| Mike Judge didn't have to shoot Office Space in Austin. The office park that housed Initech could have been—and is—anywhere in America. Chances are, your city has one that looks awfully similar, but you've never really noticed it, because why would you? These kinds of buildings are designed not to be noticed. They are blandness made real.And that's precisely why Mike Judge shot here. Obviously it was more convenient for the Austinite to shoot in his hometown, but he didn't have to go far to find an inconspicuous office park that captured the soul-crushing atmosphere of a dead-end cubicle job.Local film critic and film professor Alison Macor spoke to just about everyone involved in Office Space for a chapter on the film in her book Chainsaws, Slackers, And Spy Kids: Thirty Years Of Filmmaking In Austin, Texas. She was a film critic at the Austin American Statesman when Judge was shooting Office Space, which was a popular time for Austin in film: Robert Rodriguez was doing The Faculty in town, Richard Linklater's The Newton Boys had just come out. Turns out it was a bad time to be making Office Space. Not only was it an oppressively hot shoot, even by Austin standards, but Hollywood had been shocked by the success of There's Something About Mary that summer. Fox, the studio, was looking for something similarly outrageous from Judge—described by Macor as "big, fat faces with a wide-angle lens"—and thus began what would be a continual battle with the studio over the film's ... |
