Second Drink: Stress Relief Pt 1

This week we’re breaking down “Stress Relief”! To kick off this two-part episode, the ladies break down one of the most famous cold opens of “The Office”, featuring clips from Rainn Wilson, Oscar Nuñez, Brian Baumgartner and cinematographer, Randall Einhorn. When Dwight stages a fake fire, Stanley has a heart attack and Michael goes into overdrive to protect Stanley. The ladies reveal how much went into this episode that premiered right after SuperBowl XLIII, which includes Angela walking us through everything that went behind “Save Bandit!”. Jenna points out the use of a montage that was unusual for the show and we rock out to the Bee Gee’s “Stayin’ Alive”, which giving CPR to its beat actually saves lives. So keep away from Michael so you can be stress free and relaxed while you listen to this very epic episode. Office Ladies Website - Submit a fan question:https://officeladies.com/submitaquestion Follow Us on Instagram:OfficeLadiesPod https://www.instagram.com/officeladiespod/ Follow Us on YouTube https://youtube.com/@officeladiespod?si=D0oKJwFJuK9txzFM Follow Us on TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@officeladiespod?_t=ZT-8y1gqTrJyOs&_r=1

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome to your second drink of stress relief, part one. This episode has the famous fire drill cold open. We got so many wonderful tidbits from our crew on how that all went down. And you know what? I'm really proud of how we broke down this episode.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  Lady, it's one of my favorite podcast moments that we did because we really dug into it. We got so much good stuff. We got a message from Arena S. in Russia, who wrote us about the fire drill scene. Arena said, "This is one of my favorite episodes ever, naturally because of the funniest ever cold open. When I watched it the first time, I couldn't stop laughing. I think I even teared up. That's how funny I found it." Now here is the amazing thing. Arena went on to say, "I work as an English tutor and whenever I feel like my students need cheering up or we need to lighten the mood, I ask them, 'Have you seen The Office?'" And most of them say they haven't.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  And so I say, "I'm going to show you a little clip. Just watch." And I turn on this cold open and they just lose it. It's my favorite thing ever. I see how they light up watching something with authentic language and it's just hilarious. I keep count of how many people began watching the show after my lessons and so far it's about five. So my point is, besides being one of the most iconic series ever, your show opens the window into the American culture and fantastic English language for many students who are learning it. Thank you so much.

• 1:38Speaker 00

  Oh, that is so fun.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  It's very funny to me, thinking that this cold open is like an introduction to American culture.

• 1:45Speaker 00

  Oh, no. Actually, any, any like clip of The Office.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:51Speaker 00

  Well, this episode also has the super cringe CPR training session, which we've also heard is used as a teaching tool. Mike R. from Portland, Oregon, said, "It was my birthday and a small group of friends got together to celebrate at a local restaurant. Everyone had recently experienced some setback or bad luck, myself included."

• 2:14Speaker 00

  One guest had just lost her job. Another guest found out her first round of IVF treatment didn't take. A couple of people shared that one of their kids was having some serious issues, and I was having my own medical issue at the time. As we sat sulking at my sad birthday, a man at another table, unrelated to our group, was showing signs of choking. Luckily for him, one of my friends is a doctor. My friend sprang into action and performed the Heimlich maneuver. After what seemed like an eternity, a piece of steak was dislodged from the man's throat. My friend was exhausted mentally and physically after his heroic deed. The incident was scary and I felt helpless. Realizing that no one else was trained to help

• 2:58Speaker 00

  that man, I organized a CPR day at my office where many office references were made. Our trainer commented that the offices referenced in nearly every workshop she facilitates. Score one for the guy who lived and score one for the office for making the world a safer place.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  Well, in our breakdown, lady, we talked a lot about how people who have seen this episode have gone on to like save lives because of the stay in alive tip that the instructor gives.

• 3:31Speaker 00

  The song.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  Ah, ah, ah, ah, stay in alive. Stay in alive, exactly. And speaking of the CPR instructor, we got a letter from Robin Lynch who plays Rose. In our breakdown, we said, hey, Robin, we're trying to get ahold of you. Hit us up. And she did. Here's what her letter said. Hi, I just listened to your podcast about stress relief. Thank you so much for your kind words. I'd love to answer any questions and talk about our day on set. It was such an amazing experience. And lady, I was digging around and there are like four minutes of extra footage from those CPR scenes in the

• 4:14Speaker 01

  superfan episodes. So it got us thinking. Actually, Ange, it got you thinking.

• 4:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, I said, we should do an Office Lady 6.0 where we talk with Robin and we can unpack some of the extra scenes and just hear all about her time on set.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  I said, I love it. So that's what we're gonna do. We've reached out to Robin and we can't wait to share more in an upcoming Office Lady 6.0.

• 4:37Speaker 00

  And now here's your second drink of stress relief, part one.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  I'm Jenna Fisher.

• 4:46Speaker 00

  And I'm Angela Kinsey.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  We were on The Office together.

• 4:48Speaker 00

  And we're best friends.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  And now we're doing the ultimate Office rewatch podcast just for you.

• 4:53Speaker 00

  Each week, we will break down an episode of The Office and give exclusive behind the scenes stories that only two people who were there can tell you.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  We're the Office ladies.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Hi, everyone.

• 5:05Speaker 00

  Good morning, you guys. It's early here today for us.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  It's early here, and we have a lot to cover.

• 5:11Speaker 00

  So much. We came in early.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  We have so much to say today, but I have to point out an observation before we get started.

• 5:18Speaker 00

  Is it all my snacks and beverages on my side?

• 5:21Speaker 01

  You actually do have a ton of snacks and beverages. You have a hot tea, a cold tea, a water, a granola bar, a banana, and some naughty oats cereal.

• 5:31Speaker 00

  I do.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  It's a lot. You knew this was going to be a big episode.

• 5:36Speaker 00

  I came ready.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Clearly.

• 5:37Speaker 00

  I came ready.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  You have an entire picnic.

• 5:39Speaker 00

  I will always show up with iced tea and snacks. Just know that. That's me rolling in to any, any event.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  My observation was actually going to be about your document.

• 5:49Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  It's so charming. It is printed words. It's not note cards. It is a pile of papers. But what you have done is you have taken, like, regular lined, what's that paper called?

• 6:05Speaker 00

  It's called notebook paper.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:07Speaker 00

  Out of a spiral binder, because clearly I ran out of printer paper.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Is that what happened?

• 6:11Speaker 00

  That's what happened.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  That's why your pages are on lined notebook. It's printed, though.

• 6:18Speaker 00

  Yes. Did you think that I just wanted to print on notebook paper?

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Lady, I didn't know what you were doing.

• 6:24Speaker 00

  And I have a Post-it note.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  I just found it interesting when we sat down.

• 6:29Speaker 00

  No, this is me, you know, last night, as I print my document out, you might have heard a few expletives, because we were out of printer paper. So then I was like, damn it, it's 9 o'clock at night.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  A good hack.

• 6:40Speaker 00

  There you go, hack. Go into your kid's room, get their notebook, rip out the pages. Your printer will print on it.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  I feel like we might have helped some people today.

• 6:49Speaker 00

  We might have.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  All right, well, let's talk about why we're here today. It is Stress Relief Part One, Season Five, Episode 14, written by Paul Lieberstein and directed by Jeff Blitz.

• 7:03Speaker 00

  Exactly. You might be thinking, ladies, it's stress relief. That isn't that big, except it had the cold open to end all cold opens.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:12Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  We'll be breaking that down.

• 7:14Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, we will.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  It's gonna take a while.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  This episode, originally aired as an hour-long episode, we're gonna have to break it down in two parts. So today, we're covering the first half of Stress Relief. Would you like a summary?

• 7:29Speaker 00

  I really would.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  All right, it starts with that cold open you were talking about, Angela. Dwight takes matters into his own hands when his coworkers fail to pay attention to his fire safety seminar.

• 7:41Speaker 00

  He used PowerPoint. Big mistake.

• 7:43Speaker 01

  Big mistake. He's gonna give us a practical fire drill.

• 7:46Speaker 00

  Hands-on.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  How will we react on our feet?

• 7:49Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Well, Stanley has a heart attack. It doesn't end well.

• 7:54Speaker 00

  Doesn't.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  And that lands Dwight in hot water with corporate.

• 7:57Speaker 00

  I mean, he almost burned the building. Stanley had a heart attack. Dwight, how do you have a job?

• 8:04Speaker 01

  Michael hires a CPR expert to teach the office what we should do if Stanley has another heart attack, but Dwight has his own ideas of how to use the CPR dummy.

• 8:15Speaker 00

  Hello, Clarice.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Oh, dear.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Finally, we learned that Pam's mom and dad are having a rough patch in their marriage, and that Pam's dad has actually been bunking with Jim and Pam.

• 8:27Speaker 00

  sans robe.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:30Speaker 00

  Was he walking around in his tighty-whities?

• 8:33Speaker 01

  I don't know, but she needs to get him a robe.

• 8:35Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  Fast fact number one, this episode aired after the Super Bowl on Sunday, February 1, 2009.

• 8:45Speaker 00

  I mean, if I had an air horn thing, I'd fire it off, because this was huge for us.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  Sophia C. wrote in to say, Jenna, I have a fast fact for you.

• 8:57Speaker 00

  Sophia?

• 8:58Speaker 01

  This was the most-watched episode of the entire Office series.

• 9:03Speaker 00

  What?

• 9:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, and she's right. I looked it up. Angela, do you want to know how many people?

• 9:10Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh. I'm horrible at guessing. Like, you know, guess the jelly bean in the jar. I'm so off.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  I know. Yeah, I can't do that either.

• 9:18Speaker 00

  Okay, I'm gonna guess, um, go blah blah blah, 10 million people. That seems like a big number.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  That is a big number. But it was 22.9

• 9:31Speaker 00

  No way!

• 9:32Speaker 01

  Million people!

• 9:33Speaker 00

  Holy smokes!

• 9:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it is definitely the most-watched episode of The Office, and it's also the only episode of The Office to ever reach over 20 million viewers.

• 9:44Speaker 00

  Wow!

• 9:45Speaker 01

  But now I have another question for you.

• 9:46Speaker 00

  I don't know. Is it more guessing number stuff?

• 9:48Speaker 01

  It's more guessing. It's not numbers, though.

• 9:50Speaker 00

  Oh, good. Well, I have a shot.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  Can you guess what our second most-watched episode was?

• 9:57Speaker 00

  Hmm. Oh, no. Of the whole series?

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Of the whole series. This was number one. What do you think number two was?

• 10:06Speaker 00

  The finale?

• 10:07Speaker 01

  The pilot.

• 10:08Speaker 00

  What?

• 10:09Speaker 01

  The pilot.

• 10:10Speaker 00

  Really?

• 10:11Speaker 01

  It had 11.2 million viewers.

• 10:15Speaker 00

  The pilot that I wore my own clothes in?

• 10:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:18Speaker 00

  From Target.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:20Speaker 00

  Wow!

• 10:21Speaker 01

  11.2 million people saw your outfit.

• 10:24Speaker 00

  Well, you're welcome, America.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  Interestingly enough, airing after the Super Bowl, did not seem to get us a bump in viewership going forward.

• 10:33Speaker 00

  Oh, it was like a one-and-done?

• 10:35Speaker 01

  Kind of. So, the episode that aired before the Super Bowl was Prince Family Paper.

• 10:41Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  And we had 8.7 million viewers.

• 10:44Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  That was kind of our averagy range.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  Right.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  After the Super Bowl is Lecture Circuit, and we actually had a drop in the ratings to 8.4.

• 10:55Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  So, some regular viewers.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  I don't know. They were like, not after that Super Bowl stunt. Fast fact number two, Randy told me that there were rumors that we were going to get that 2009 Super Bowl slot from as early as the end of season four.

• 11:14Speaker 00

  Geez.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:16Speaker 00

  They planned that that far out?

• 11:18Speaker 01

  I guess so. There had been some talk that maybe it would go to The Apprentice. The Apprentice was gonna get the slot.

• 11:25Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  But our executive producers really fought for the office to get it, and we did. Randy said it was part of our internal shooting records as of May 2008, which was well before we had ever started shooting season five. So we'd known for a while this was coming. I also reached out to Greg Daniels.

• 11:44Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. What'd he have to say?

• 11:46Speaker 01

  He said this. Oh, yeah. This was a big deal.

• 11:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  Quote, "We threw our biggest guns at it, which is why Paul Lieberstein wrote it." That makes sense.

• 11:57Speaker 00

  It's a fantastic script. I texted Paul yesterday, just a few couplets of dialogue. I was like, this is perfection. I'll tell you what I texted him later.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  Well, Paul had been with us since the very beginning. He is one of our best. It made total sense that he should write this episode.

• 12:13Speaker 00

  Right.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  I got curious.

• 12:15Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  And I started doing a little digging. Angela, the script for this episode was 95 pages long.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  I know. I looked through it and I was like, what is this phone book I'm reading? Oh, my God, it's stress relief.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  The candy bag?

• 12:31Speaker 00

  Okay, the candy bag, our alts, all of our alt dialogue?

• 12:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, all the extra jokes that they didn't put in the script, but that they want us to maybe shoot.

• 12:39Speaker 00

  Oh, my God. How long was it?

• 12:42Speaker 01

  Lady, it was 207 pages long.

• 12:45Speaker 00

  They had 207 pages of extra jokes?

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:50Speaker 00

  On the ready to go?

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 12:51Speaker 00

  Oh, my God.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  So I thought we should tell everyone that this episode took us nine days to shoot. It was a very, very big deal. Greg also said that because we were running after the Super Bowl, it created a scrutiny from the network that was not normally present on our show.

• 13:10Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Lots of notes, lots of opinions.

• 13:15Speaker 00

  Sure. This is a big piece of real estate.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  This will come up again later.

• 13:20Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Should I move us to fast fact number three?

• 13:23Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  All right. Fast fact number three. Greg told us that because there would be so many new eyes on this episode, new viewers, that they had to figure out a storyline that would appeal to both current office viewers and new ones. And they also had to find a way to kind of reintroduce everyone's characters so that new viewers could follow along. They really tried to stay away from existing storylines. So for example, there's no movement or mention of the Angela, Andy, Dwight love triangle.

• 13:59Speaker 00

  Right.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  There's nothing about the company is struggling and there might be layoffs.

• 14:04Speaker 00

  No, there's nothing very complicated. This is a very simple idea that can hook everybody.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Yes. But they especially had to figure out, how do we start this episode? How do we hook these new viewers and make them stay for the whole hour?

• 14:19Speaker 00

  Right.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  So Greg had this idea. What if an office weirdo who wanted people to listen to his safety ideas actually caused a fire emergency?

• 14:31Speaker 01

  He was like, you don't have to know who's who. It has a lot of energy and a lot of physical comedy.

• 14:37Speaker 00

  There you go. I mean, that is brilliant. Greg is brilliant because instantly you're hooked. Everyone has an office like idiot that is gonna like take matters in their own hands or something. I thought it was amazing.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  Well, we will break down this epic cold open after the break, but I have one more thing to say.

• 14:58Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  This is a bonus fast fact.

• 15:00Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Did you notice the main titles?

• 15:03Speaker 00

  Of course I did.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Everybody is in them.

• 15:06Speaker 00

  I know.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  This is the first time that our main titles featured the entire cast. It was so cool.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  We were so excited. We all cheered when we watched it. Oh my gosh, I remember my family too, because like everyone in my family who had never seen the show saw it because it was after the Super Bowl and we were in the main titles. It was really exciting.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  It was special.

• 15:30Speaker 00

  It was special.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  The whole thing was special. I mean, there are all these little milestones along the way as we're doing this rewatch and as we're looking back at our journey, I'm realizing all of these firsts.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  And I would have never imagined I'd be on a TV show that would run after the Super Bowl.

• 15:48Speaker 00

  The Super Bowl is such a big deal. I remember commercial auditioning and everyone wanted like a Super Bowl commercial spot. If we could just, I still, I still am like, oh, come on.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:00Speaker 00

  Let me throw a Dorito at your head and you catch it in your mouth and it ricochets off the ceiling. Super Bowl ad.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  You heard it here, Doritos. Office ladies throw Doritos and catch them. We'll do it.

• 16:12Speaker 00

  Jen will do a cartwheel.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  Wait.

• 16:14Speaker 00

  She's very athletic.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  What?

• 16:18Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Better start working on my cartwheel.

• 16:20Speaker 00

  I guess so.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  Well, ladies, should we take a break? And then when we come back, everyone, get ready.

• 16:27Speaker 00

  Buckle in because we have an epic cold open with an epic cold open breakdown.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  We do. It's gonna be good.

• 16:43Speaker 00

  All right, you guys, let's get right to it. First of all, you should know, we reached out to a ton of people to share with us how they made this cold open happen.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  It was fascinating, actually, finding out.

• 16:55Speaker 00

  With so many different parts, right?

• 16:56Speaker 01

  We knew our part, right? But we're like, well, how did camera do it? How did they, like, so many things.

• 17:02Speaker 00

  So many things to capture. So Randy Cordray, you guys know, we love Randy. He told us they had several planning sessions, right? With all the department heads, we had our director, Jeff Blitz, cinematographer, Randall Einhorn. They had to walk through this whole dance that we did with the camera stunts, animal trainers, script supervisor Veda, like, tracking the continuity. And then our rock star, first AD, Kelly Cantley, she then broke it down into smaller moments.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Dean Holland, our editor, who edited this sequence, he told me he was also brought in on those planning sessions. He said he got so much footage, but that it was actually really, really well organized and pretty easy to edit because they planned so well.

• 17:50Speaker 00

  Oh, way to go, guys. Randy told us that we spent an entire day shooting this, one whole day, to be exact. It was Thursday, December 11th.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 17:59Speaker 00

  And we had tons of safety meetings, all the safety stuff.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  I remember we did not shoot this in order.

• 18:06Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  We shot it out of order and some of that was for safety reasons.

• 18:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  Let's describe it and then we'll go back and we will break it down piece by piece.

• 18:15Speaker 00

  All right.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Here's your overview, everybody.

• 18:16Speaker 00

  Here's your overview of the cold open. The first shot is Dwight opening his desk and he sort of motions to the camera all sneaky and he's got lighter fluid and what looks like to be a blowtorch.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:28Speaker 00

  So you know something's up.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Something Dwight-ish.

• 18:31Speaker 00

  He goes in the hallway and he's kind of hiding out and he's whispering to camera and he starts like jamming the doors. He puts a key in, he hammers it shut, he puts his little wood wedges under and

• 18:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:43Speaker 00

  blowtorches the door handle and starts his speech.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. He says that nobody paid attention to his fire safety seminar.

• 18:51Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  He blames himself for using PowerPoint.

• 18:54Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  And that experience is the best teacher. So he will teach his coworkers proper fire emergency procedure the hard way.

• 19:02Speaker 00

  And you guys, today cigarettes are gonna save lives.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:06Speaker 00

  As he smokes a cigarette and then tosses it into a trash can and immediately a fire starts.

• 19:12Speaker 01

  But no one notices at first.

• 19:13Speaker 00

  No one notices.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Smoke piling in under the door.

• 19:17Speaker 00

  And everybody's just quietly working and it's really frustrating Dwight. So he's like, um, do you guys smell something? And Angela's so snarky, is like, did you bring your jerky in today?

• 19:28Speaker 01

  I know.

• 19:29Speaker 00

  And then Pam notices it, but Jenna, Pam notices it the way I react in moments like this. You notice she didn't say fire?

• 19:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  There's a, oh my, it's a. She freezes.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  Michael starts yelling for everyone to stay effing calm. Dwight is kind of shouting proper safety procedures, but people are panicking. It's suddenly total chaos.

• 19:52Speaker 00

  This is what it sounded like.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  Oh my God, okay, it's happening. Everybody stay calm. What's the procedure, everyone? What's the procedure? Stay [bleep] calm! Wait, wait, wait, wait. Everybody [bleep] calm down! No, no, Michael, no!

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  Well, amid all the chaos, Angela gets a cat out of a file cabinet.

• 20:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Oscar escapes up into the ceiling. I know you're gonna have a lot to tell us about that.

• 20:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  And then Michael smashes a window in the conference room.

• 20:24Speaker 00

  Kevin is gonna make sure he's getting snacks during the fire. He's like busting up the vending machines. And then Dwight lights a bunch of firecrackers.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 20:33Speaker 00

  To which Ed Helms's Andy says my favorite line in this cold open, which is, "The fire is shooting at us!"

• 20:41Speaker 01

  Jim is like ramming the copy machine into a door. Finally Dwight pulls the fire alarm.

• 20:48Speaker 00

  Why? Because Stanley's having a heart attack.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yes. It's insane.

• 20:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  The whole thing is insane. How did we do it?

• 20:59Speaker 00

  Well, we had amazing people. That's how we did it. We spoke to our cinematographer Randall Einhorn about how exactly they captured all these moments. We reached out to him. Here's what he had to say.

• 21:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, I worked really closely with Jeff Blitz and our AD Kelly Cantley to, you know, coordinate how exactly we're gonna shoot that because there was a lot of moving parts, a lot of moving pieces. It didn't want to feel like it needed 50 cameras filming it. It always wants to feel like there's just two cameras filming it and they're struggling to film it. So it was a lot to work out because there was so much going on. But because we're able to cut on some of the camera swishes, we're able to piece it together so it looked like it was one piece. Because as the cameras panning from one thing to another, if you're doing it right, you can, you can make it look like, you can create an edit point where you're, you're panning from one, the end of one piece and you're, and you're panning into another,

• 21:56Speaker 03

  of the beginning of another piece, is really kind of how it's done. That's how we all pulled it all together and made it look like it was a one frantic take.

• 22:05Speaker 00

  I have learned doing this re-watch.

• 22:09Speaker 01

  How often we used that whip cut?

• 22:11Speaker 00

  It was our friend.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Clearly, it's why this cold open happened. Lady, we got a ton of fan questions about this cold open, so why don't I go through them?

• 22:21Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 22:22Speaker 01

  We said at the top of the episode, Rain's doing all his mischief with the locking of the doors and setting the fire. We had a fan question from Jaden C., was Dwight using a real blowtorch on those handles?

• 22:36Speaker 00

  It certainly looked like it.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  Why don't we let Rain Wilson tell us?

• 22:39Speaker 00

  Rain, what you got to say?

• 22:42Speaker 04

  Yes, it was a real live blowtorch. It was not a CGI flame. They had a lot of safety officers there, you know, a fire marshal is there and a special effects coordinator, and the handles actually did get very hot. You know, nowadays, they'd probably do CGI and maybe even make the door handle a little red with the CGI, but that was all completely real.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  I can't believe they gave him a real blowtorch.

• 23:08Speaker 00

  I mean, if you look back over the things they gave Rain that were real in episodes.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  They should have known, going back to the Dundees, when they gave him that operating keyboard.

• 23:20Speaker 00

  Like, just what he did with the fart key.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  Don't give that guy real things.

• 23:25Speaker 00

  Don't give that guy real things. Well, yeah, so real blowtorch, what else?

• 23:29Speaker 01

  Well, we had another fan question. People wanted to know if Rain was really smoking. And Rohit R. wanted to know if it was real smoke in the trash can. Here's what Rain had to say.

• 23:42Speaker 04

  It was an actual cigarette that I smoked and lit, and I threw it in the garbage can with the paper, but I think they like ran in the second that camera panned away and tossed in some water and put it out. And the fire that you see in the trash can is expertly created due to the magic of special effects. There are so many amazing details throughout the episode that Paul Lieberstein, I remember guiding me through. I mean, I think he wrote it, but Paul was very instrumental in a lot of the details about how I smoked and how I casually tossed the cigarette. And he had it kind of visualized in his mind, how the wedges get hammered under the door and all the details, the hammer in my pocket and, and stuff like that.

• 24:24Speaker 04

  So the great Paul Lieberstein, AKA Toby, really played a great creative part throughout the entirety of the office and especially in this episode and this cold open.

• 24:35Speaker 00

  Wow, I didn't know that. I didn't know Paul was behind all those beats, all the like staging of the fire moments.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, me either.

• 24:44Speaker 00

  Also Jenna, just on a side note, I've never had to smoke a cigarette in a movie or TV show and it would be a disaster because I don't know how to smoke a cigarette and it would be so clear. I wouldn't know how to be like fakie smoky.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  Well, for all of our like kinda techie nerds out there, Randy broke down for me exactly how they did make that fire in the trash can, that smoke. So Rain was right, right? They extinguished the fire that you saw, but then to create that smoke billowing in, that was created by a special effects team led by Ron Nary. And for the smoke, he used a water vapor generator with a minute concentration of glycol. And I guess the glycol is what keeps the water vapor hanging in the air a bit longer. Randy said it had no odor and it was approved safe by both SAG and NBC Universal Safety Department.

• 25:40Speaker 00

  What is glycol?

• 25:42Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 25:44Speaker 00

  Google it?

• 25:45Speaker 01

  You can Google it?

• 25:46Speaker 00

  Google it?

• 25:48Speaker 01

  What is it? Is it glycol?

• 25:52Speaker 01

  Okay, there's two glycol's.

• 25:54Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 25:55Speaker 01

  There's propylene glycol.

• 25:58Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  And then there's ethylene glycol.

• 26:02Speaker 00

  Was one a good guy and one's not great?

• 26:04Speaker 01

  I guess kind of. I think the ethylene glycol is the stuff that's in like antifreeze.

• 26:10Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  And it has like a sweet taste. That's what it's poisonous, right? You don't want your dog to lick it.

• 26:15Speaker 00

  Right.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  They're always saying, don't lick your antifreeze.

• 26:17Speaker 00

  They're always saying that.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  To dogs. The dogs are like, we don't understand you.

• 26:22Speaker 00

  No, cats love it too. You gotta be careful.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Now, propylene glycol is a substance that's commonly used as a food additive. It's in a lot of cosmetic and hygiene products, including I think some toothpastes.

• 26:36Speaker 00

  Oh, so that's the one we used.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  I mean, I guess so.

• 26:39Speaker 00

  Well, I think.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  One of the glycol's can also be used as some sort of a fiber. I don't think we have time to in the moment, deep dive glycol, but we were curious. So I'm assuming that since SAG and NBC Universal said it was safe, then we used the safe one.

• 26:58Speaker 00

  We use the safe one. Look at us, we're fine.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  We're here.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Next fan question is from Mikey S. Did Steve improvise when he said, "Stay effing calm"? No. A little bit, though.

• 27:15Speaker 00

  Well, that's Steve, right? I mean, he got everything scripted, but sometimes he would zhuzh in the moment.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Here's what it said in the script. "Oh, God, it's happening. Let me through. Let me through. Stay calm. Stay calm. Stay effing calm!" And then Michael violently pushes his way through to the front.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  I think we did it. I mean, very accurately. We have more fan questions. Angela, Jaden C. wants to know, "How many times did Michael throw the projector into the window?"

• 27:48Speaker 00

  Well, he starts with the chair, right?

• 27:50Speaker 01

  That's right. It does not break. And Randy said that for that, we used a plane of Plexiglas.

• 27:58Speaker 00

  Because they didn't want it to break. They wanted his first attempt not to go well.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  Yes. Then they replaced the Plexiglas with breakaway glass, and it shatters very realistically, but it never shatters in a sharp or dangerous way. I have a little fun fact for you. In the olden days of Hollywood, this was known as candy glass.

• 28:21Speaker 00

  I know that, Jenna, because I got a tour of an old Western set with my dad, and they were like, "All those windows that guys get thrown out the bars in and the saloon, that was candy."

• 28:32Speaker 01

  Candy. You could eat it. I guess nowadays, they don't make it out of candy, but Randy said old schoolers still call it candy glass, even though now it's called breakaway glass.

• 28:43Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  And Randy also told us, Jaden, in answer to your question, they got it in one take. One throw of the projector broke the breakaway glass.

• 28:52Speaker 00

  There you go.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  Jaden would also like to know, "How many times did Kevin break the vending machine?" I reached out to Brian Baumgartner. He said he thought it took about two to three takes. They used that same breakaway glass. He said it broke every time, but they had to do it a few extra times just to get a certain camera movement right. You know, they were doing the whip cuts.

• 29:17Speaker 00

  Right, to make it look frantic.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Right. Now, next up, lady.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  I thought we should discuss this moment that no one wrote in about, but that was so epic.

• 29:28Speaker 00

  I can't believe no one wrote in about it. I know exactly the moment you're talking about because it was such a big deal to all of us on set. And maybe people don't realize that because of what a badass Chris Workman is.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  So what we're talking about is the moment when, led by Kevin, the Dunder Mifflin employees are running through the kitchen and take down our camera operator, Randall Einhorn. Guys, this was a total mistake.

• 29:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, we were like, oh, my God, Randall's down, but only for a few seconds.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  We reached out to Randall because we had to hear this story from his perspective.

• 30:05Speaker 00

  When Brian mowed him down.

• 30:08Speaker 03

  I remember when I was running backwards through the break room and Brian Baumgartner, who plays Kevin, was running at me because he's frantically trying to get out of there. And he, he just kept running on me, running and gaining on me and gaining on me. And I'm running backwards with the camera and he just got so close that I think he hit me and I, I hit the ground. I went down, but my camera says Chris Workman, who's really strong guy, just caught me with one arm, caught me and the camera with one arm and put me back on my feet. And I'm like a 200 pound guy. The camera's nearly 40 pounds and Chris just lifted me up. I didn't even know if I hit the ground. It was, but that shot of me going down and getting back up actually made the show. So thank you, Chris Workman, for picking me up. And thank

• 30:53Speaker 03

  you, Brian Baumgartner, for running into me and making such a cool shot.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Well, Angela, I felt like we also needed to hear from Brian Baumgartner about this moment.

• 31:04Speaker 00

  The mower and the mode.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Exactly. We needed a point counterpoint.

• 31:09Speaker 05

  Well, thank you, Randall. I, you know, I wanted to make fun of you for getting the story wrong, but, but you complimented me and got the story 100% right. I mean, look. I had people running behind me. Okay, so I, I, I had to run over whatever was in front of me, or I would have gotten run over myself. Um, but actually come to think of it, it's the first time that anyone has ever told me that I've outrun anyone. I mean, you, you were running backwards carrying a camera. Uh, but yeah, I, I had to, to, to put you down. And look, the thing I remember is yes, you, you went all the way to your back, as I recall, and for me,

• 31:51Speaker 05

  out of the corner of my eye, it looked like Chris Workman, one hand picked you up, put you back on the feet and like the pro, uh, that you are. Well, you, you just kept filming. I'm so happy that it made it into the cut and it's, it's one of my favorite episodes. It, it aired after the Super Bowl, obviously, and, and that was a big deal for me. And, um, and yeah, one of our funniest cold opens for sure.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Well, lady, I just remember that moment so vividly because I do remember Randall is down. What do we do?

• 32:23Speaker 00

  And then Randall is up.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  I guess we continue. But it was amazing to me. And that's the only time it happened. And that's the take we used.

• 32:33Speaker 00

  Chris Workman, man, he is a machine.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  All right now, I think we need to discuss the thing that we got the most mail about.

• 32:42Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Save Bandit.

• 32:46Speaker 00

  Save Bandit.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  Now, Save Bandit was the last thing on our call sheet for the day. All the rest of us had gone home. I know they did this because it was so complicated. They wanted you to have the set to yourself. I was not there. Angela, please tell us, how did you pull this off?

• 33:07Speaker 00

  Okay, so here's the thing, guys. We had to have a lot of rehearsals. You should know, on the day when there was a lot of the chaos and we were all running around, I was there, but the cat didn't work those moments. Okay?

• 33:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:21Speaker 00

  The cat did have to work one moment, Jenna, with all of us, where I opened the drawer and you reveal.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:28Speaker 00

  You guys are all in the background for that moment. And I had to actually pick the cat up and walk over to where I would have tossed it. And that was it. That's all I had to do with the cat with the group there. Jenna, this cat was massive.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  It looks big.

• 33:43Speaker 00

  I'm like, did you cast the biggest cat they had? Did you see the big one in the corner and say, we want that dude? Just taking it out of the drawer with the chaos, not even doing anything with it, just picking it up and taking it to my spot. The cat was like, um, I'm out of here. So I was really glad when we actually filmed the stunt part that you guys were all gone.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:08Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  Less activity for the cat to deal with.

• 34:11Speaker 00

  The cat was already like, where am I? What's going on? All right. So a lot of things went in to make this happen and I'm going to share with you some stuff that Randy Cordray and Jeff Blitz shared with me, but then I'm going to tell you my personal memories. So I guess in the script, there were a few alts about how the cat got in the ceiling.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 34:29Speaker 00

  Jeff Blitz fought really hard to have the moment where the cat goes up in the ceiling and then out a different part of the ceiling.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:36Speaker 00

  That was the thing he fought for. He said to do this, though, it would involve a pair of matching cats and two trainers in the ceiling, one to catch Bandit one and one to drop Bandit two through a different ceiling panel.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  So the idea originally was that you would go on a search for twin cats.

• 34:57Speaker 00

  Twin cats.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  Identical looking cats.

• 34:58Speaker 00

  Yes. And Randy said that we worked with an excellent animal training company out of Silmar, California. Their name is Bob Dunn's Animal Services and our specific cat trainer for this stunt and many more episodes was Denise Sanders. She was fantastic. I love Denise. And Randy would want you guys to know that we took the safety of not only the humans on set, but also the animals, took it very seriously.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Well, that was Randy. Randy is a real animal lover and he advocated for all of us.

• 35:31Speaker 00

  Fur babies and real people. Okay. So Jenna, my memory is we had two rehearsal days for this stunt.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 35:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. One was just like a preliminary blocking, but then the second one was like, okay, we have to practice this as if we're doing it. And our biggest rehearsal, it was me, Jeff Blitz, Randy Cordray, Greg Daniels. I think some of the writers were there. I think Dean might've been there, our editor, everyone that was going to be involved in this moment, Oscar, the trainer up in the ceiling. There was a lot of people actually for this rehearsal. And if I miss some of you guys, there was more people than you would imagine. I had a stunt woman named Katina Waters. Because they actually didn't want me tossing the cat up in the ceiling. Right? They wanted a professional animal wrangler stunt person.

• 36:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 36:20Speaker 00

  Right, what if I got it wrong?

• 36:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:23Speaker 00

  I'm not a professional animal wrangler.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  You're not a professional animal thrower?

• 36:27Speaker 00

  I am not. But as we started blocking the moments of the scene, the cat wrangler Denise was like, you guys, we can't toss a cat up in the ceiling. You know, we can't toss it up, we can't toss it out. There is no tossing of cats, guys. Because, not that it will harm the cat, this isn't a very high distance or anything like that.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  It won't physically harm them.

• 36:48Speaker 00

  It won't physically harm the cat. And then she used this phrase, Jenna, that was like a scratch on the record player. She said, because it will blow out the cat. And this is clearly a cat wrangler term. It will blow out the cat. We all, all of us went, huh? Blow out the cat? And then Greg goes, because Greg's such an inquisitive minded person, he's like, I'm sorry, what does that mean? To blow out the cat?

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:13Speaker 00

  And she said, it will ruin its career.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  Now, is that because just the stress of performing that stunt would make it so that the cat wouldn't be able to maybe go to work again? Like, the cat would be okay physically, but it would be stressful and they couldn't be sure that it would be a trainable cat in the future?

• 37:35Speaker 00

  Right.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  That's what I'm hearing.

• 37:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's exactly what we all heard, which is, the cat will physically be fine, but you might make it so it's afraid and we won't be able to train it.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 37:44Speaker 00

  Right?

• 37:45Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 37:45Speaker 00

  Right?

• 37:46Speaker 01

  So it could live out its life as someone's pet, but it's not going to be a working cat anymore?

• 37:50Speaker 00

  Not a stunt cat anymore.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  Okay. But this is her job, right? Like, this cat working, this is her livelihood.

• 37:57Speaker 00

  Right. And so Greg, like, as a problem solver, he was like, well, what would it cost to retire the cat? Could we pay you and retire the cat? And that way you don't lose your income in this cat.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 38:07Speaker 00

  She didn't want to retire the cat. This is a very high-earning cat. This is a very good cat.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  It's the largest cat they have.

• 38:14Speaker 00

  It's the largest stunt cat.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  Clearly the largest physically and the largest monetary.

• 38:19Speaker 00

  Stunt cat. So they came up with this idea. They made it work. This is what the animal trainer said that they could do. We would toss up into the ceiling a fake cat. Okay?

• 38:31Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 38:32Speaker 00

  Yes. A fake cat. And then up in the rafters of the ceiling would be a trainer that would then gently be holding a real cat and release it onto my desk, which was just a few feet below.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  Okay, I think I got it. Tossing cat up blows out cat.

• 38:49Speaker 00

  Tossing cat up blows out cat. Can't throw a cat.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  Dropping cat.

• 38:54Speaker 00

  Onto its feet.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  Totally fine.

• 38:55Speaker 00

  Totally fine.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  You know what? I have to say, Sonny Cat actually enjoys a good toss. Sometimes I'm doing laundry on the bed and he'll come up and he likes it when I give him a big hoist onto the pile of laundry. And then he'll jump down and I'll do it again.

• 39:12Speaker 00

  Sonny, you could have been banned.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  Sonny could have been banned. He's like, I'll do it. I'll do the toss.

• 39:19Speaker 00

  Yes, Sonny should have been banned. Well, here's the deal. Randy even went to extra measures to make sure the cat would be fine when they were going to drop it on my desk. He and the animal trainers and our stunt guy, Eric Sulkey, they came up with this huge inflatable safety airbag that would decelerate and gently catch the falling cat. It was described as like falling into feathers. And we did some practice runs and the trainers signed off on it. It was fine. The cat wasn't traumatized at all. They hid this airbag in the corner of my accounting desk with like papers and stuff, but there was a cat airbag on my desk.

• 39:58Speaker 00

  Okay. And the ceiling panel had breakaway foam rubber. All right. So it was all very cushy cushy. But now.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  I just want to say, they did all of this and then gave Rain a real blowtorch.

• 40:14Speaker 00

  They had an inflatable airbag cushion for this enormous cat. But now Jenna, enter in the people that make fake animals.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  I'm scared.

• 40:25Speaker 00

  I found them fascinating. So like, you know, if you have a show like CSI and there's a dead body.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:31Speaker 00

  These are your people. They make fake humans. They make fake animals. Jenna, they had to meticulously match the exact cat that we were tossing in the ceiling. And it was a rush job. Randy said this fake cat cost $12,000.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  Oh my God.

• 40:47Speaker 00

  I know. And I want you to know, that thing was one of the scariest things I've ever seen, held or touched. First of all, it had these yellow eyes that would just look at you. And then the fur felt real, but when you picked it up, it was gelatinous. So like flop, like as you held it.

• 41:06Speaker 01

  Oh my God.

• 41:06Speaker 00

  Imagine like flopping a towel over your arm, a big thick towel. It was like smushy. It was frightening. I, we started kind of pranking with it. Like I set it on Oscar's desk and he walked up and he was like, oh God. I had to like start covering its face with a piece of paper because the thing was so creepy to look at.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  Where is it now?

• 41:25Speaker 00

  I don't know.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  Who has it?

• 41:27Speaker 00

  NBC owns it somewhere, right? They paid for it. By the way, this is just the cat stuff. We haven't even gotten to the fact that Oscar has a whole bit he has to do.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  Oh yeah.

• 41:38Speaker 00

  Right? So when we actually got to the day to shoot the stunt, I go over to the drawer. I pull out the cat. Now they said my dialogue and everything, I still had to be yelling. Okay. So I opened the drawer and you'll hear in the take, I say to the cat, it's okay. Like I'm trying to like, be like, I'm not a bad person. I lift up this enormous cat. And then I have to go to my spot where Oscar's going in the roof. And they wanted, so they could do that swishy cut.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:06Speaker 00

  They wanted me to take the cat. I'm holding it to my chest. They wanted me to swing the cat back behind me. And then swing it up over my head and stop.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  This is the real cat?

• 42:18Speaker 00

  The real cat.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 42:20Speaker 00

  The real cat gets the swinging motion.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  Swinging okay.

• 42:23Speaker 00

  Swinging okay.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  Swinging approved.

• 42:25Speaker 00

  Swinging approved while I'm yelling. I only weigh eighty-two pounds. Right?

• 42:31Speaker 01

  I'm sure the cat loved that. You know what cats love? Screaming.

• 42:35Speaker 00

  And swinging.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:37Speaker 00

  This cat probably weighed twenty pounds. I'm not exaggerating at all. It was enormous. Just the swinging and getting it to my stopping point. It was like,

• 42:47Speaker 00

  I was like, oh, God. And then I stop and I hold it in the air. Freeze. Then they yell, cut, and in comes my stunt woman in the same outfit. She takes real cat. She holds it in the air. I step away because what she's gonna do with the cat, Jenna, is kind of do the second motion where it appears like she's tossing, but she doesn't toss the cat.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 43:08Speaker 00

  But she kind of gives it a little air, but not a lot of air.

• 43:11Speaker 01

  And this was like, they don't want you to get all scratched up. She knows how to give like a little.

• 43:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, they had to give the idea of the motion.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:20Speaker 00

  Right?

• 43:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:21Speaker 00

  More than my swing.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 43:23Speaker 00

  Okay. And then, of course, we had to get a take where I had to take fakey cat and do the same motion as the stunt woman. I had to watch her and toss fakey cat in the ceiling. Right?

• 43:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:33Speaker 00

  They pieced all of that together. So Jenna, I had talked to Jeff Blitz about this moment a while back because I distinctly remember when we filmed it, two cats coming out of the ceiling instead of one.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  How, how, how, how did two cats come out?

• 43:47Speaker 00

  That's my memory. And I was like, wait, am I crazy? And I talked to Dean Holland, who edited. And I was like, Dean, did you have to CGI out one cat? Because I know two cats came down. I remember seeing two cats. He was like, no. And so I talked to Jeff Blitz and he goes, yes, Angela, two cats came down. I was like, what? He said, on the take we used, the trainer that was supposed to catch the fakey cat missed.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 44:12Speaker 00

  And so then, on action, fakey cat came out the other side and real cat.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh.

• 44:20Speaker 00

  Two cats hit the desk. And Jeff said, luckily, the way the camera was positioned, it only caught one cat. And I think it's the real cat when you watch because.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  It looks like a real cat comes down.

• 44:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, because it hits and it kind of runs off. Whereas fakey cat just would have gone plop. Right?

• 44:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 44:39Speaker 00

  So there you go. One cat went up, two cats came down, but we got the shot. It took all those people and all that maneuvering, but it made it in the episode.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  Angela, that is amazing. I did not know all the details of that story. I was on the edge of my seat. I absolutely loved that.

• 44:59Speaker 00

  You guys, the crazy thing is it took me that long to tell that story, but it happened in five seconds.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 45:04Speaker 00

  When we actually filmed it, it was so quick. So it was like me, drawer, cat, swing, step out, fakie cat. Oh, my God, two cats react to one.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  Well, you mentioned that there was something else going on during all this, which was Oscar going in and out of the ceiling.

• 45:24Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  That was a whole other ordeal. Randy told us that that part of the stunt of getting Oscar up into the ceiling was the other most challenging part of the stunt because there was nothing to climb into in the way that our set was built. Like, the actual lightweight drop ceiling, it was suspended from

• 45:47Speaker 00

  Cables.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, very thin rigging wires.

• 45:51Speaker 00

  It was fakie ceiling, guys, because our set was inside a humongous soundstage.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:58Speaker 00

  So actually, above the Dunder Mifflin offices was just air.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  If you walked outside, you could look up and just see these wires holding fakie ceiling.

• 46:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  So he said in the weeks prior to filming this, our production designer, Michael Gallenberg, and construction coordinator, Tim James, had to completely re-engineer the ceiling.

• 46:20Speaker 00

  They had to, like, build rafters, basically, that we didn't have, right?

• 46:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it had to be enough to support not just Oscar, but all of the stunt personnel. He said on the day, there were two stunt coordinators, the animal people, Oscar, Oscar stunt double, and an NBC Universal Safety Coordinator all up in the ceiling. Can you imagine that guy's day at work?

• 46:45Speaker 00

  I can't.

• 46:46Speaker 01

  Like, he's not normally with us. He's just up in our ceiling now.

• 46:50Speaker 00

  I can tell you that I had to look up into the ceiling, and it looked crowded. I get why someone might have missed a cat as it flew up there.

• 47:00Speaker 01

  Well, we got a fan question from Alex M. Did Oscar really fall through the ceiling? Yes.

• 47:07Speaker 00

  Well, yes and no, right?

• 47:09Speaker 01

  We pulled it off using both Oscar and a stunt double, right Ange?

• 47:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I reached out to Oscar and I was like, Oscar, you gotta tell us everything about the ceiling. I guess he gets asked this a lot. And he sent in this audio clip.

• 47:22Speaker 06

  I had a stunt man. I had a Moroccan. He was, he was, I think he was from Morocco. He was, he was a,

• 47:31Speaker 06

  he was from Cirque du Soleil. He was a little shorter than me and he was a stunt man and I think he was jumping out from the hole and doing wonderful tumbles when he hit the ground. I did half of it. He did the really hard part. It was a very funny scene, very complicated. I remember in one of the shots, I made Steve laugh because one of the ways that I was coming down from the roof on one of them, they had a big, a bar up there and it lowered me slowly through the hole. And that was a funny way to come down. And when I made eye contact with Steve, just hanging there with a straight face, of course he laughed. And then they figured out another way to bring me down, which was the leap down. But first I would just like, one of the things we tried were just like being lowered down from the thing,

• 48:17Speaker 06

  which didn't make sense, but was very funny.

• 48:19Speaker 00

  Do you remember that?

• 48:20Speaker 01

  I remember it.

• 48:21Speaker 00

  I do too.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  It was very weirdly Matrix-y.

• 48:24Speaker 00

  It was, and Oscar was slowly coming.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  Like very slowly.

• 48:28Speaker 00

  What was that Tom Cruise movie where he slowly lowered himself down?

• 48:32Speaker 01

  Oh, it was possible.

• 48:33Speaker 00

  It was like that. Oscar was like slowly coming out of the ceiling. It looked crazy.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  And Oscar, of course, did not break because he never broke.

• 48:43Speaker 00

  But we did.

• 48:43Speaker 01

  And all the rest of us were like, we can't possibly continue as if that's physically possible.

• 48:48Speaker 00

  And if Steve broke, you know, it looked ridiculous.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  Well, let me break it down for you, for anyone who wants to follow along. At 2 minutes 38 seconds, the real Oscar is standing on his desk and he pushes up the ceiling tile. At 2 minutes 43 seconds for that beat of Oscar actually jumping up and pulling himself into the ceiling, that's his stunt double. You'll notice, you don't see his face. His double's name was Aladeen Namu, and to pull this off, I guess Aladeen had to wear a safety harness underneath his Oscar wardrobe, and it had this cable that went up through his harness to a pulley that was manned by two guys in the ceiling. And after he would jump, these guys would like hoist him up using this pulley.

• 49:35Speaker 00

  You gotta trust the guys in the ceiling, don't you?

• 49:37Speaker 01

  Then at 2 minutes 48 seconds, we see the real Oscar again. He's up there in the scaffold looking down. He was also secured by a harness and a cable, just to make sure. Finally, at 3 minutes 33 seconds, Oscar appears to break through another ceiling panel over by the kitchen, near Creed's desk. That's his stunt double's legs kicking.

• 50:01Speaker 00

  Creed's reaction was so hilarious to me. Sorry, go on.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  But at 4 minutes 6 seconds, that is when the stunt team dropped real Oscar onto the floor.

• 50:13Speaker 00

  So many beats of this scene, so many.

• 50:16Speaker 01

  We haven't even talked about Stanley's heart attack.

• 50:20Speaker 00

  Oh my gosh.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  At the end of all of this, he's on the ground, and Michael is like telling him he can't die, he can't die. He's shoving a wallet in his mouth.

• 50:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, Michael's yelling Barack Obama's president.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  You can't die, Stanley. We got a fan question from Megan G. Leslie David Baker spoke at my college and said that the scene where Michael puts the wallet in his mouth was improvised. Is this true? Lady, I looked it up in the script, it is not there. It ended with him saying, you can't die, Barack Obama is president. That wallet bit was on the day.

• 50:58Speaker 00

  Oh my gosh. Well, I have a fan question that made me chuckle, Jenna. Emma N. wrote in and said, Meredith has these kind of dirty, question mark, brown boots she's carrying at around 1 minute 49. And throughout some of the cold open, was there any deleted scene or explanation about this?

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 51:19Speaker 00

  Well, Emma, you got me curious. I went to your time code. You are not wrong. I took a photo. Look, Jenna, I'll put it in stories.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  What is that?

• 51:27Speaker 00

  And I looked at this photo and I was like, Emma, I recognize these boots. I would bet money that those are Kate's Ugg boots that wardrobe gave us to keep under our desk when we were so cold. They're not Meredith's boots. So I texted Kate. I said, Kate, in stress relief when Dwight almost burns down the building, did you grab your actual Ugg boots from under your desk? Fans are asking. And I sent her the picture and she wrote back, ha, ha, ha, I did. So the direction we were given was clearly everyone's panicking and they're grabbing their things. They want to get out of the building. And she said, I grabbed my Ugg boots. They are actually not dirty. They're a dusty pink.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 52:12Speaker 00

  So there you go, Emma. Nice catch.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  Lady, I think we should take a break.

• 52:17Speaker 00

  That's the cold open.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  That's just the cold open. We still have this whole episode to break down and there is so much more to talk about.

• 52:25Speaker 00

  All right, we'll be back.

• 52:35Speaker 00

  All right, we are back. Dwight and Michael are at a meeting in corporate because, um, hi, Dwight almost burned the building down and Stanley had a heart attack. So they're having to meet with David Wallace and Kendall from HR.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  Yes, Kendall. Guest star alert. Kendall was played by John Hartman. Now, we've heard of Kendall before. He was mentioned in previous episodes and we heard his voice, remember when he yelled at Holly?

• 53:01Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  So John Hartman did the voice and now here he is, he's at the table.

• 53:06Speaker 00

  He was so good.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  You know that bit where they do the little runner where like take heed, he did?

• 53:12Speaker 00

  Did you look it up to see if it was scripted?

• 53:14Speaker 01

  I did because Sonia Y. wanted to know.

• 53:18Speaker 00

  Sonia, so did I.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  It was scripted.

• 53:21Speaker 00

  It was scripted until the very last Michael heeded again.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  Yes. They kind of added to the bit.

• 53:29Speaker 00

  Steve added to the bit at the very end, but everything else is scripted. I actually texted that couplet of dialogue to Paul Lieberstein and I said, this is perfection. You are so funny. And then Steve at the very end added one more, and I can see Rain trying not to break. He actually has to look down at the table.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:47Speaker 00

  There's two things I have to point out also in this scene. First of all, in this dialogue Dwight's like, imagine my frustration, a safety officer that they're not listening. Excuse me? Angela Martin was the safety officer in basketball. She couldn't find the first aid kit because Dwight had moved it and she said, how many times do I have to tell you? I'm the safety officer. It was like their first little like spat.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:14Speaker 00

  So I don't know what's happened. Dwight clearly has not let this go and he thinks he's the safety officer.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  Well, he's not the safety officer anymore.

• 54:21Speaker 00

  No, he's not because Michael's going to be the safety man. That's what he calls it. He calls it the safety man. I have one other thing I have to point out because it made me laugh so hard, Jenna. I rewound this and watched this beat three times. When Michael gets up and walks out and looks out at the city, you know? And then he comes and sits down next to Kendall. He like scooches Kendall over and he says, can you shove it down, please? Shove it down, please.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  I didn't catch that.

• 54:49Speaker 00

  It's so funny. That is not in the script. Shove it down, please is not in the script. And the way that John and Andy Buckley just rolled with all of those little moments. Oh, they're so good.

• 55:03Speaker 01

  Well, when they get back to Dunder Mifflin, Stanley is coming back into the office. Michael's like, shh, quiet, quiet, quiet. No loud noises.

• 55:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  No surprises.

• 55:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  Stanley has a talking head where he explains that in the past, he has been very abrupt with people, but the doctor said he needs to find a more positive way to relate to people or he will die. Well, you notice in that talking head, there was a montage, a montage of moments of Stanley being abrupt with people.

• 55:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, of him losing his cool.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  A montage like this was very unusual for our show. It was added to help give more context to the character of Stanley for all of those post-Super Bowl viewers.

• 55:46Speaker 00

  I was gonna say, because a documentary doesn't do a montage.

• 55:49Speaker 01

  Not normally.

• 55:50Speaker 00

  Not normally, but when you're after the Super Bowl.

• 55:52Speaker 01

  You do.

• 55:53Speaker 00

  You do. Another beat of the scene that didn't make it in, it's in the deleted scenes, that really made me laugh, Jenna, is that Michael, you know, wants everyone to help Stanley. He's urging them. So here is how that manifests. Andy makes Stanley a mix CD of Enya songs.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 56:12Speaker 00

  Stanley's like, thanks. Michael assigns Kevin to be his bathroom buddy.

• 56:17Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 56:19Speaker 00

  As Kevin says, in case you have a heart attack on the crapper.

• 56:22Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 56:22Speaker 00

  And Stanley's like, I can go to the bathroom by myself. Thank you. Phyllis just looks at him and can't stop smiling. And she has a really sweet talking head where she says she's known Stanley Hudson a long time and the way he breathes, his sort of loud breathing is soothing to her.

• 56:39Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 56:40Speaker 00

  It's really cute. So you have that Phyllis moment. And then Michael says, don't worry, Stanley, I got you a portable defibrillator.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 56:49Speaker 00

  And then tries to go put it on him. And everyone's like, no, no, no, no, no.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh, I remember shooting that.

• 56:54Speaker 00

  Yes. And then Michael like thinks it's funny and wants to like hook everyone up to it.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  Wants to like defibrillate.

• 57:00Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  How do you say that?

• 57:02Speaker 00

  Defibrillate.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  Everybody.

• 57:04Speaker 00

  And then Kevin gets the defibrillator and as a joke puts it on Meredith's seat. Meredith sits on it and doesn't even notice it, but all of her hair goes up in the air. And that's another stunt we had to do. They had to make Kate Flannery's hair rise up with static.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 57:18Speaker 00

  Didn't make it in, but it was pretty funny.

• 57:21Speaker 01

  Michael is determined to make sure that we all know what to do should Stanley ever have another heart attack. He's asked us all to come into the conference room for a CPR class.

• 57:32Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  A class he wishes he was running, but apparently you have to have an actual CPR trainer or else you don't get the dummy.

• 57:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, the Red Cross won't give you the dummy doll unless you have an actually trained CPR instructor.

• 57:50Speaker 01

  We got a fan question.

• 57:51Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  From Stephanie H. I loved this question. Who played Rose, the CPR instructor, and why is she so perfect?

• 57:59Speaker 00

  She is absolutely amazing.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  Her name is Robin Lynch. She is an actress. I believed she was a CPR trainer. I reached out to Allison Jones and she said she found Robin through just a general casting call and that Robin was by far the best person that they saw for the role.

• 58:24Speaker 00

  She just plays it so perfectly straight. She's there to teach CPR. This office goes off the rails and she just tries to stay the course. I did slide into her DMs on Insta.

• 58:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, Robin, we tried to get a hold of you.

• 58:38Speaker 00

  We wanted to chat with you, Robin. If you ever see our message, let us know. We'll chat you up and we'll revisit it.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  Should we talk about all the things that go wrong in this CPR class? There are many.

• 58:48Speaker 00

  There are many. First of all, it starts with Kevin. Kevin gives out at 20 seconds. He's like, I'm calling it.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:55Speaker 00

  And then Rose is like, does anyone else want to turn? And Dwight says absolutely he would not. And as the camera is pulling back away from Dwight to reveal the room, Jenna, at 9 minutes 50 seconds, I am whispering to someone off camera, no.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  What are you talking about? What are you saying?

• 59:14Speaker 00

  I'm not looking at Rose. I'm looking at someone off camera. I don't know who I'm talking to.

• 59:19Speaker 01

  Wait, let me ask you this question.

• 59:21Speaker 00

  What?

• 59:22Speaker 01

  Could you be saying no to the other camera?

• 59:26Speaker 00

  I think so, maybe, but it looks really weird and I filmed it and I'm going to show it to you. And I'll put this in stories, but first I'm going to show my BFF, guys. Okay, ready? Hit play. Absolutely, I would not. You know who I really think should go?

• 59:43Speaker 01

  Do you see that, lady? What are you doing?

• 59:47Speaker 00

  I don't know, but I'm very pointedly saying no. And look, look at my face.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  No. I think, I don't know if that's an improv you're doing, if you're doing it to camera.

• 59:59Speaker 00

  I think it's an improv that I'm doing to Matt's own B camera.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:03Speaker 00

  Angela in Deleted Scenes had a talking head where she's like, I am not putting my mouth on that thing. Who knows whose mouth has been on it? So I think I was sort of improvising off that talking head, but it looks really random if you catch it.

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  It's a very, very good catch, lady. Well, Stanley's gonna give it a go because for some reason, Michael thinks Stanley should learn how to resuscitate himself.

• 1:00:26Speaker 00

  We might not always be there.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:29Speaker 00

  And then, of course, in true Michael fashion, he takes over the meeting, right? He's gonna tell them how to do CPR now.

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:36Speaker 00

  And they're doing it all wrong. Rose says, listen, guys, you need 100 beats per minute. And she suggests they pumped the tune of Stayin Alive by the Bee Gees.

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. At first, Michael confuses this with I Will Survive.

• 1:00:50Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  But then Rose starts singing Stayin Alive, you know, ah, ah, ah, ah.

• 1:00:58Speaker 00

  Stayin Alive, Stayin Alive.

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  Then Andy starts singing Stayin Alive. Kelly starts dancing. It turns into a dance party.

• 1:01:08Speaker 00

  I actually have the clip if you want to hear it.

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  Let's hear it.

• 1:01:12Speaker 02

  Ah, ah, ah, ah. Stayin Alive, Stayin Alive. Ah, ah, ah, ah. Stayin Alive, Stayin Alive.

• 1:01:20Speaker 07

  You can't tell by the way I use my walk. I'm a woman's man, no time to talk. What is it like? Women won't been kicked around since I was born. Well, it's all right. It's okay. You can't live the other way. Okay. Let it go, let it go.

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:01:38Speaker 07

  I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm Stayin Alive, Stayin Alive.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  I mean, poor Rose. We had a fan question from Megan D. in Scotland.

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  Was any of the scene with the Red Cross lady improvised such as Kelly's dancing or Andy's singing? No, guys, this whole thing, all this singing and the dancing, it was all scripted and we followed this scene pretty much as written.

• 1:02:05Speaker 00

  Brilliantly written.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  I found out who pitched this idea.

• 1:02:10Speaker 00

  Oh, I know. Tell them.

• 1:02:12Speaker 01

  It is Jen Salata.

• 1:02:14Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  This whole staying alive CPR idea came from her. She said that she had heard it was true. She looked it up and cross-checked it. She said she cross-checked it again because she didn't want to put it on TV unless it was true. And then she shared with me that before The Office, she had been a writer's assistant on home improvement and that the writers had done an episode where the Jonathan Taylor Thomas character found a lump on his throat. And it turned out that it was a thyroid issue in the episode, right? And Jen said that she was later in charge of opening the mail and they got letters from all of these families that said after watching that episode, it helped save their

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  children's lives because their children had had a thyroid lump and because of the episode, they got it checked out. And guys, since this stress relief episode aired, people have used this CPR technique to save lives.

• 1:03:14Speaker 00

  They have. Jen shared with us that she heard about a guy pulling a woman out of a car and doing CPR to the tune of staying alive because of this episode. I looked it up. It's true. There's many articles. I'm going to start with this one. Okay, in January of 2019, Rolling Stones ran this story. A scene from The Office that dealt with first aid technique is credited to helping save a life after an Arizona man, despite having no CPR training, managed to resuscitate a woman in medical distress. His name, interestingly enough, is Cross Scott.

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 1:03:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, his last name is Scott. So, he found an unconscious woman behind the wheel of her car that was rolling down a dirt road.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:03:59Speaker 00

  He smashed the window, got her out, and then he's quoted as saying, "I've never prepared myself for CPR in my life. I had no idea what I was doing." Thankfully, Scott had seen the episode of The Office that dealt with CPR training and knew to do chest compressions to the cadence of staying alive. They reached out to Courtney Slanicker, Executive Director of the Red Cross Southern Arizona Chapter, and she told the Daily Star that if you don't do CPR, the victim will die. Don't be afraid to act. Whatever you do will help that victim and hopefully prevent a death. And Courtney confirmed that staying alive is in fact, the correct rhythm for chest compressions.

• 1:04:39Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:04:40Speaker 00

  Jen Salata, you got it right.

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:04:43Speaker 00

  There's so many guys, but just recently in January of this year, The Today Show shared a story about a four-year-old girl who collapsed while playing tag, and her dad, Matt Uber, found her and started chest compressions, again, to the tune of staying alive. And he's quoted as saying, "When I was trying to think about what to do about CPR, my mind literally went to that episode of The Office where they are doing CPR training and doing the compressions to the beat of staying alive."

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  I mean, that just got me choked up to imagine that father in that moment.

• 1:05:16Speaker 00

  I know.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  And then he had something, anything he could do.

• 1:05:20Speaker 00

  I know. I know. And there's more. I know there's more stories, but those two were two that stood out to me.

• 1:05:27Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 1:05:28Speaker 00

  And one of the things that, after reading some of these stories, Jenna, that people share is that, how important knowing CPR is, and that we should all learn CPR. Yes, we have the staying alive, so you know the beats, but that we should all learn our CPR safety, because it really can save a life.

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  I know that when we had our son, our first child, Lee and I both did an infant CPR training.

• 1:05:54Speaker 00

  Same, same.

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  But we should do a refresher.

• 1:05:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, it's not over for Rose. She's not out of the woods yet. Things are about to get even crazier.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. She announces that we failed to save the life of our CPR dummy.

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  Dwight suggests that the next course of action would be to harvest the organs.

• 1:06:15Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  For organ donation.

• 1:06:17Speaker 00

  And then he, of course, grabs the giant knife that is strapped to his calf.

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, and he hacks into the dummy's chest.

• 1:06:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, and we all freak out.

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, we freak out because then he cuts off the dummy's face.

• 1:06:30Speaker 00

  And puts it on his face.

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  Like Silence of the Lambs.

• 1:06:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  We had some fan mail about it. People would like to know how many CPR dummies were used in this episode.

• 1:06:42Speaker 01

  Well, I asked Randy.

• 1:06:44Speaker 00

  I know for sure Rain really did cut into it because we watched him do it.

• 1:06:48Speaker 01

  Randy said we used three CPR mannequins in total. Now, in a minute, David Wallace is going to say that they cost $3,500 each, but Randy said that was a little exaggerated. He said there are some top end dummies that come with very sophisticated features like articulating heads and heartbeat simulators. Those cost, at the time, around $1,000 each, but we used one that cost about $750 each.

• 1:07:18Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  But listen, Dwight is in trouble again. He has to go back to corporate and he has to discuss his mutilation of the CPR dummy.

• 1:07:28Speaker 00

  I really can't believe the guy is still employed.

• 1:07:33Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:07:34Speaker 00

  Now he has this huge task where he has to go make this very public apology to his coworkers and they have to sign that they received his apology.

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  Yes, that's going to be now Dwight's task. Meanwhile, we've got this very interesting, somewhat odd other storyline that's going to come up.

• 1:07:55Speaker 00

  It really seems like it comes out of nowhere. It's in the break room. Andy, I guess, is really good at pirating movies. So you can see them before they come out. And Jim and Pam are going to watch this movie with Andy on his laptop.

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  Yes, we got a lot of fan mail about this pirated movie scene. Hannah E., Abby S., and Bet S. said, "I am absolutely obsessed with the strange mini movie Andy watches with Jack Black and several other big names. How did this subplot come about?"

• 1:08:27Speaker 00

  Does it rhyme with Schmooper Bowl?

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  It does. It does. Remember when I said there was that extra scrutiny? Well, one of the things that the network was very insistent about was that this episode have big name guest stars.

• 1:08:42Speaker 00

  So they could flash it about?

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:44Speaker 00

  Jack Black, Jessica Alba.

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  Yes. There was a lot of comparison to when other shows had run after the Super Bowl, like Friends, who had featured big guest stars. But Greg and the rest of our writers were very against this. Especially against it was Allison Jones, our casting director. They all felt that to have like a big name guest star walk into the office pretending to play a character at a small paper company would just totally shatter the reality of the documentary premise of our show. We would get all these new eyes on the episode, maybe, but the conceit of our show is that it's a documentary.

• 1:09:25Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  You can't have Jack Black come in and pretend to be a salesman.

• 1:09:29Speaker 00

  Exactly. But you can, years later, have James Spader play Robert California.

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  And have Idris Elba come in and all these other people.

• 1:09:37Speaker 00

  Timothy Olyphant and Kathy Bates. Okay, but for now.

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  For now, our integrity is intact, okay? And Greg came up with this idea, this fix, that would not infect the reality of the show. And that was where the idea for Pam, Jim, and Andy to watch this pirated movie. And I guess Teri Weinberg, who was one of our original executive producers, was now working as the executive vice president of NBC Entertainment. And Greg said that she was really instrumental in fighting, like the kind of top brass at NBC, to agree to this fix.

• 1:10:18Speaker 01

  They did. Jack Black was the first person to commit. He was all in. He loved our show. Clarice Leachman.

• 1:10:26Speaker 00

  Amazing, by the way.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  Amazing. She heard a pitch on what the story would be and she was like, yes, I am in. And then finally, we got Jessica Alba.

• 1:10:37Speaker 00

  So the movie is called Mrs. Albert Hannity and Jack Black is playing Sam. Clarice Leachman is playing Lily, AKA Nana, and Jessica Alba plays Sophie. It's sort of a romantic love triangle story.

• 1:10:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, Jack Black is dating or engaged to Jessica Alba's character and she's introducing him to her grandmother and there's an instant connection. I mean, they go to shake hands and music starts playing.

• 1:11:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's some electricity there. Well, I want you to know, there were some alt ideas for this parody movie, Jenna.

• 1:11:13Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:11:14Speaker 00

  And I went back to the table read draft, not the shooting draft, just to see what it said in the table read. In the table read draft, the movie was going to be called Hang Glider Cop.

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  What?

• 1:11:28Speaker 00

  And Jack Black would be a cop named Tanner that's kind of a rogue cop and he gets, as punishment, sent over to the hang gliding division.

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:11:38Speaker 00

  And now he's going to be a hang gliding cop.

• 1:11:40Speaker 01

  A wacky comedy.

• 1:11:42Speaker 00

  Like a cop comedy.

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:11:45Speaker 00

  They didn't go with that one. Probably getting a hang glider was too much of a project.

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  Gosh, I'd love to see that movie.

• 1:11:52Speaker 00

  Hang Glider Cop.

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  Jack Black, are you listening?

• 1:11:55Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm. HG Division.

• 1:11:57Speaker 01

  We got more fan questions about this. Livian G, Norrit F, and Maddie L said, did we get to meet Jack Black, Clarice Leachman, or Jessica Alba? No.

• 1:12:09Speaker 00

  We did not work the same days they worked.

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

  They filmed all of their stuff in one day at a private residence in West LA. The rest of us all had the day off. They didn't even come to our base camp.

• 1:12:23Speaker 00

  No, they were at a house.

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  I looked it up on the call sheet. They started really early that day. On the call sheet, it said breakfast would be ready for the crew at 4:42 a.m. in a nearby park.

• 1:12:36Speaker 00

  Oof, they had to get everything in one day.

• 1:12:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, the actors all arrived really early. They did their hair, makeup, and wardrobe fittings, all in the morning, and then they were finally allowed to go into the neighborhood where the house was located at 7 a.m. So they had vans that took everyone from this park base camp over to the location, and that's where they filmed it. So we never met.

• 1:13:02Speaker 00

  So while they're watching Mrs. Albert Hannity, we start seeing Pam getting all these text messages, and we learn this storyline that Pam's parents are in a rough patch.

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  Yes, and that Pam's dad is bunking with Jim and Pam.

• 1:13:18Speaker 00

  It is really funny, though, that Jim and Pam are having these little sidebar relationship conversations, and Andy thinks it's about the movie.

• 1:13:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:26Speaker 00

  Andy thinks you guys are just like geniuses at relationships, that you can just figure all this stuff out.

• 1:13:31Speaker 01

  Well, something else I should mention, Angela, is that we were actually watching.

• 1:13:36Speaker 00

  That's one of my questions for you. I was like, ask Jenna, were they actually watching the movie on the laptop?

• 1:13:42Speaker 01

  So we were.

• 1:13:43Speaker 00

  How could you not react to Clarice coming out of the tub? You had to be distracted on your phone. I was like, holy crap.

• 1:13:50Speaker 01

  So they had shot this a long time ago. If you look at the call sheets for this episode, this bit of us in the conference room was not even on the schedule for these nine days. We shot this another week later so that they could put together this mini movie, so that we could have some reactions. The first time they played them for us, we couldn't speak. We were riveted. We were like, what are we watching?

• 1:14:18Speaker 00

  That was what I thought. I was like, how can Jim and Pam, like, not just be falling out of their chairs right now? And Andy's like, guys, they're making out.

• 1:14:29Speaker 01

  So what they did was they showed it to us and then we watched a blank screen, but we knew what we were supposed to be reacting to.

• 1:14:39Speaker 00

  You knew the beats of it.

• 1:14:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:14:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:41Speaker 01

  And then they inserted it into the screen. You know, if you notice, it's all over the shoulder.

• 1:14:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was very curious about that.

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was bonkers.

• 1:14:52Speaker 00

  Well, after all the texting with Pam's mom and dad, Pam says, Jim, can you talk to my dad? You're so good at talking to people.

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  Maybe he'll open up to you.

• 1:15:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:01Speaker 01

  This is not going to go the way Pam planned.

• 1:15:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:04Speaker 01

  But that's for next week.

• 1:15:06Speaker 00

  Well, before we close out this episode, Michael has decided to do yoga in the conference room.

• 1:15:12Speaker 01

  For relaxation.

• 1:15:13Speaker 00

  It did really make me laugh when he was like, um, if you have your legs open, close them. No one needs to see that. Um, or whatever he said. It cracked me up.

• 1:15:22Speaker 01

  It also really made me laugh when Jim says to Pam, don't open your eyes. And she says, why?

• 1:15:28Speaker 00

  Oh, God. I don't know if you noticed Dwight and Angela are laying side by side.

• 1:15:33Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:15:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's because there was a deleted scene where Dwight whispers to her, "I will make love to you the way I used to if you will sign my apology letter." And she's like, ah, no.

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  Wow. Well, during all of this, Stanley has a little heart monitor on and it beeps whenever he gets stressed. Turns out every time Michael gets close to him, it starts beeping. And then when Michael walks away, it stops. So Michael has this very funny talking head where he says, it turns out that Dwight wasn't the killer after all. The killer was Michael. And he says, quote, "You never suspect you're the killer." It's a great twist.

• 1:16:12Speaker 00

  Great twist.

• 1:16:15Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh, you guys, that was stress relief part one.

• 1:16:18Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:16:19Speaker 00

  We did it.

• 1:16:19Speaker 01

  Next week is part two. Boom, roasted. That's next week. Thank you to everyone who contributed to this episode. Thank you, Oscar, Randall, Rain, and Brian for sending in your audio clips. Guys, Rain and Brian both have podcasts. They are great. Rain is the host of Metaphysical Milkshake, and Brian is the host of The Office Deep Dive.

• 1:16:42Speaker 00

  Yes, and also a huge thank you to Randy Cordray, Greg Daniels, Jeff Blitz, Jen Salata, Paul Lieberstein, Dean Holland, James Carey, oh my gosh, Kate Flannery. We reached out to so many people.

• 1:16:55Speaker 01

  We always say thank you, but it's because we mean it.

• 1:16:58Speaker 00

  Really? Yeah.

• 1:16:59Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:17:00Speaker 00

  Thank you, guys, so much.

• 1:17:01Speaker 01

  And thank you for listening. We'll be back next week with part two.

• 1:17:05Speaker 00

  Have a good one.

• 1:17:10Speaker 01

  Thank you for listening to Office Ladies Second Drink.

• 1:17:13Speaker 00

  This episode was initially created in collaboration with Earwolf.

• 1:17:17Speaker 01

  Office Ladies is a presentation of Odyssey and is produced by Jenna Fisher and Angela Kinsey. Our senior producer is Matt Beagle.

• 1:17:24Speaker 00

  Our Second Drinks episodes are produced by Molly Nugent.

• 1:17:27Speaker 01

  Our audio engineer is Sam Pfeifer.

• 1:17:29Speaker 00

  Odyssey's executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis.

• 1:17:32Speaker 01

  Office Ladies was mixed and mastered by Bill Schultz.

• 1:17:35Speaker 00

  Our theme song is Rubber Tree by Creed Braden.