Entertainment In Brief

Mike Judge moves from Office Space to factory space for new workplace comedy. Plus, stitching up Harry

All bottled up

If you’ve consumed a bottle of water in the past year, there’s a chance it began its life on the set of director Mike Judge’s Extract.

Judge — who set the standard for workplace-angst comedy with 1990’s brilliant Office Space, about disgruntled employees at a failing software company — is back at the office for his new film. Only, this time, that office is attached to a flavour-extract manufacturing plant, and most of the angst is felt by the plant’s owner, played by Jason Bateman.

Judge said he wouldn’t make the film if he couldn’t find the right location, insisting you can’t recreate a bottling factory on a soundstage. Fortunately, he found what he was looking for in Commerce, California’s Chameleon Beverage Company, bottlers of water.

The director did, however, have to work around Chameleon’s relentless schedule.

“We run 24 hours, seven days a week,” says Chameleon’s owner Derek Reineman over the phone from his California office. “So we agreed to certain chunks of time where we’d be continuously running in the background, with intermittent stops for certain visual or sound issues.”

If Judge was shooting a close-up of the assembly line, fake bottles of extract came down the conveyor belt. But if the line was far enough from the camera, the workers in the background were actual Chameleon employees bottling a real order.

“From a manufacturing perspective it drove me crazy,” says Reineman. There’s a lot of stopping and starting that goes on in the moviemaking process, and for a manufacturer, time is of the essence. We don’t like to stop at all, ever, if we can help it.”

That said, Reineman says Office Space is one of his favourite movies, so he didn’t really mind the delays. He has yet to see Extract, but loves the trailer, and says from what he’s seen Judge has deftly captured workplace angst yet again — only this time, from a point of view a little closer to his own.

“From what I understand, it’s told more from the perspective of the employer, as opposed to the employee,” says Reineman. “What I did see certainly resonated with some real-life experiences that probably everyone who owns a business can relate to.”

—Marni Weisz