):
I got a concussion or whatever. And then Dwight says,
what about you? What are your favorite moments? And Michael
says all of them, every single one, And then Dwight says, well,
what about when Jan showed up and said the branch
was closing? And He's like, come on, man, But that
I remember just thinking like this, and that scene wasn't
in the outline, and I remember writing that scene and
thinking like that that this is like I locked into
(15:17):
that idea. And I think it's just because it was
like a moment of humanity between the two of them,
where like the office is very meaningful. It's all Michael
has and him being able to just sort of express
in a sincere and human way what he loved about
the place, like that kind of thing. I really felt
like that was my jam. But yeah, I mean those guys,
(15:39):
like Greg's theory was that writing staff should be like
The X Men, where he's like, if you have all
people who are the same and have the same like
comedic power, you're gonna have one awesome thing about the show.
But if if everybody has his or her own comedic power,
then you get everything. And so yeah, I think Lee
and Jean were really into the like super I mean,
(16:01):
those guys are so funny, Like Scott's Tots was an
episode they pitched very early on that Greg was like,
we're never doing this, and then long after I left,
I was watching him like, oh, I guess Greg gave in.
But yeah, they love that. Jen Solata was her superpower
is just this incredible connection to Pam. She's also hilarious,
(16:22):
but like she was like the beating heart of the show.
I would say, not just through Pam, through all the characters,
but like the episode where the bird dies and Michael
has the funeral for the bird. That was Jen from
beginning to end, and we kept like tinkering and tinkering
and tickering, and she eventually was like, I think I
just understand this and I just want to write it,
and we were like, great, and then it's amazing. And
the part of it that she really liked into was
(16:44):
Pam Pam understanding what Michael was going through and giving
the eulogy and trying to make Michael feel better by
talking about this dead bird. It's a really complicated emotional moment.
But Jen just like understood it at some fundamental level.
And you know, Paul was really into Michael's when Michael
was at his absolute worst. Like Paul was super into
(17:06):
the Michael's worst instincts, right right, Mindy was Mindy's superpower
was always the super absurdist stuff, the really like crazy
flights of fancy. You know, famously in the episode where
Michael burns his foot on the George Foreman grill, when
Michael burns his foot. I mean again, every episode that
(17:28):
everybody wrote was always rewritten a tremendous amount. But I
will say that that first monologue Michael has where he's
explained to the camera how he burned his foot. I
don't think we changed a word of it. Like Mindy
turned in her script and that speech was in there
and it was really long and it's really complicated and
it has it's a crazy roller coaster, and I don't
(17:48):
think we changed a single word because she just like
she would lock into just the the super absurdist stuff
presented very straightforwardly, like yeah, I mean, everyone everybody had
something they were good at. That staff is incredible.
Speaker 3 (18:02):
They sure, or we'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
One thing I heard from basically all of the writers
was that Greg Daniels, our showrunner, producer, mastermind, fearless leader,
whatever you want to call him, he had a lot
of games or exercises or theories as he called them
that he instilled in the writer's room and used to
help shape the stories.
Speaker 3 (18:42):
Characters are the whole world of the office.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
I'm not a writer, but from what I learned, this
is different from how your average sitcom writer's room is run.
Our writer Brent Forrester had also worked with him years
before on The Simpsons and King of the Hill, so
he knew Greg's weighs very very well.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
Here's Brent, do you consider Greg a teacher?
Speaker 7 (19:08):
Oh for sure. Yeah, he's a friend of mine forever now.
And we were in the trenches at the Simpsons ten
am to ten pm every single day, so you know
we're allD buddies, but for sure big time.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
Someone told us this exercise that he had something that
if you were having trouble breaking stories, and he called
it unlikely duos, And there were note cards on the
wall with all the character's names, and the idea was
to pick two characters that you would not necessarily associate
with each other together and then write a story on that.
Speaker 3 (19:43):
I think that's.
Speaker 7 (19:44):
Always a great method. Early on, back on nurses for me,
I asked one of the senior writers there what makes
a story? And the guy called me into his office.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
His name was Bruce Ferber.
Speaker 7 (19:56):
He closed the blind, shut the door, locked it, and
he said, is usually about two people, and then he
unlocked the door and made me leave. It sounds so
a commonplace, but it's actually the key.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
Right.
Speaker 7 (20:11):
Yeah, that's what's great is what's an unusual pairing. That's
how I got my first Simpsons episode was I paired
Homer versus Patty and Selma. It had never been done before,
so I got an episode, right but for sure, on
any show, you know what, two characters have never been
in a.
Speaker 3 (20:23):
Story together, do that right?
Speaker 1 (20:24):
Oh, that's genius. It's the small attention to details. When
you know the characters and how the characters would behave,
you almost don't need anything more than this. I was
told that during the testing of the show with the
Gym's and the Dwights, the direction from Greg to the
(20:45):
actors was very simply, Jim, bring Dwight a glass of water, right,
and then what happens?
Speaker 3 (20:53):
Right?
Speaker 1 (20:54):
You know Dwight is going to be skeptical, right, right,
because you know, you know he's afraid the gym has
done something to the water. Yeah, And I thought, like,
you guys did such a great job of that, of
studying the character's behavior and how each character.
Speaker 3 (21:09):
Would behave in a given situation.
Speaker 7 (21:11):
No, you've hit it on the head. And if you notice,
ask Greg what his favorite television show is of all time.
I remember he was being interviewed and he sat there
for an hour trying to think, you know, and asking
the writers what they thought it was. Larry Sanders and
Judd Apatow. If you ask him, he'll give you the
same answer. I worked with jud on a show called
Love we did for Netflix. I was the head writer
(21:33):
there and I remember we delivered scripts to jud the
first four scripts. I thought they were good. They were real,
clever and funny, and he was so bummed and as
he tried to articulate what it was, he said, watch.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
The Larry Sanders Show.
Speaker 7 (21:45):
And by the end we had a phrase, a motto,
and it was behavior over banter. I never forgot it.
Speaker 3 (21:54):
Man.
Speaker 7 (21:55):
You know, you don't have to have clever word play
if the characters are in an interesting behavior. Now, I
can tell you two behaviors that are funny for actress.
One is lying, always funny. The other generally is seduction.
Unless the first that I suppose is really hot, it's
gonna be kind of funny.
Speaker 3 (22:11):
Right.
Speaker 7 (22:11):
So I wonder for you as a comic performer. You know,
you're talking about the glass of water thing, which is
complex behavior. Are there other categories of behavior that are
funny for you to perform?
Speaker 1 (22:21):
Oh, that's a very interesting question for me. The biggest
laughs that I ever remember was when Holly was told
that Kevin was slow. That was my recollection and people
went sort of bonkers about it. And I think the
(22:42):
reason why is because it was a very simple joke
that is set up by years of history and knowing
the character, and as soon as you hear the setup
of that, you know instantly that she will believe it
and that there will be confusion between her and Kevin,
and that could play out as long as we wanted
(23:02):
it to. I think that when you truly, when you
have the time to create a character and there's an
expectation from an audience on how that character would respond,
the anticipation of that and delivering that or the opposite
of what the expectation is to me, those things.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
Are very funny. Wow, that's gold.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
At one point said this. It has been said by
wiser artists than me that the more personal you make
your writing, the more personal it will become. Do you
feel like you write personally?
Speaker 3 (23:40):
I aspire to, for sure.
Speaker 7 (23:42):
Our medium is very interesting because it's collaborative and I
am hired to execute the vision of somebody above me.
And you know, I've come to think of the writer's
room as an art project. The showrunner is.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
The artist of the show.
Speaker 7 (24:00):
That's the Picasso, and we're all there to sort of
make his or her vision come to life. Having said that,
when you get an individual episode. At a certain point
they send you off, and that's when the art form
becomes yours and you really try to pour yourself into it.
Speaker 3 (24:15):
So on The Office, I.
Speaker 7 (24:16):
Always did try to find what was personal about it
for me in that episode.
Speaker 3 (24:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Another really unique thing about the Office was how fluid
the dynamic was between the writing staff and the actors.
Usually this is not the case the writers write a
script and the actors acted. But on our show, not
only were the lines of communication very open, but a
lot of our writers were very much a part of
(24:44):
the cast, obviously Mindy Kayling, bj Novak, and of course
Paul Lieberstein, who played dunder Mifflin's beloved behted.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
No, No, it is that a thing.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Controversial, let's say controversial. HR Rep. Toby Flanderson. You said
it's not traditional and there's this huge wall typically between
the writing staff, yeah, and the actors. How do you
think that that difference in our show changed the dynamic.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
It would have been. I don't think our show would
have come out that way if if there was a
strict wall. We were all on the same page with
the show writers and actors, and we became so close
with each character an actor and liked them and liked
writing for them. And that often doesn't happen when they're
(25:35):
so separate. The writers have one idea what the show
is that they want to create, and the actors have
a different and so they're fighting each other on set
just create without ever talking. They're fighting each other. Yeah, right,
so I think, yeah, it was such a it was
such a good thing to do. Often that wall is
there because of the producers and the director. Now, the
(25:56):
director typically, you know, you're not supposed to have any
just supposed to be the only person talking to you
about your performance, right, And I get that, But at
the same time, if you have, you know, the show
goes for a little while. Actors know their roles better
(26:18):
than the director, the writers know the characters better than
the director, The DP knows the show better than the director.
The director's coming in knowing the least about the show
of anybody, and we're all supposed to like not make
the show better and just wait for the director to
catch it. It doesn't really work completely, right. It's the
(26:40):
thing about TV. I mean, it's a great rule for
a great rule for a movie, and you know, you
can see, like as a director too, and we all
became directors. You know that building someone's performance, you want
to tell them just a couple of things, you can
slowly try to push them in a direction, and you know,
it matters how you say things. And I think we
(27:01):
all generally respected that right boundary while we were building
a scene, but we all talked about the scenes beforehand
and afterwards what was going to come up, the stories,
and when things weren't working, we just stopped and we
just talked to each other.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
Yeah, I've taken that with me into the future.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
Like I always will show respect to a director, but
I will walk over to video village and have a
conversation with the writer or the creators on set just about.
Speaker 3 (27:29):
The character or what we're going for.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
I feel like I'm able to have a conversation with
them and get to the core of actually what it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
which is that a director is just more skilled at
having that conversation correct.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Yeah, Yeah, I've really I'm really big with intention.
Speaker 3 (27:49):
Now.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
I'm working on the Space Force with Greg now, so
we were doing scenes with Steve and I tell him
to say whatever he wants and just tell him the intention, right,
I mean, he's gonna say whatever he wants anyway.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
But right, did you feel like you had because of
your relationship with Greg did you feel like you had
a greater accountability to him when you started working Like
did you feel yeah?
Speaker 3 (28:22):
Big time?
Speaker 2 (28:23):
I think, you know, there's always this this I when
two people are working together and related that there's there's
this sense of nepotism, you know, And I felt like
I had more to prove and I wanted to, for
both of our sakes, defend against that by just doing
more and being better, you know.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
Right, I just want to talk a little bit about
the form of the show. We began over time to
find elements that we felt like worked that was going
to create you know, the best half hour television meaning
in diversity day for example, like setting that episode in
(29:05):
one day, having you know, having.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
All episodes were one day, right the most Yes, as
a rule. As a rule, yeah, yeah, which I think
that's something we broke a handful of times in two
hundred episodes.
Speaker 3 (29:18):
And why was that important?
Speaker 2 (29:21):
When we were talking about the concept of the show.
A documentary crew had come there that day for some
reason and everything was shot was contained in like their
intention and the I know at least the first few
times we broke that rule, it was because a story
lingered to the next day, so they followed it. But
(29:43):
it was our feeling that they weren't there every day
catching everything, whereas I think towards the end of the
show we'd said, no, maybe they just are there every day.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
I have never heard this before. Swear to God, really,
I've never heard this before.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
Yeah, why did they come? Because they came because they
knew this person was coming to talk to Michael about
you know, a problem they received, you know, the Larry movement, diversity.
But there was always that hook, right were they there
even if it was never stated.
Speaker 3 (30:19):
Or so like, oh, today it's the Christmas party? Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
You can imagine some days where nothing happened and they
just didn't come, right.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
I mean, I love this so much. It makes total
sense that the camera crew wasn't at this paper company
five days a week forever, And that level of thought
and detail in the world building of this thing, it
just it never ceases to amaze me. And as you've heard,
so much of that was the brainchild of Greg Daniels,
(30:48):
who I truly I consider him a genius, mad genius,
but a genius. He gave the show real values, a
real heart. So here's the man himself telling me about
one of his biggest principles on the show.
Speaker 3 (31:04):
A few people talk.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
To you about one of your core ideas, which is
the idea of truth and beauty.
Speaker 8 (31:11):
Yeah, that was my thing with Randall, truth and beauty,
Truth and beauty.
Speaker 3 (31:15):
Yeah. And what did that mean to you?
Speaker 8 (31:19):
Well, you know, to me, that was I think that's
some romantic poet. I'm not sure where that came from,
somebody like John Keats or something. I don't know, and
I don't even know.
Speaker 3 (31:29):
What he meant by it.
Speaker 8 (31:30):
But the way I used to use it with Randall
was that's what we're going for in the camera, right,
Let the camera seek out truth. That's what it's trying
to find. That's the point of a documentary.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
What's the truth?
Speaker 8 (31:42):
And also not like a cynical negative truth, like also
where's the beauty. It's like another principle of photography of
like a good photograph is, you know, a little sprig
of weed coming through the cracked concrete or whatever, you
know what I mean. It's like, where are you gonna
do something that's a little bit inspiring but find it
(32:03):
in a truthful way out in the real world.
Speaker 3 (32:05):
Right.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
Well, Mike sure talked about it, and you told a
story about a parking lot, an endless parking lot with
lines and parking spaces, and in one crack there's a
little flower, a little dandelion.
Speaker 8 (32:20):
He said that it's funny. I just made the same. Yeah, yes,
I think that that, you know. I'm I like the
notion of esthetic, like what are you searching for in art?
And the Japanese have interesting aesthetics with a cracked pot?
Speaker 3 (32:40):
Did he mention that to use that a lot?
Speaker 8 (32:42):
So I think it's called wu I'm not sure, but
it's the notion of a perfect pot is okay, you know,
and we in the West probably value a perfect pot.
But a cracked pot where the crack suddenly makes you
(33:03):
feel the history of the pot and the people who've
used it in their family and have treasured it and
kept it even with the crack in it, like it
suddenly cracks through you know, it suddenly will touch you.
It's those little details often of imperfections, that's like a
it's just a cool sort of philosophy.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
Yes, yeah, I have this so far off topic, but
a number of years ago, my parents were moving out
of their house and I went for a week and
I was like helping them and throwing out all of
this trash. And we go into like the corner of
the closet and a guest room that no one ever
slept in. And in the closet there was a big
piece of paper that was folded up and I unfolded
(33:44):
it and it was a Kennedy poster that my dad
had like handed out or seen or collected or whatever.
Speaker 3 (33:52):
And I remember.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
Saying to him, can I have this? And he's like, yeah,
it's like all torn or whatever. And I took it
and I framed it and I took it to this
play and they were like, oh, we can you know,
do this or that, And I was like no, no, no,
the crack has to stay there and the wrinkle, the
folded marks just as lightly as you can matt this
(34:14):
on something and enclose it because I want that history
of it.
Speaker 3 (34:18):
I don't know that idea. Yeah.
Speaker 8 (34:19):
Well, also, like I mean, you know, they don't get
too psychological, but you know, when you think about your dad, right,
you're so the relationship that you have with your father,
the fact how old that they are, and just the
sense of like passage of time being important to that
relationship and fragility of it and knowing that it may
(34:40):
not be around forever.
Speaker 3 (34:42):
And I can.
Speaker 8 (34:43):
Completely see why a tear in your dad's poster adds
to the emotion of it.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Yeah right, yeah, totally. I love that so much. The
imperfections really are what make the Office so perfect. More
after the break, So, as you probably heard from the
(35:20):
news or heard from this podcast, many of your favorite
shows have been ground to a halt the last few months.
The Writer's Guild of America is deep in a strike now.
Back in two thousand and seven, when The Office was
on the air, there was a major writer strike that
lasted ninety nine days.
Speaker 3 (35:41):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
Well, as of today, the current strike has reached one
hundred and forty days without an end in sight. We're
really in it now for the long haul. I love
how Mike Sure talked about the last strike, which had
a lot to do with the start of streaming and
online videos and how those were paid or not paid for.
(36:04):
And I'd like to share that with you now. The
account's significant because I have an Emmy congratulation, an actual Emmy,
but you also won an Emmy. But we were never
paid for it, and it led to the writers strike.
I watched a video.
Speaker 4 (36:24):
Of you yesterday from when we were on strike.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
When you were on strike, Yeah, you guys produced a video. Yeah,
and you said a number of things in the video.
Speaker 4 (36:33):
Okay, I don't remember any of them.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
But I saw it and I was like, oh my god.
And then we were joking that you guys were coming
up with bits as you were walking the picket line
and making the video. Kind of funny anyway, but you
said in part that you're watching this on the internet,
a thing that pays us zero dollars. They were put
on NBC dot com and they sold ads and we
(36:57):
won a Daytime Emmy and didn't make any money. The
writer strike was a really big deal. Yeah, I don't know,
just talk to me about that time of what you
remember of Greg saying no, we're not going to produce
material for free.
Speaker 4 (37:12):
There It was a very inspiring moment for me personally,
because this central issue at the time. This is two
thousand and seven. The central issue at the time was
jurisdiction over the internet because Netflix hadn't started making original
shows yet, but people felt like they were going in
that direction and NBC and every network had a website
(37:33):
and they were starting to like stream in primitive fashion,
the stream things on the over the internet, and suddenly
it was like, well, if this is the future. It
didn't take a genius to think like, well, this is
the future, Like, who cares whether it's a television screen
you hang on your wall or sit on a platform,
or whether it's your computer screen. This is how people
are consuming the work we do, and we ought to
(37:55):
get paid for them. So so those webisodes were like
a big part of that because they were shot with
a union labor and no one got paid. So that
was like the you know, it wasn't like because of
those episodes that the writers could want on strike. Those
webisodes were an example of the kind of thing that
we were trying. We were saying, like, if this is
the way things are going, we got to do some
(38:16):
about this, right. So, because the companies at the time
were saying like, you know what, we don't have enough information.
Let's just let's just let's just wait three years from now,
we'll have more information and then we'll know what the
future of this is. And we were like, no, you're
trying to you're basically trying to grandfather in the internet
as like a thing that you don't pay for. So
(38:37):
we went on strike and it was a huge deal
and it was very scary. It was like unclear what
was going on. The communication wasn't sublime. And Greg was like, well,
we're going to pick at our own show. And the
reason we're going to pick out our own show isn't
a show of solidarity. Isn't a saying like this is
the thing we care about the most in the world.
(38:57):
And we were in that little Chandler Studios in the
middle of Van Eyes and it was not on a
major studio lot, and so we all showed up to
work at six in the morning and we pick it
at our own show. And we were in the middle
of season four. We were about to shoot the Dinner
Party episode, one of the most famous episodes of the
show of all time, the best read through I think
we ever had. Do you remember that read through? That
(39:19):
read through was like it was like a rock concert.
And we had finished that script. That script was ready
to go, and that script could have been shot. The
actors could have just executed the script, and the directors
were on strike, and the crew wasn't on strike, but
Steve Carrell said, no, I'm not. This is the way
we make this show is collaborative, and there's writers on
(39:41):
the set and there's producers on the set, and we
changed things and we work out new little moments and
pitch new jokes, and I don't think I'm going to
make the show without the writers. And he didn't show up,
and so they shot a couple scenes from the episode
that Michael Scott wasn't in, and then there was nothing
else to do and the show shut down, and that
was such a heroic thing. He just stayed home and
(40:04):
he got calls from a lot of lawyers and a
lot of studio executives, from really really powerful people saying
you have to do this, and he was like, no,
I don't watch me. And Greg called him and he
was home and Greg was like, hey, I know that
you've had a lot of pressure coming at you. Are
you okay And he was like, yeah, I'm home, I'm
playing with my kids, and was totally unfazed by it
(40:25):
and had the attitude of like, this is a collaborative effort.
This is a thing that we do together. We don't
do this, this isn't without writers on the set. We
don't make the same show, and I'm not going to
make that show fire me basically was what he was saying.
He called their bluff and the show shut down and
writers run strike for four months, and then they gave
up jurisdiction of the internet and we went back to work,
(40:47):
and then we made the Dinner Party, which is amazing,
and it was truly the story of what he did
spread like wildfire. He did not have to do that.
There were very few people who were in the position
he was in, obviously as the star of a very popular, successful, gigantic,
monolithic hit show. But still he didn't have to do that.
Speaker 3 (41:08):
He could have.
Speaker 4 (41:09):
No one would have been mad at him. He wasn't
on the actors right, and.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
I was, you know, I remember having a huge, long
conversation with my representations, saying like, how can I walk
past them? How can I cross how can I cross
the line? And he said that that you know, you
have no choice, Yeah, you have to show.
Speaker 4 (41:26):
Up, and we knew that, and Ed, I remember Ed
came out and was like, hey guys, and he hung
out with us, and I remember Ed going, I'm really sorry,
but I have and we were like no, no, no, we
get it. Your union is not on strike here, like
you're not. We get it. It's fine. No one's bad
at you, Like no one had any animosity towards any
of the actors because you were in breach of contract
if you didn't show up. Steve was in breach of contract.
(41:47):
He just said, I don't care. Fire me. And it's
easier for the star of the show to do that
right than it is for anyone else. But the story
spread like wildfire, and Mindy wrote a sign in He
hung it on his trailer that said like Steve Carrell
American hero or something and took a picture of it,
and it spread very quickly around the town, and it
(42:08):
was a real wind beneath the wings of the Guild
at the time.
Speaker 3 (42:13):
It's amazing.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
I mean, he you can't sort of overstate just what
an amazing guy he is. Yeah, and person to work with.
I get a little choked up when I remember what
an amazing leader he was during that time and always,
but during the strike especially. And I want to close
(42:38):
out with one of my favorite tidbits I learn while
collecting these stories about the office. The next clip release
sums up the care that the writers took in every
single decision. But I'm going to let the brilliant writer
and later co show runner of the show, Jen Salada
tell you about this. Was there anything else that specific
(43:00):
or unique? Do you remember about this writing room? Writer's room?
Speaker 9 (43:04):
It was the best writer's room I've ever been in,
and I feel like it will be the best writer's
room I'm ever in. I think the writers were exceptionally talented,
and Greg was saying that everybody had their own super strengths,
but everybody was good at story and comedy and emotion.
I felt that certain people, yeah, were more gift, more
(43:28):
gifted in certain areas. But I've worked on staffs where
one person was story, one person was comedy. There was
a little bit more like that, and I felt like
this staff, everybody had the ability to do everything, and
the fact that everybody cared so much. There was an
enormous discussion I don't know if anybody talked about it
between whether the proposal should have sound or no sound.
(43:50):
There were people on both sides. It was about fifty
to fifty. It was the craziest discussion. It was whether
or not when we saw Jim proposed to Pam we
should have have sound. And hear what he's saying, or
just see the visual of him in the rain getting
on one knee. And I found that that really explained
(44:11):
the writer's room. Everybody cared so much. There was one
moment where Greg was getting into his car, you know,
after the discussion had gone on for a month and
we were about to, you know, have to settle on it,
where I was coming from a trailer and he was
getting into his car and I said Greg, and he
like turned and he was like kind of trapped between
his car door and his car and I was like,
(44:31):
did you make did you decide yet it was sound
or no sound? And he's like, no, no, I haven't,
I haven't. It was literally like a horror film. I
was like was stalking him to find out if the
decision had been made. We argued passionately, and it was
just because everybody cared, And I think that a lot
of it was just for the passion with which the
passion everybody had for telling the story. I can talk
(44:52):
a little bit about the sound no sound if you
want to hear it, but you might hear it from everybody.
Speaker 3 (44:55):
Else to oh, go ahead.
Speaker 9 (44:59):
So that was actually a decision a little bit that
I feel like came down to another discussion that we
had a lot of times in the room, which was
kind of being more documentary and a little bit more
real and a little bit more subtle and being a
little bit more like a comedy or a show. So basically,
(45:20):
the side that wanted to hear Jim's words were like,
you've been waiting forever to hear him propose to Pam.
Why would you take that moment away from people and
not hear his actual words. It's like they've been waiting
for it. You want to give them what they've been
waiting for. Just might be slightly more of a comedy
show kind of thing with a documentary documentary thing. It
was a little bit more of like God, it's so
(45:44):
beautiful and subtle, and to be across the street and
to have to reach for it because he would turn
his mic off in this moment. It's a big moment,
and once you see him down on one knee, we
know what he's saying, and then actually filling in the
blank is more beautiful. We went back and forth about
this for so long. At one point Greg asked me
(46:04):
to send in my pros and CON's list, like sound
and no sound. And then I remember I was in
his office a little bit later. We didn't still hadn't
made a decision, and I saw a list of people
who wanted sound and a list of people who wanted
no sound, and his wife and two kids was on
one side of the list, and two other kids or
white one kid. Once I listened to other kids. His
family was split down the middle. So he was interviewing
(46:26):
everybody and saying what should we do? What should we do?
So there was a moment he was at the sound
mix we were he had to make the decision, like
this is the moment, and he's like, is there anybody
we haven't asked? Is there anybody we haven't asked? And
I said, oh, yeah, the security guard is there, you know,
security guard whose name I can't quite remember him. Sorry,
But I go and I get the security guard. And
it occurs to me during my walk to the office
(46:48):
that he's never seen the office. The lovely, lovely man
protected us, all right. So I'm like, okay, cool, So
now we've just got a very objective person. So I
show him the scene without sound, and then I show
him the scene with sound, and I say, what did
you prefer, and he said I liked the second one
and I said why he said, oh, because I could
(47:08):
hear it. Okay, Greg, he said he like the second
one because you could hear it. So that was it. Anyway,
That wasn't how the decision was made, but that was
our last person weighing in, and then you know, it
ended up airing with sound. But it was the debate
about whether or not it should be sound or no
(47:30):
sound was the writer's room. To me, it was everybody
incredibly passionate about something that we had worked towards and
just we really cared.
Speaker 1 (47:50):
Thanks for caring, Jen and Greg, Mike, Paul, Brent, Lee
Jean and everyone who worked on and rode on the show.
These people mean so much to me, and I support
what they are fighting for. I support what the actors
(48:11):
the Screen Actors Guild is fighting for. But I hope
for the sake of everyone that we get back to
work very soon. I'll be back next week with a
new and of course exciting guest. Until then, please everyone
keep the writers and the actors and all of the
(48:33):
crew across the entertainment industry in your.
Speaker 3 (48:36):
Mind this week, and we'll see you next week.
Speaker 1 (48:50):
Off the Beat is hosted and executive produced by me
Brian Baumgartner, alongside our executive producer Lang Lee. Our senior
producer is Diego Tapia. Our producers are Liz Hayes, Hannah Harris,
and Emily Carr. Our talent producer is Ryan Papa Zachary,
and our intern is Ali Amir Sahi. Our theme song
(49:11):
Bubble and Squeak, performed by the one and only Creed Bratton,
Well, hello there, friends, and welcome to a very special
episode of Off the Beat. I am your host, Brian Baumgartner.
Today we're going to take a little trip, a trip
to a place that I like to call memory Lane.
Believe it or not, I have now been podcasting for
(00:36):
over three years, and it all started out with me
talking to some of my old co workers on the office,
the actors, directors, makeup artists, camera operators, anyone I could
find basically to help me understand what made that show
so special. Well, the first line of attack in that
(00:57):
specialness was, of course, the writers. So today I wanted
to highlight some of the brilliant, hilarious minds who shaped
the stories and crafted the jokes that well that you love.
I'm calling this my WGA episode. Seems fitting at this
point in time, am I right? But you can think
(01:20):
of this as a best of some of my favorite
snippets from my conversations with some of my favorite people
on the planet. Whether you're a longtime listener to the
podcast or this is your first time hearing these, I
hope that you'll enjoy these stories about the inner workings
of the writer's room and the magical place that was
(01:43):
and still is the office.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Bubble and Squeak, I love it, Bubble and Squeakna.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
Bubble and Squeak.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
I cook it every month. Oh from the Nah people.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Let's start it off with this clip from my conversation
with Jeane Stupnitsky talking about how he and his writing
partner Lei Eisenberg, got to be in that room in
the first place.
Speaker 5 (02:25):
So one of the things that separated Lee and I
from everyone everyone, like a lot of those a lot
of the stuff went to Harvard. They were all kind
of like it was almost their birthright to write the sitcoms.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
Okay, you know.
Speaker 5 (02:36):
I was from Chicago. He was from Boston, and I
had just five years of just nothing. I was, like
I said, I'm just getting fired a lot. I was
terrible at everything. So not a good assistant, not a
good PA, just a huge fuck up. Really just a
history of failure in many ways. So there was no
(02:57):
like we didn't expect anything, We weren't didn't feel like
we should be there. But yes we got. I think
I was maybe twenty six or twenty seven, Yeah, started.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
What do you think you and Lee, both of you,
what do you think your greatest contribution to the show
was or how do you feel like you helped?
Speaker 3 (03:19):
Oh wow, what are you most proud of?
Speaker 5 (03:22):
Yeah, you know, there are certain jokes that I'm really
proud of that I remember writing. That feeling you get
when you just you're like this is this is this
feels like it could be really good. So I have
those moments in my mind of just remember writing certain
jokes and they were weren't even always from my episodes,
but like they're just jokes that I'm proud of.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
It feels so weird.
Speaker 5 (03:44):
This when the imposter syndrome really kicks in when you
start talking about stuff like this. But I think maybe
we kind of subverted. I think we like, you know,
we did things like when Jim kind of became like
not the greatest partner every She's like, oh, I gotta
I gotta leave. I gotta go to the houses on
fire or flood and you know, trying to leave camp
like you would really piss Officer and a segment of
the audience. But just things like that, I don't know.
(04:07):
I think we probably wrote. Everyone had their own, Like
I feel like Mike Sure wrote like Michael it is
almost most noble in a way, like the best version
of Michael version. Personally I like a lot, and like
everyone had like a different version. But I think we
probably wrote like the the most biggest British version of
the show in a way. Okay, maybe some of the
darker stuff.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Well that that was sort of where I was going.
I mean, the two episodes that you guys were responsible for,
Scott's Todd's and Dinner Party unquestionably considered the most cringiest
of episodes in the history of the show. Were those
your ideas or did you execute them? And what I
mean by that for those of you listening who don't know.
(04:48):
Sometimes there are stories that are decided collectively in the
writer's room and then you're assigned a script to write.
I'm curious about sort of the genesis for either one
or to those episodes.
Speaker 5 (05:01):
Yeah, so yeah, it's true. Some like writers will come
in with ideas after we'll have like time off in
between seasons. We're coming with new ideas, and the ideas
who come in come in with aren't always the ones
that you end up writing. Sometimes other writers write them
and you write other writers ideas. Neither one was our
idea Dinner Party. It might have been Greg's idea I
(05:21):
don't actually remember whose idea that was, but I remember
feeling very I knew how to write that episode, and
I remember Greg assigned it to Mindy, who like wasn't
that I don't think she she want to write a
different episode. I think at the time it was called
like Who's Afraid of John Levinson Gold? But Scott's Tots
was a Paul Lieberstein original that we were assigned.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Ok, you make your acting debut in the office correct
on television?
Speaker 5 (05:49):
On television?
Speaker 3 (05:49):
Yes, Yes, on television.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Leo and Gino the delivery guys, was this something you
were excited about doing or was this just fun for the.
Speaker 5 (05:59):
Right I did not enjoy at all, and it was
really the other writers kind of. I think Greg thought
it was funny, and the other writers, like I thought
it would be funny to force us to act. I
hated it, didn't want to do it, fought against it.
But if we were going to do it, we did
Lee and I did think it was funny for him
to play Geno and me to play Leo, which was
just really confused when the people work on the show,
(06:19):
you know what our names was? What our names were? Anyway,
at the beginning, I think by the end, we're really confused.
And sometimes if I felt someone didn't like, if I
knew someone wasn't sure, if I was leader Gene and
Lee would walk by and be like, hey Gene to Lee,
I would call him Gene, which would just doubly confuse
them and they think they finally have to haven't figured out,
and then I would just continue confusing.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
That's so good. I mean, look the show. The show
gave all of us so much. I mean, for you,
your first job in a writer's room, your acting career
on Delvion, whether you liked it or not, your directorial debut,
when you look back on that time, what feelings do
you have.
Speaker 5 (07:00):
I mean, I owe so much. It was my film school,
you know, I owe so much to the show. It
because you know easily you can easily get on a
show that last six episodes, and then you get on
another show and it kind of you know, gets canceled
or it's I mean, we got so lucky being hired
on the show, to be on a show that went
as long as it did, and we didn't stay the
(07:21):
whole time, but it changed our lives, met a lot
of amazing people.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
We learned so much.
Speaker 5 (07:25):
We learned how to become showrunners and how to write
and how to run a room and kind of one
of the things in the Writer's Strike that we talk
about is just and I know Mike Scohn record talking
about this just true. It was like, you know, for
the next genreal. You know, we learned from Greg how
to do these things, and a lot a lot of
people are aren't learning that anymore. But we just completely
(07:48):
change our lives, can change the trajectory of our careers.
I remember thinking before it became preessional writer, I thought, oh,
these writers are They're so lucky. They're so lucky that
they get to do this. And then when I became
one and I was like, it's all talent, lucky, has
nothing new with it. I'm just that talented. Now I
realized I'm back to the lucky part. There's talent, for sure,
but there's so much luck involved. There's just things you
(08:11):
can't control that we got on the show that it
went as long as it did, that we met these
made these connections and met these people. It just it's
you know, things are lot of our hands and I
feel so lucky. I feel so lucky.
Speaker 3 (08:23):
Well, I think we were all pretty lucky to be there. Jean.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
However, Lee remembers their early days on the staff as
a little less nostalgic. In fact, I think neurotic is
a better word for it. Here's Lee Eisenberg.
Speaker 6 (08:39):
We had never been in a writer's room before, so
we didn't know anything. And so in a writer's room,
if you pitch a joke and people don't like it,
they don't tell you they don't like it. It just
you're met with silence, and then you extrapolate the silence to.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
Mean move on.
Speaker 6 (08:53):
But we didn't know that, so we thought that maybe
like people couldn't hear and so like I remember Jean
saying to Paul once, like did you hear what I said?
And that like stuff like that would happen a lot.
And then I pitch, I pitched something and.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
Because you thought they were being rude, well I didn't
sea it was just like bond.
Speaker 6 (09:09):
Well, it's just not the way that people interact with
each other. You don't you acknowledge someone you say like, oh,
I'm not sure that's right for me, But like if
you did, you know you're generating thousands of jokes a day,
Like if you have every single joke and explain why
it's not right. You would get anything done.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
That's funny, Lee, I don't think it's works for this moment, right,
should we think of it?
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Yeah, no one does that. We keep going, right.
Speaker 6 (09:26):
It was just weird, and we didn't know what we were doing.
And then everyone will go out to lunch together. They
would all kind of like run to their cars and
like five people pile into a car, and then Gene
and I would like get into like our camera. It
just we felt like we were the new kids and
we didn't fit in. And so I think our contract
was like twenty weeks. It was ten weeks with an
option for another ten weeks or something like that. And
(09:48):
we were ten. We're getting close to ten weeks, and
we're we were nervous, but we also kind of felt like,
no one's that nice to us. I think we're gonna
get fired anyways, can we can we quit? And we
called our agent and we said, he's like, hey, so
you're you're almost up. You know you're going to you
know we're gonna try getting you those other ten weeks.
We said, well, what if we want to quit? He said, well,
(10:10):
I don't stand why you're asking and we said, well, like,
you know, people aren't that nice to us, like we're
fourth graders at the New School. And he was like,
this is the stupidest question anyone's ever asked me. And
he just was Mark Provozero, who represented me and Bean
and Mindy and BJ and he was like, dumbest question
I've ever been asked. And he hung up on us, right,
and then we stayed on the show for five more years.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
Were you close to being fired? Do you think? Or
do you Was that just your perception because people didn't
seem nice.
Speaker 6 (10:38):
I think that when you say people didn't seem nice,
I really feel young. I think that the you know,
when you're acting and when you first start acting and
you're like, the scene isn't about you, and you're like
you want to go up to the director and.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
Be like, hey, did you like what I was doing? Right?
Speaker 6 (10:50):
And you think the scene's about you even though no
one cares about you because the scene isn't about you.
That's the way I felt about the writer's room was
I was like, they're scrutinizing us every moment, and they
were Greg had eighty five thousand other things to worry
about than the staff writer's happiness or our contributions. We
were contributing, but I think for us it was like
Gene I would drive back and forth. We live together,
(11:12):
and we'd have like a forty five minute commute every
day each way, and all we would do is just say, like, hey,
Paul laughed a little bit at that joke I said
in the small room, how did it go with Mike
and Jen in the other room? Did bj acknowledge you today?
I mean, it was like we were parsing out the
smallest little things, and then Greg got pneumonia season two
(11:33):
while we were breaking the fight, so we had to
outline the fight. Everyone else got to outline the episode's
kind of more as a group, and for us it
was like me and Jean and Paul and everyone else
was off on script. And then we had to go
meet Greg at his house because he had walking pneumonia,
and it was like, Oh, they're setting us.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
Up to fail.
Speaker 6 (11:50):
They gave us this episode that's like goofy and different
from the rest of the show. There's like a fight
in a dojo, like they don't want us to do well,
and then when we handed a bad script, they'll fire
up us. This is what we were convinced of. I
think we didn't. I think we didn't feel confident that
we weren't going to be fired until three years in.
I'm not kidding. Every single time, Like when we wrote
(12:10):
the Secret, we were like, they gave us the secret
because there's not a lot of time, and then we
won't deliver and then they'll fire us. That's all we
went through the first few years. What Wait, We liked
everyone eventually, but we were terrified. It wasn't like a
culture of fear. It was just two insecure guys.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
You were just worried about yourself. Oh, we were terrified. Yeah. Wow, Yeah,
I'm really sorry to hear that. Thanks. I mean, it
doesn't surprise me.
Speaker 6 (12:36):
You're a bit neurotic, but I've monetized the neuroses.
Speaker 3 (12:39):
That's all that matters.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
Well, sure, I'm glad that they didn't quit or get fired,
because without them we wouldn't have had such delectable masterpieces
of cringe as Scott's Tots or even Dinner Party. In fact,
every writer contributed their own special element to the show.
(13:03):
But I wasn't there, at least not for that part.
So I'm gonna let Moe's shrewt. I mean, Mike, sure,
tell you all about it. So Lee talked about this.
I was talking to him about if there were specific
strengths because the episodes were different, were there ways that
(13:23):
either interested people or that they were better at And
what he said was that he felt like he and
Gene were much more in the sort of cringe comedy. Yeah, yeah,
which you know, if you look at Dinner Party, that
certainly fits that bill. And what they said about you
was that you were much more optimistic. Do you feel
(13:44):
like that's true?
Speaker 5 (13:45):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (13:45):
I do.
Speaker 4 (13:48):
I feel like my sweet spot on the show was, well,
Christmas Party's pretty optimistic episode. But like the episode Branch
Closing that I wrote that story because Jan walks in
on the first page of the episode and says, we're
shutting a branch down, and Michael has a complete collapse
(14:11):
and then he says, no, I'm not letting this happen.
I'm going to do something about this, and he and
Dwight head off and they go to David Wallace's house
in Connecticut and they're just like, I'm going to confront
him and I'm going to make him see that this
is not the right decision. It is utterly ineffectual Wallace
Network shows up. They just end up sitting there and
are miserable and completely unbeknownst to them, through a variety
(14:34):
of other machiness, the branch ends up getting saved. But
there's a scene in the end where Michael and Dwight
are sitting in the car and that all hope is lost,
and Michael says, okay, top three favorite moments ever at
the office, and Dwight says, like my first day when
you sprayed me with the fire extinguisher, and when yeah,
I got sick and you came into the MRI, you know,
(14:55):
I got a concussion or whatever. And then Dwight says,
what about you? What are your favorite moments? And Michael
says all of them, every single one, And then Dwight says, well,
what about when Jan showed up and said the branch
was closing? And He's like, come on, man, But that
I remember just thinking like this, and that scene wasn't
in the outline, and I remember writing that scene and
thinking like that that this is like I locked into
(15:17):
that idea. And I think it's just because it was
like a moment of humanity between the two of them,
where like the office is very meaningful. It's all Michael
has and him being able to just sort of express
in a sincere and human way what he loved about
the place, like that kind of thing. I really felt
like that was my jam. But yeah, I mean those guys,
(15:39):
like Greg's theory was that writing staff should be like
The X Men, where he's like, if you have all
people who are the same and have the same like
comedic power, you're gonna have one awesome thing about the show.
But if if everybody has his or her own comedic power,
then you get everything. And so yeah, I think Lee
and Jean were really into the like super I mean,
(16:01):
those guys are so funny, Like Scott's Tots was an
episode they pitched very early on that Greg was like,
we're never doing this, and then long after I left,
I was watching him like, oh, I guess Greg gave in.
But yeah, they love that. Jen Solata was her superpower
is just this incredible connection to Pam. She's also hilarious,
(16:22):
but like she was like the beating heart of the show.
I would say, not just through Pam, through all the characters,
but like the episode where the bird dies and Michael
has the funeral for the bird. That was Jen from
beginning to end, and we kept like tinkering and tinkering
and tickering, and she eventually was like, I think I
just understand this and I just want to write it,
and we were like, great, and then it's amazing. And
the part of it that she really liked into was
(16:44):
Pam Pam understanding what Michael was going through and giving
the eulogy and trying to make Michael feel better by
talking about this dead bird. It's a really complicated emotional moment.
But Jen just like understood it at some fundamental level.
And you know, Paul was really into Michael's when Michael
was at his absolute worst. Like Paul was super into
(17:06):
the Michael's worst instincts, right right, Mindy was Mindy's superpower
was always the super absurdist stuff, the really like crazy
flights of fancy. You know, famously in the episode where
Michael burns his foot on the George Foreman grill, when
Michael burns his foot. I mean again, every episode that
(17:28):
everybody wrote was always rewritten a tremendous amount. But I
will say that that first monologue Michael has where he's
explained to the camera how he burned his foot. I
don't think we changed a word of it. Like Mindy
turned in her script and that speech was in there
and it was really long and it's really complicated and
it has it's a crazy roller coaster, and I don't
(17:48):
think we changed a single word because she just like
she would lock into just the the super absurdist stuff
presented very straightforwardly, like yeah, I mean, everyone everybody had
something they were good at. That staff is incredible.
Speaker 3 (18:02):
They sure, or we'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
One thing I heard from basically all of the writers
was that Greg Daniels, our showrunner, producer, mastermind, fearless leader,
whatever you want to call him, he had a lot
of games or exercises or theories as he called them
that he instilled in the writer's room and used to
help shape the stories.
Speaker 3 (18:42):
Characters are the whole world of the office.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
I'm not a writer, but from what I learned, this
is different from how your average sitcom writer's room is run.
Our writer Brent Forrester had also worked with him years
before on The Simpsons and King of the Hill, so
he knew Greg's weighs very very well.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
Here's Brent, do you consider Greg a teacher?
Speaker 7 (19:08):
Oh for sure. Yeah, he's a friend of mine forever now.
And we were in the trenches at the Simpsons ten
am to ten pm every single day, so you know
we're allD buddies, but for sure big time.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
Someone told us this exercise that he had something that
if you were having trouble breaking stories, and he called
it unlikely duos, And there were note cards on the
wall with all the character's names, and the idea was
to pick two characters that you would not necessarily associate
with each other together and then write a story on that.
Speaker 3 (19:43):
I think that's.
Speaker 7 (19:44):
Always a great method. Early on, back on nurses for me,
I asked one of the senior writers there what makes
a story? And the guy called me into his office.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
His name was Bruce Ferber.
Speaker 7 (19:56):
He closed the blind, shut the door, locked it, and
he said, is usually about two people, and then he
unlocked the door and made me leave. It sounds so
a commonplace, but it's actually the key.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
Right.
Speaker 7 (20:11):
Yeah, that's what's great is what's an unusual pairing. That's
how I got my first Simpsons episode was I paired
Homer versus Patty and Selma. It had never been done before,
so I got an episode, right but for sure, on
any show, you know what, two characters have never been
in a.
Speaker 3 (20:23):
Story together, do that right?
Speaker 1 (20:24):
Oh, that's genius. It's the small attention to details. When
you know the characters and how the characters would behave,
you almost don't need anything more than this. I was
told that during the testing of the show with the
Gym's and the Dwights, the direction from Greg to the
(20:45):
actors was very simply, Jim, bring Dwight a glass of water, right,
and then what happens?
Speaker 3 (20:53):
Right?
Speaker 1 (20:54):
You know Dwight is going to be skeptical, right, right,
because you know, you know he's afraid the gym has
done something to the water. Yeah, And I thought, like,
you guys did such a great job of that, of
studying the character's behavior and how each character.
Speaker 3 (21:09):
Would behave in a given situation.
Speaker 7 (21:11):
No, you've hit it on the head. And if you notice,
ask Greg what his favorite television show is of all time.
I remember he was being interviewed and he sat there
for an hour trying to think, you know, and asking
the writers what they thought it was. Larry Sanders and
Judd Apatow. If you ask him, he'll give you the
same answer. I worked with jud on a show called
Love we did for Netflix. I was the head writer
(21:33):
there and I remember we delivered scripts to jud the
first four scripts. I thought they were good. They were real,
clever and funny, and he was so bummed and as
he tried to articulate what it was, he said, watch.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
The Larry Sanders Show.
Speaker 7 (21:45):
And by the end we had a phrase, a motto,
and it was behavior over banter. I never forgot it.
Speaker 3 (21:54):
Man.
Speaker 7 (21:55):
You know, you don't have to have clever word play
if the characters are in an interesting behavior. Now, I
can tell you two behaviors that are funny for actress.
One is lying, always funny. The other generally is seduction.
Unless the first that I suppose is really hot, it's
gonna be kind of funny.
Speaker 3 (22:11):
Right.
Speaker 7 (22:11):
So I wonder for you as a comic performer. You know,
you're talking about the glass of water thing, which is
complex behavior. Are there other categories of behavior that are
funny for you to perform?
Speaker 1 (22:21):
Oh, that's a very interesting question for me. The biggest
laughs that I ever remember was when Holly was told
that Kevin was slow. That was my recollection and people
went sort of bonkers about it. And I think the
(22:42):
reason why is because it was a very simple joke
that is set up by years of history and knowing
the character, and as soon as you hear the setup
of that, you know instantly that she will believe it
and that there will be confusion between her and Kevin,
and that could play out as long as we wanted
(23:02):
it to. I think that when you truly, when you
have the time to create a character and there's an
expectation from an audience on how that character would respond,
the anticipation of that and delivering that or the opposite
of what the expectation is to me, those things.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
Are very funny. Wow, that's gold.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
At one point said this. It has been said by
wiser artists than me that the more personal you make
your writing, the more personal it will become. Do you
feel like you write personally?
Speaker 3 (23:40):
I aspire to, for sure.
Speaker 7 (23:42):
Our medium is very interesting because it's collaborative and I
am hired to execute the vision of somebody above me.
And you know, I've come to think of the writer's
room as an art project. The showrunner is.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
The artist of the show.
Speaker 7 (24:00):
That's the Picasso, and we're all there to sort of
make his or her vision come to life. Having said that,
when you get an individual episode. At a certain point
they send you off, and that's when the art form
becomes yours and you really try to pour yourself into it.
Speaker 3 (24:15):
So on The Office, I.
Speaker 7 (24:16):
Always did try to find what was personal about it
for me in that episode.
Speaker 3 (24:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Another really unique thing about the Office was how fluid
the dynamic was between the writing staff and the actors.
Usually this is not the case the writers write a
script and the actors acted. But on our show, not
only were the lines of communication very open, but a
lot of our writers were very much a part of
(24:44):
the cast, obviously Mindy Kayling, bj Novak, and of course
Paul Lieberstein, who played dunder Mifflin's beloved behted.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
No, No, it is that a thing.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Controversial, let's say controversial. HR Rep. Toby Flanderson. You said
it's not traditional and there's this huge wall typically between
the writing staff, yeah, and the actors. How do you
think that that difference in our show changed the dynamic.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
It would have been. I don't think our show would
have come out that way if if there was a
strict wall. We were all on the same page with
the show writers and actors, and we became so close
with each character an actor and liked them and liked
writing for them. And that often doesn't happen when they're
(25:35):
so separate. The writers have one idea what the show
is that they want to create, and the actors have
a different and so they're fighting each other on set
just create without ever talking. They're fighting each other. Yeah, right,
so I think, yeah, it was such a it was
such a good thing to do. Often that wall is
there because of the producers and the director. Now, the
(25:56):
director typically, you know, you're not supposed to have any
just supposed to be the only person talking to you
about your performance, right, And I get that, But at
the same time, if you have, you know, the show
goes for a little while. Actors know their roles better
(26:18):
than the director, the writers know the characters better than
the director, The DP knows the show better than the director.
The director's coming in knowing the least about the show
of anybody, and we're all supposed to like not make
the show better and just wait for the director to
catch it. It doesn't really work completely, right. It's the
(26:40):
thing about TV. I mean, it's a great rule for
a great rule for a movie, and you know, you
can see, like as a director too, and we all
became directors. You know that building someone's performance, you want
to tell them just a couple of things, you can
slowly try to push them in a direction, and you know,
it matters how you say things. And I think we
(27:01):
all generally respected that right boundary while we were building
a scene, but we all talked about the scenes beforehand
and afterwards what was going to come up, the stories,
and when things weren't working, we just stopped and we
just talked to each other.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
Yeah, I've taken that with me into the future.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
Like I always will show respect to a director, but
I will walk over to video village and have a
conversation with the writer or the creators on set just about.
Speaker 3 (27:29):
The character or what we're going for.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
I feel like I'm able to have a conversation with
them and get to the core of actually what it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
which is that a director is just more skilled at
having that conversation correct.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Yeah, Yeah, I've really I'm really big with intention.
Speaker 3 (27:49):
Now.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
I'm working on the Space Force with Greg now, so
we were doing scenes with Steve and I tell him
to say whatever he wants and just tell him the intention, right,
I mean, he's gonna say whatever he wants anyway.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
But right, did you feel like you had because of
your relationship with Greg did you feel like you had
a greater accountability to him when you started working Like
did you feel yeah?
Speaker 3 (28:22):
Big time?
Speaker 2 (28:23):
I think, you know, there's always this this I when
two people are working together and related that there's there's
this sense of nepotism, you know, And I felt like
I had more to prove and I wanted to, for
both of our sakes, defend against that by just doing
more and being better, you know.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
Right, I just want to talk a little bit about
the form of the show. We began over time to
find elements that we felt like worked that was going
to create you know, the best half hour television meaning
in diversity day for example, like setting that episode in
(29:05):
one day, having you know, having.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
All episodes were one day, right the most Yes, as
a rule. As a rule, yeah, yeah, which I think
that's something we broke a handful of times in two
hundred episodes.
Speaker 3 (29:18):
And why was that important?
Speaker 2 (29:21):
When we were talking about the concept of the show.
A documentary crew had come there that day for some
reason and everything was shot was contained in like their
intention and the I know at least the first few
times we broke that rule, it was because a story
lingered to the next day, so they followed it. But
(29:43):
it was our feeling that they weren't there every day
catching everything, whereas I think towards the end of the
show we'd said, no, maybe they just are there every day.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
I have never heard this before. Swear to God, really,
I've never heard this before.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
Yeah, why did they come? Because they came because they
knew this person was coming to talk to Michael about
you know, a problem they received, you know, the Larry movement, diversity.
But there was always that hook, right were they there
even if it was never stated.
Speaker 3 (30:19):
Or so like, oh, today it's the Christmas party? Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
You can imagine some days where nothing happened and they
just didn't come, right.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
I mean, I love this so much. It makes total
sense that the camera crew wasn't at this paper company
five days a week forever, And that level of thought
and detail in the world building of this thing, it
just it never ceases to amaze me. And as you've heard,
so much of that was the brainchild of Greg Daniels,
(30:48):
who I truly I consider him a genius, mad genius,
but a genius. He gave the show real values, a
real heart. So here's the man himself telling me about
one of his biggest principles on the show.
Speaker 3 (31:04):
A few people talk.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
To you about one of your core ideas, which is
the idea of truth and beauty.
Speaker 8 (31:11):
Yeah, that was my thing with Randall, truth and beauty,
Truth and beauty.
Speaker 3 (31:15):
Yeah. And what did that mean to you?
Speaker 8 (31:19):
Well, you know, to me, that was I think that's
some romantic poet. I'm not sure where that came from,
somebody like John Keats or something. I don't know, and
I don't even know.
Speaker 3 (31:29):
What he meant by it.
Speaker 8 (31:30):
But the way I used to use it with Randall
was that's what we're going for in the camera, right,
Let the camera seek out truth. That's what it's trying
to find. That's the point of a documentary.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
What's the truth?
Speaker 8 (31:42):
And also not like a cynical negative truth, like also
where's the beauty. It's like another principle of photography of
like a good photograph is, you know, a little sprig
of weed coming through the cracked concrete or whatever, you
know what I mean. It's like, where are you gonna
do something that's a little bit inspiring but find it
(32:03):
in a truthful way out in the real world.
Speaker 3 (32:05):
Right.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
Well, Mike sure talked about it, and you told a
story about a parking lot, an endless parking lot with
lines and parking spaces, and in one crack there's a
little flower, a little dandelion.
Speaker 8 (32:20):
He said that it's funny. I just made the same. Yeah, yes,
I think that that, you know. I'm I like the
notion of esthetic, like what are you searching for in art?
And the Japanese have interesting aesthetics with a cracked pot?
Speaker 3 (32:40):
Did he mention that to use that a lot?
Speaker 8 (32:42):
So I think it's called wu I'm not sure, but
it's the notion of a perfect pot is okay, you know,
and we in the West probably value a perfect pot.
But a cracked pot where the crack suddenly makes you
(33:03):
feel the history of the pot and the people who've
used it in their family and have treasured it and
kept it even with the crack in it, like it
suddenly cracks through you know, it suddenly will touch you.
It's those little details often of imperfections, that's like a
it's just a cool sort of philosophy.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
Yes, yeah, I have this so far off topic, but
a number of years ago, my parents were moving out
of their house and I went for a week and
I was like helping them and throwing out all of
this trash. And we go into like the corner of
the closet and a guest room that no one ever
slept in. And in the closet there was a big
piece of paper that was folded up and I unfolded
(33:44):
it and it was a Kennedy poster that my dad
had like handed out or seen or collected or whatever.
Speaker 3 (33:52):
And I remember.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
Saying to him, can I have this? And he's like, yeah,
it's like all torn or whatever. And I took it
and I framed it and I took it to this
play and they were like, oh, we can you know,
do this or that, And I was like no, no, no,
the crack has to stay there and the wrinkle, the
folded marks just as lightly as you can matt this
(34:14):
on something and enclose it because I want that history
of it.
Speaker 3 (34:18):
I don't know that idea. Yeah.
Speaker 8 (34:19):
Well, also, like I mean, you know, they don't get
too psychological, but you know, when you think about your dad, right,
you're so the relationship that you have with your father,
the fact how old that they are, and just the
sense of like passage of time being important to that
relationship and fragility of it and knowing that it may
(34:40):
not be around forever.
Speaker 3 (34:42):
And I can.
Speaker 8 (34:43):
Completely see why a tear in your dad's poster adds
to the emotion of it.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Yeah right, yeah, totally. I love that so much. The
imperfections really are what make the Office so perfect. More
after the break, So, as you probably heard from the
(35:20):
news or heard from this podcast, many of your favorite
shows have been ground to a halt the last few months.
The Writer's Guild of America is deep in a strike now.
Back in two thousand and seven, when The Office was
on the air, there was a major writer strike that
lasted ninety nine days.
Speaker 3 (35:41):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
Well, as of today, the current strike has reached one
hundred and forty days without an end in sight. We're
really in it now for the long haul. I love
how Mike Sure talked about the last strike, which had
a lot to do with the start of streaming and
online videos and how those were paid or not paid for.
(36:04):
And I'd like to share that with you now. The
account's significant because I have an Emmy congratulation, an actual Emmy,
but you also won an Emmy. But we were never
paid for it, and it led to the writers strike.
I watched a video.
Speaker 4 (36:24):
Of you yesterday from when we were on strike.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
When you were on strike, Yeah, you guys produced a video. Yeah,
and you said a number of things in the video.
Speaker 4 (36:33):
Okay, I don't remember any of them.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
But I saw it and I was like, oh my god.
And then we were joking that you guys were coming
up with bits as you were walking the picket line
and making the video. Kind of funny anyway, but you
said in part that you're watching this on the internet,
a thing that pays us zero dollars. They were put
on NBC dot com and they sold ads and we
(36:57):
won a Daytime Emmy and didn't make any money. The
writer strike was a really big deal. Yeah, I don't know,
just talk to me about that time of what you
remember of Greg saying no, we're not going to produce
material for free.
Speaker 4 (37:12):
There It was a very inspiring moment for me personally,
because this central issue at the time. This is two
thousand and seven. The central issue at the time was
jurisdiction over the internet because Netflix hadn't started making original
shows yet, but people felt like they were going in
that direction and NBC and every network had a website
(37:33):
and they were starting to like stream in primitive fashion,
the stream things on the over the internet, and suddenly
it was like, well, if this is the future. It
didn't take a genius to think like, well, this is
the future, Like, who cares whether it's a television screen
you hang on your wall or sit on a platform,
or whether it's your computer screen. This is how people
are consuming the work we do, and we ought to
(37:55):
get paid for them. So so those webisodes were like
a big part of that because they were shot with
a union labor and no one got paid. So that
was like the you know, it wasn't like because of
those episodes that the writers could want on strike. Those
webisodes were an example of the kind of thing that
we were trying. We were saying, like, if this is
the way things are going, we got to do some
(38:16):
about this, right. So, because the companies at the time
were saying like, you know what, we don't have enough information.
Let's just let's just let's just wait three years from now,
we'll have more information and then we'll know what the
future of this is. And we were like, no, you're
trying to you're basically trying to grandfather in the internet
as like a thing that you don't pay for. So
(38:37):
we went on strike and it was a huge deal
and it was very scary. It was like unclear what
was going on. The communication wasn't sublime. And Greg was like, well,
we're going to pick at our own show. And the
reason we're going to pick out our own show isn't
a show of solidarity. Isn't a saying like this is
the thing we care about the most in the world.
(38:57):
And we were in that little Chandler Studios in the
middle of Van Eyes and it was not on a
major studio lot, and so we all showed up to
work at six in the morning and we pick it
at our own show. And we were in the middle
of season four. We were about to shoot the Dinner
Party episode, one of the most famous episodes of the
show of all time, the best read through I think
we ever had. Do you remember that read through? That
(39:19):
read through was like it was like a rock concert.
And we had finished that script. That script was ready
to go, and that script could have been shot. The
actors could have just executed the script, and the directors
were on strike, and the crew wasn't on strike, but
Steve Carrell said, no, I'm not. This is the way
we make this show is collaborative, and there's writers on
(39:41):
the set and there's producers on the set, and we
changed things and we work out new little moments and
pitch new jokes, and I don't think I'm going to
make the show without the writers. And he didn't show up,
and so they shot a couple scenes from the episode
that Michael Scott wasn't in, and then there was nothing
else to do and the show shut down, and that
was such a heroic thing. He just stayed home and
(40:04):
he got calls from a lot of lawyers and a
lot of studio executives, from really really powerful people saying
you have to do this, and he was like, no,
I don't watch me. And Greg called him and he
was home and Greg was like, hey, I know that
you've had a lot of pressure coming at you. Are
you okay And he was like, yeah, I'm home, I'm
playing with my kids, and was totally unfazed by it
(40:25):
and had the attitude of like, this is a collaborative effort.
This is a thing that we do together. We don't
do this, this isn't without writers on the set. We
don't make the same show, and I'm not going to
make that show fire me basically was what he was saying.
He called their bluff and the show shut down and
writers run strike for four months, and then they gave
up jurisdiction of the internet and we went back to work,
(40:47):
and then we made the Dinner Party, which is amazing,
and it was truly the story of what he did
spread like wildfire. He did not have to do that.
There were very few people who were in the position
he was in, obviously as the star of a very popular, successful, gigantic,
monolithic hit show. But still he didn't have to do that.
Speaker 3 (41:08):
He could have.
Speaker 4 (41:09):
No one would have been mad at him. He wasn't
on the actors right, and.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
I was, you know, I remember having a huge, long
conversation with my representations, saying like, how can I walk
past them? How can I cross how can I cross
the line? And he said that that you know, you
have no choice, Yeah, you have to show.
Speaker 4 (41:26):
Up, and we knew that, and Ed, I remember Ed
came out and was like, hey guys, and he hung
out with us, and I remember Ed going, I'm really sorry,
but I have and we were like no, no, no, we
get it. Your union is not on strike here, like
you're not. We get it. It's fine. No one's bad
at you, Like no one had any animosity towards any
of the actors because you were in breach of contract
if you didn't show up. Steve was in breach of contract.
(41:47):
He just said, I don't care. Fire me. And it's
easier for the star of the show to do that
right than it is for anyone else. But the story
spread like wildfire, and Mindy wrote a sign in He
hung it on his trailer that said like Steve Carrell
American hero or something and took a picture of it,
and it spread very quickly around the town, and it
(42:08):
was a real wind beneath the wings of the Guild
at the time.
Speaker 3 (42:13):
It's amazing.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
I mean, he you can't sort of overstate just what
an amazing guy he is. Yeah, and person to work with.
I get a little choked up when I remember what
an amazing leader he was during that time and always,
but during the strike especially. And I want to close
(42:38):
out with one of my favorite tidbits I learn while
collecting these stories about the office. The next clip release
sums up the care that the writers took in every
single decision. But I'm going to let the brilliant writer
and later co show runner of the show, Jen Salada
tell you about this. Was there anything else that specific
(43:00):
or unique? Do you remember about this writing room? Writer's room?
Speaker 9 (43:04):
It was the best writer's room I've ever been in,
and I feel like it will be the best writer's
room I'm ever in. I think the writers were exceptionally talented,
and Greg was saying that everybody had their own super strengths,
but everybody was good at story and comedy and emotion.
I felt that certain people, yeah, were more gift, more
(43:28):
gifted in certain areas. But I've worked on staffs where
one person was story, one person was comedy. There was
a little bit more like that, and I felt like
this staff, everybody had the ability to do everything, and
the fact that everybody cared so much. There was an
enormous discussion I don't know if anybody talked about it
between whether the proposal should have sound or no sound.
(43:50):
There were people on both sides. It was about fifty
to fifty. It was the craziest discussion. It was whether
or not when we saw Jim proposed to Pam we
should have have sound. And hear what he's saying, or
just see the visual of him in the rain getting
on one knee. And I found that that really explained
(44:11):
the writer's room. Everybody cared so much. There was one
moment where Greg was getting into his car, you know,
after the discussion had gone on for a month and
we were about to, you know, have to settle on it,
where I was coming from a trailer and he was
getting into his car and I said Greg, and he
like turned and he was like kind of trapped between
his car door and his car and I was like,
(44:31):
did you make did you decide yet it was sound
or no sound? And he's like, no, no, I haven't,
I haven't. It was literally like a horror film. I
was like was stalking him to find out if the
decision had been made. We argued passionately, and it was
just because everybody cared, And I think that a lot
of it was just for the passion with which the
passion everybody had for telling the story. I can talk
(44:52):
a little bit about the sound no sound if you
want to hear it, but you might hear it from everybody.
Speaker 3 (44:55):
Else to oh, go ahead.
Speaker 9 (44:59):
So that was actually a decision a little bit that
I feel like came down to another discussion that we
had a lot of times in the room, which was
kind of being more documentary and a little bit more
real and a little bit more subtle and being a
little bit more like a comedy or a show. So basically,
(45:20):
the side that wanted to hear Jim's words were like,
you've been waiting forever to hear him propose to Pam.
Why would you take that moment away from people and
not hear his actual words. It's like they've been waiting
for it. You want to give them what they've been
waiting for. Just might be slightly more of a comedy
show kind of thing with a documentary documentary thing. It
was a little bit more of like God, it's so
(45:44):
beautiful and subtle, and to be across the street and
to have to reach for it because he would turn
his mic off in this moment. It's a big moment,
and once you see him down on one knee, we
know what he's saying, and then actually filling in the
blank is more beautiful. We went back and forth about
this for so long. At one point Greg asked me
(46:04):
to send in my pros and CON's list, like sound
and no sound. And then I remember I was in
his office a little bit later. We didn't still hadn't
made a decision, and I saw a list of people
who wanted sound and a list of people who wanted
no sound, and his wife and two kids was on
one side of the list, and two other kids or
white one kid. Once I listened to other kids. His
family was split down the middle. So he was interviewing
(46:26):
everybody and saying what should we do? What should we do?
So there was a moment he was at the sound
mix we were he had to make the decision, like
this is the moment, and he's like, is there anybody
we haven't asked? Is there anybody we haven't asked? And
I said, oh, yeah, the security guard is there, you know,
security guard whose name I can't quite remember him. Sorry,
But I go and I get the security guard. And
it occurs to me during my walk to the office
(46:48):
that he's never seen the office. The lovely, lovely man
protected us, all right. So I'm like, okay, cool, So
now we've just got a very objective person. So I
show him the scene without sound, and then I show
him the scene with sound, and I say, what did
you prefer, and he said I liked the second one
and I said why he said, oh, because I could
(47:08):
hear it. Okay, Greg, he said he like the second
one because you could hear it. So that was it. Anyway,
That wasn't how the decision was made, but that was
our last person weighing in, and then you know, it
ended up airing with sound. But it was the debate
about whether or not it should be sound or no
(47:30):
sound was the writer's room. To me, it was everybody
incredibly passionate about something that we had worked towards and
just we really cared.
Speaker 1 (47:50):
Thanks for caring, Jen and Greg, Mike, Paul, Brent, Lee
Jean and everyone who worked on and rode on the show.
These people mean so much to me, and I support
what they are fighting for. I support what the actors
(48:11):
the Screen Actors Guild is fighting for. But I hope
for the sake of everyone that we get back to
work very soon. I'll be back next week with a
new and of course exciting guest. Until then, please everyone
keep the writers and the actors and all of the
(48:33):
crew across the entertainment industry in your.
Speaker 3 (48:36):
Mind this week, and we'll see you next week.
Speaker 1 (48:50):
Off the Beat is hosted and executive produced by me
Brian Baumgartner, alongside our executive producer Lang Lee. Our senior
producer is Diego Tapia. Our producers are Liz Hayes, Hannah Harris,
and Emily Carr. Our talent producer is Ryan Papa Zachary,
and our intern is Ali Amir Sahi. Our theme song
(49:11):
Bubble and Squeak, performed by the one and only Creed Bratton,
Host
Brian Baumgartner
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