To create the Dunder Mifflin set, the producers rented a tiny, nondescript studio at 3322 La Cienega Place in Culver City, California.
Larry Wilmore: It was a very bizarre place to work. It looked like they were shipping aluminum out of there. It just didn’t seem like showbiz.
Jason Kessler: A lot of small studios have offices for production staff to work in. And instead of using those for working, they actually dressed that as a set and that became the Office set.
Donald Lee Harris (Production Designer): They hired me to build the set. When I first walked in, it was pretty much just a big, giant, empty room. There were no cubicles or anything like that. There was nothing. No offices, none at all. I felt that the space could work if we divided it up and created some of the office cubicles around the bullpen. We built the offices out of that aluminum sash that you use for storefronts. I designed and built all of those around the bullpen.
Ken Kwapis: Greg and I spent a lot of time discussing the layout of Dunder Mifflin, and in particular how the desk arrangement would reinforce certain relationships in the series. Dwight and Jim, for example, not facing each other exactly, but being at a slight angle to each other. The idea that Pam is always facing Jim, but Jim is turned slightly away from Pam, so that it takes . . . this sounds very small, but it’s important . . . he has to make a choice to turn to look at her. In the early episodes, this enabled me to frame a lot of interesting shots where we’re looking past Jim toward Pam, and she is gazing at him. And he’s either unaware that she’s looking at him or pretending to be unaware she’s looking at him.
Donald Lee Harris: I wanted Jenna’s desk to be curved so that she wasn’t just facing one direction. She could swivel her chair to any direction in the room and also have a vision of the whole space, and not just be locked into a standard square desk where you’re just looking one way.
Ken Kwapis: There were a number of things that I wanted to do in the bullpen that are not realistic. For instance, most bullpens have cubicles where people are separated by walls. And it was important obviously that people be able to see each other. The accountants have a glass partition between them, but everyone else works in an open bullpen. It’s more like a classic newspaper bullpen, like The Washington Post in All the President’s Men.
Donald Lee Harris: Two small stages were attached to it, one of which we actually converted to the warehouse. We went to some warehouses in Los Angeles to see how they were set up, how they stacked materials and they used the chain link to separate different areas. It’s very helpful for somebody like me, who may not have much experience in the paper business.
Randall Einhorn (Director/Cinematographer): The first set we filmed on was J. J. Abrams’s office back when he was doing Felicity.
Matt Sohn (Cinematographer/Camera Operator): A number of seasons later, J. J. came in to direct an episode. On his first day on set, he was walking around and he was like, “This is so weird. . . .”
J. J. Abrams: I was struck by this uncanny feeling like I had been there before, and I couldn’t figure out what the hell it was. And I hadn’t ever noticed it on the series watching it, but I couldn’t shake this feeling like something very weird was going on. And then it struck me that the room that was Michael’s office had been Matt Reeves’s office when we worked on Felicity and then I was doing Alias, and that the conference room was my office. It was a complete, unexpected mind bender.
Carey Bennett (Costume Designer): I’d never worked in an office before, luckily, so I actually researched and found this paper company in Glendale called Economy Office Supply that was about the same size as what we were trying to create. I invited myself over there and I just couldn’t believe it. It was just so juicy, full of amazing details, even inspirational quotes that had been printed off of a computer and then taped to the wall, but in a big, long string of papers. And all the characters were there for me. This one woman had these great long dresses and these really comfy shoes and was just as sweet as can be. She became Meredith. There was a guy that always had on these T-shirts with wolves on them and gamer stuff on his desk. That became Dwight. I took a million pictures of this place and I presented this little photo presentation that I had from this office to Greg and everyone. They were just like, “What is this place? How did you get these pictures? Where did you find this?” So, we all went back over there. We took video cameras and videotaped this whole place. I think we even ended up using all of their supplies and stuff for the set. It’s what fueled me the entire time I worked on the show.
Henry Saine (Graphic Designer): Everything always had to look very boring, which meant I had to unlearn everything I knew about design. I designed all the signs and everything with Microsoft Paint instead of normal tools like Photoshop and Illustrator. If I had to make a birthday banner I’d think, “They’re going to just use an old Helvetica font and put a bunch of exclamation points at the end.” When I created the Dunder Mifflin logo, I worked really hard on eight of them and at the last minute I made a ninth where the words weren’t even lined up right. That’s the one they picked.
They decided to set the show in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Much like Slough from the UK series, it’s a working-class town relatively close to a huge city.
Carey Bennett: At an early meeting about the show, we had a map out and we were all like, “Where should we place our show?” Daniels literally hovered over the map and was like, “Well, we need to be close to a big city, but it needs to have been maybe a city that had, at one point, had some industry, but now it was sort of on the downswing.” He just circled his finger around the map and found Scranton. And that was that.
Greg Daniels: I was reading John O’Hara stories at the time. He’s a great writer and sets a lot of his stuff [in Scranton]. Paper Magic is a company that does children’s valentines and it says “Made in Scranton” on the back of Scooby-Doo valentines that I had gotten around the same time for my kids. I think it was still maybe floating around when John Krasinski came there before the pilot with some buddies and shot the footage that’s in our opening title sequence. He interviewed different Scranton paper personalities at Penn Paper and Paper Magic, and the behavior of him going around with a camera crew, asking the managers of these paper companies to show him around, it mimicked exactly what we were going for. We were like, “Thumbs up. That works.”
Carey Bennett: I also worked on Scrubs and one of the PAs was from Scranton. I hired him to take pictures for me when he went back home of every single person he could see. He came back with a thousand photos of everybody from police officers to kids on the street to people working in stores. I needed every walk of life and he came back with a whole disk full of pictures.
Mari Potis (Greater Scranton Chamber of Commerce, Director of Membership and Events): I got a call from Phil Shea, their property master, and he told me they were doing a pilot for a TV show about a fictional paper company that would be set in Scranton but shot in Van Nuys, California. He wanted to use a Scranton Chamber of Commerce sign for the walls and then asked if I would help with some other items for the set. Then for the next nine years, I became the person that got them authentic Scranton props for the background. Greg Daniels wanted everything as authentic as they could [get] to Scranton. Eventually, we sent them truckloads of items submitted from local businesses that lined up to donate them at Steamtown mall, hoping to get free advertising on TV. It was that yellow Froggy 101 radio station sticker [from Dwight’s desk], pizza boxes, newspapers . . . whatever they needed.
Donald Lee Harris: We did the whole first season there in that warehouse and upstairs, which is also very difficult to work in. There was no elevator or anything, so everything had to be hauled up the stairs.
Randall Einhorn: Ken Kwapis was really responsible for everything in the office actually working. You turn on the faucet, you wanted that to work. That doesn’t happen in normal television production. If you need the faucet to work, you need to get a special effects guy in who could hook it up with pressure and someplace to attach it. It was really smart to make it feel like a place where you could sell paper.