C E L OT TA Another one that I was a
little bit passionate about in an
annoying way, because I kept push-
ing it, was Phyllis goes through
menopause. I really wanted to tell
that story. I remember thinking
that Phyllis made it so cold in the
office that it led to thermostat
debates that every office has. And
maybe Angela actually freezes at
her desk for a tiny bit. Maybe that
was a little bit broad. Oh, and I was
always fascinated with the idea of
Michael coming down with ennui.
Some stories are hard to tell, but
you take a main character and he’s
in a funk and he didn’t understand
what it is and he couldn’t point to
the thing causing it. He’s just very
lackadaisical and just kind of blah. I
imagined the office having to deal
with a blah Michael and getting
everybody else involved in putting
a focus on why he felt kind of blah
that day. Then maybe it would get
into a philosophical area of, what’s
the point of all this?OWEN ELLICKSON I wrote an epi-
sode called “Here Comes Treble”
about Andy’s old a cappella group
and [Stephen] Colbert ended up
playing his friend Broccoli Rob.
Early on, Carrie Kemper and a
couple other writers and I were
talking about Andy’s old buddies
coming back and him sort of brag-
ging and peacocking around all
smirky with his guys again. Then
they mention that one guy who
wasin the group died when they
were in school, and it becomes
clear to Andy that he and his
friends killed that guy, but Andy
was so drunk that he didn’t
remember it. Basically, Andy
unwittingly had been part of sort
of a murder silence pact. I always
wanted to find something that
Michael didn’t do, and that cer-
tainly fit the bill for me. [“Here
Comes Treble” aired in season 9,
minus the murder-pact subplot.]FROM THE OFFICE: THE UNTOLD STORY
OF THE GREATEST SITCOM OF THE
2000S BY ANDY GREENE, TO BE PUB-
LISHED MARCH 24, 2020, BY DUTTON,
AN IMPRINT OF THE PENGUIN PUBLISH-
ING GROUP, A DIVISION OF PENGUIN
RANDOM HOUSE, LLC. COPYRIGHT ©
2020 BY ANDY GREENE↑ The Office by
Andy Greene is out
March 24
↙ Original Office
mates Steve Carell,
John Krasinski,
and Rainn WilsonUNORTHODOX METHODS“Greg not only was interested in what we would put on
TV, but interested in the process by which we would^
put it on TV,” Owen Ellickson explains. “It seemed like
sometimes he would make a point of running the
room in a different way to see how it worked. One night
he printed out a script and put each page out horizontal^
ly aligned in the hallway, and then we had to sort of go -
down crawling and read the script, as though somehow^
reading it in that fashion might generate new insights^(^)
or something like that.”
UNDER COVER
“Pretzel Day was something that you would call a cover (^)
story,” Forrester says. “[The] blood drive was a cover
story. It meant an event that a documentary crew showed
up for, but it isn’t the actual drama of the episode.”^
Justin Spitzer continues, “The ‘cover story’ was Greg’s
concept. That’s because you imagine that the cameras
don’t come to the office every single day. It was especially
true early on that we thought the cameras probably^
come just on big days, like the day of the sexual-harass-
ment seminar or something. So we’d be like, ‘What
is happening in the office that makes it a little different
than a normal day?’”
HOUSE OF CARDS
“When we were pitching ideas, Greg [Daniels] had a system
where we’d just write the idea on a three-by-five card
and we’d just put it on the board,” Larry Wilmore says in
Greene’s book. “In no time, we had tons of cards on^
a bulletin board.” As Jen Celotta describes it: “It sort of
looked like^
A Beautiful Mind in the writers’ room. There
were note cards everywhere. At first, it was just random
cards that were fragments of stories or fragments of^
jokes. Then it kind of divided into characters and episodes,^
so there was a little bit more order to the note cards
as the seasons went on.” Brent Forrester adds, “Every
single inch of every wall had a three-by-five card with an^
idea for a story. There was a really big office wall, like,^
twenty feet long [that] was entirely covered with cards in^
categories like ‘A story,’ ‘B story,’ ‘C story,’ ‘runner,’ and^
stuff we called cover stories.”^
Building The Office
This writers’ room didn’t function like most
Will Arnett
Warren Buffett
Jim Carrey
Ray Romano
James Spader
Jay Ferguson
Davey Faragher
Angelo Middione
Rashida Jones
Charles Esten
Craig Anton
Common
Knowledge?
These
Office-related
names have
something
in common
APRIL2020.THEOFFICE.LO A.indd 35 FINAL 3/3/20 1:43 PM