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 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 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 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 and still is the office.
Bubble and Squeak, I love it, Bubble and Squeakna.
Bubble and Squeak.
I cook it every month. Oh from the Nah people.
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.
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.
Okay, you know.
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 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.
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?
Oh wow, what are you most proud of?
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.
It feels so weird.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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 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.
Ok, you make your acting debut in the office correct on television?
On television?
Yes, Yes, on television.
Leo and Gino the delivery guys, was this something you were excited about doing or was this just fun for the.
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,
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.
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.
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 whole time, but it changed our lives, met a lot of amazing people.
We learned so much.
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 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 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.
Well, I think we were all pretty lucky to be there. Jean.
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.
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.
Mean move on.
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.
Because you thought they were being rude, well I didn't sea it was just like bond.
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.
That's funny, Lee, I don't think it's works for this moment, right, should we think of it?
Yeah, no one does that. We keep going, right.
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
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, 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.
Were you close to being fired? Do you think? Or do you Was that just your perception because people didn't seem nice.
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.
Be like, hey, did you like what I was doing? Right?
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, 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 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.
Up to fail.
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 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.
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.
You're a bit neurotic, but I've monetized the neuroses.
That's all that matters.
Yeah.
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. 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 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 like that's true?
Yeah?
I do.
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 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
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, 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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.
They sure, or we'll be right back.
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.
Characters are the whole world of the office.
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.
Here's Brent, do you consider Greg a teacher?
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.
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.
I think that's.
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.
His name was Bruce Ferber.
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.
Right.
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.
Story together, do that right?
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 actors was very simply, Jim, bring Dwight a glass of water, right, and then what happens?
Right?
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.
Would behave in a given situation.
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 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.
The Larry Sanders Show.
And by the end we had a phrase, a motto, and it was behavior over banter. I never forgot it.
Man.
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.
Right.
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?
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 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
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.
Are very funny. Wow, that's gold.
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?
I aspire to, for sure.
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.
The artist of the show.
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.
So on The Office, I.
Always did try to find what was personal about it for me in that episode.
Yeah.
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 the cast, obviously Mindy Kayling, bj Novak, and of course Paul Lieberstein, who played dunder Mifflin's beloved behted.
No, No, it is that a thing.
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.
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 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 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 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
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 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.
Yeah, I've taken that with me into the future.
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.
The character or what we're going for.
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.
Yeah, Yeah, I've really I'm really big with intention.
Now.
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.
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?
Big time?
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.
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 one day, having you know, having.
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.
And why was that important?
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 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.
I have never heard this before. Swear to God, really, I've never heard this before.
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.
Or so like, oh, today it's the Christmas party? Yeah, exactly.
You can imagine some days where nothing happened and they just didn't come, right.
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, 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.
A few people talk.
To you about one of your core ideas, which is the idea of truth and beauty.
Yeah, that was my thing with Randall, truth and beauty, Truth and beauty.
Yeah. And what did that mean to you?
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.
What he meant by it.
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.
What's the truth?
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 in a truthful way out in the real world.
Right.
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.
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?
Did he mention that to use that a lot?
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 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.
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 it and it was a Kennedy poster that my dad had like handed out or seen or collected or whatever.
And I remember.
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 on something and enclose it because I want that history of it.
I don't know that idea. Yeah.
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 not be around forever.
And I can.
Completely see why a tear in your dad's poster adds to the emotion of it.
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 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.
Wow.
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. 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.
Of you yesterday from when we were on strike.
When you were on strike, Yeah, you guys produced a video. Yeah, and you said a number of things in the video.
Okay, I don't remember any of them.
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 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.
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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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.
He could have.
No one would have been mad at him. He wasn't on the actors right, and.
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.
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.
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 was a real wind beneath the wings of the Guild at the time.
It's amazing.
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 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 or unique? Do you remember about this writing room? Writer's room?
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 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. 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
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, 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 a little bit about the sound no sound if you want to hear it, but you might hear it from everybody.
Else to oh, go ahead.
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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
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 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 crew across the entertainment industry in your.
Mind this week, and we'll see you next week.
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 Bubble and Squeak, performed by the one and only Creed Bratton,