KEY EPISODE 7

“Weight Loss”

“Weight Loss” is a double episode of The Office that kicked off season five, introduced the character of Holly Flax, sent Pam to New York to attend art school, and had the entire Dunder Mifflin staff group-weighing themselves on an industrial scale as part of a fitness competition with other branches. It’s a packed forty-two minutes, but it’s a thirty-three-second scene where Jim proposes to Pam in front of a gas station during a downpour that created the biggest headaches for the crew. It’s also the scene that stirred up more heated debate than any other scene in the history of the show.

Randy Cordray: Greg wanted the proposal to take place halfway between New York City and Scranton. Pam was off at art school and they decided to meet halfway at a rest stop. The dialogue said, “Meet me at that rest stop. Do you remember the one where the soda exploded all over you? We’ll meet for lunch there.” That was all Jim had told to Pam. You had no information that he was going to propose to her whatsoever. Greg insisted that this be shot at a rest stop during the day, in the rain. I kept trying to pick his brain as to why he wanted it like that. He said to me, “Momentous events can happen to us in a place that we least expect it.” That’s why Jim proposed to Pam at a rest station gas stop in the rain. He couldn’t wait another minute, and the place wasn’t important. It was the event that was important to him.

Matt Sohn: Funnily enough, it was a gas station that Greg once saw.

Randy Cordray: What he had in mind was an actual rest stop that he and his family visit when they visit his in-laws in Connecticut. They would fly into LaGuardia and hop in their rental van and they would always stop at this one ExxonMobil station along the Merritt Parkway to use the bathroom and get a bite to eat and get a drink, and then go on to Connecticut. So this was his archetype of what he wanted for a rest stop. After 9/11, we learned that ExxonMobil had put a moratorium on filming any of their locations. They did not want the hassle and the security issues of a film crew on that location. And they’re obviously a big enough corporation that they don’t need the money, and they don’t need the hassle of having a film crew. So it was an absolute no, there was no negotiating around this. We could not shoot at that location.

Finding a similar one proved to be nearly impossible.

Randy Cordray: I tasked our locations department to go find this location. He kept bringing back various photos and Greg was rejecting them one after another. I learned that rest stops back east are typically gas stations with fast food. Out west, they are usually provided by the state department of transportation and they include a grassy spot to walk your dog, a couple of bathrooms, maybe some vending machines, a big kiosk with some maps, and places for trucks to park and places for cars to park. That’s not what Greg Daniels had in mind. Now, this is my first episode on the show. I’m scared to death that I’m going to fail on my first episode for Greg Daniels. I don’t want to fail him. I want this to work. I want him to be pleased with what he gets on film. And obviously, this is the most significant event in the history of Pam and Jim, this has to be right.

Michael Gallenberg: After six weeks of searching all over LA and in fact the western half of the country for a suitable rest stop where we might find or make rain, Randy Cordray comes into my office and informs me they were sending me on a red-eye Friday-night plane and I would be picked up by a PA from Conan’s show and driven to the rest stop on the Merritt Parkway.

Randy Cordray: We sent Michael on a stealth junket. He drove out there to that particular rest stop and without identifying himself he took a bunch of stealth measurements and photos of the place. And came back armed and prepared to build this location.

Michael Gallenberg: We had nine days to scout, design, build, and shoot a rest stop with a four-lane parkway.

Building it near an actual four-lane highway wasn’t an option.

Randy Cordray: We contacted the California Highway Patrol and they said that the filming crew was creating a hazard and they would demand that we slow traffic down to five miles an hour through the rain zone. Well this was completely unacceptable.

Jen Celotta: I think it cost $300,000 to build it on an airport runway or something.

Randy Cordray: There’s five acres of black asphalt behind a Best Buy store in Glendale, California. It is completely barren, unstriped and unpainted. They built downtown Tokyo there when they shot The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. Michael Gallenberg, clever, brilliant man that he is, designed that gas station to merely be a façade. It was only eight feet deep. When you see the shot in that episode, and you see activity behind Jim in the minimart of the gas station, that’s only eight feet deep. There’s just enough room for a person in there to walk up to a cashier. It was all done with photographs. The colorful cases of sodas, those were photographs that Michael took and printed and laminated them onto foam-core backing. They were merely planted on the back wall of that set.

Brian Wittle: We built a gas station. It was totally unnecessary, way overboard.

Randy Cordray: Then we built a four-lane freeway out in front and we used colored tape to mark the lanes. And we built a median strip with Astroturf and guardrail. This was designed in a giant dog bone shape so that cars and trucks could pass through the shot at fifty-five miles an hour, and then go way out into the distance, arc in a big circle, and come back through the shot the other direction. I hired thirty-five precision drivers.

Michael Gallenberg: I also shot stills of the trees in Connecticut for the digital backdrop to hide the rolling hills of Los Feliz. And we had three crane rain rigs.

Randy Cordray: The nearest water was a fire department hydrant in front of Best Buy, which was several hundred yards away, so we had giant construction cranes holding up water tankers over the whole set so that we could rain [on] four lanes of freeway and the whole top of the gas station.

The scene begins with an establishing shot of the fictional Fairview gas station. The cameraman is positioned across a four-lane highway as cars whisk by in the rain.

Randy Cordray: The concept was that the documentarians had followed Jim to the lunch date and missed the exit. Jim made the exit and made it into the gas station, but the documentarians missed the exit and therefore they pulled off on the shoulder and they were shooting across the four lanes of traffic, through the rain. We see Jim arrive. Pam is already there.

Pam playfully complains to Jim that the gas station isn’t halfway between New York and Scranton and that she had to drive more than halfway. Without saying a word, he gets down on one knee and proposes. “I couldn’t wait,” he says. “Pam, will you marry me?” She agrees and they passionately kiss. They only had time to film a few attempts before the sun disappeared behind a mountain and ruined their light, but they emerged with a perfect take. When they got to the editing suite back in Van Nuys, however, a whole new problem emerged.

Jen Celotta: There was this massive debate about whether the proposal should have sound or not have sound. Massive. We were in two camps and I think we were just divided down the middle.

Dean Holland: That was my fault. We had the scene and there was dialogue and we cut it and everybody loved it and everything was great. And I said, “Greg, I did another version for you and I just want you to see it.” I showed him a version where you’re hearing the traffic and everything and he pulls up. And what I did is, I just took all their dialogue out. It was as if they didn’t have their mic packs on.

Halsted Sullivan: Greg pulled me and Warren [Lieberstein] into the editing room and showed us both takes. He said, “Do you want sound or no sound?” And I said sound. And Warren said no sound. The debate was, “Is it a cooler move for Jim to turn off his mic and make this a truly personal moment between him and Pam?” And [on] the other side, not as a writer of the show, but really as a fan of the show, I’ve waited so long for this moment and we haven’t turned off the mic yet. I wanna hear it. I don’t want to leave unsatisfied.

Jen Celotta: Greg felt like, we’ve waited a long time for this. You want to sort of hear it. A lot of the writers felt differently and we enormously respect each other, so fighting was encouraged because everybody was so passionate about what we were doing. And the writers were so wanting it to be, like, messed up and muddied.

Brian Wittle: I told him I think he should leave the sound on, and the reason is because the shot is in close-up. If we’re really there, we would hear something. We would at least hear rain. If you wanna do a romantic thing where all you see are the gestures and you can tell that he’s proposing to her, and you can tell that she says yes and you can tell all that, then I would play that from a wider shot and only hear the rain. I said, “If you’re gonna do it like that, then yeah, take the dialogue out. But otherwise, I think you need the dialogue.”

Randall Einhorn: I would have been definitely no audio. If we’re doing a documentary, they would have taken it off, right? Greg entrusted me with being the documentarian and if somebody tells you to do something you wouldn’t do, tell them to fuck off. What you imagine might be even more romantic than what you actually hear.

Jen Celotta: I sent Greg my pro/con list for sound/no sound. I found a legal pad in his office with people who wanted sound and people who didn’t want sound. His wife and one of his kids was one side, his other two kids were on the other side. We went back and forth to the point where one night I was coming from a trailer late at night and I walked up to Greg as he was getting into his car and I was like, “Did you make a decision?” He’s like, he said, “No, no, no, no, no. We don’t have to lock till tomorrow!” It was like I was cornering him in a horror movie.

Halsted Sullivan: Greg began pulling in all sorts of crew members to hear their opinions. He brought in the guards from the gate to A and B it. It just became one of the most debated things ever on the show.

Jen Celotta: At one point a guard came in to see both versions while Greg was on speakerphone. This guard was a lovely, lovely man but it didn’t appear that The Office was a show that he watched and I didn’t want to call him on it. We show him the scene with sound and without sound. We’re like, “Which one do you prefer?” And he goes, “I like the one with sound.” We ask why and he’s like, “Oh, ’cause I can hear it.”

Dean Holland: It wasn’t just the security guards. He also showed accounting and the cleaning crew.

Brian Wittle: Greg is so sensitive to other people’s opinions. He’s this super-talented amazing guy, but if you tell him, “Oh, I don’t think this part works,” he’ll take your comment really seriously, no matter who you are, which is pretty amazing, but it’s also gotta be torture for him.

Dean Holland: We had two versions mixed and ready to go. And Jake Aust, who was our post producer, he called me at like eight forty-five in the morning and said, “I can’t get in touch with Greg. And he hasn’t decided yet. You got to call him. He has to decide.” So I called Greg in his car and said, “Let me tell you how I proposed to my wife. I didn’t say anything fancy. I didn’t say anything special. If I could go back now, it was probably the lamest proposal ever. But that’s what my wife and I will always remember.” Both of us were talking about our proposals and at the end of it he’s like, “I’ve pulled my car over. I have tears in my eyes,” and says this is the way it should be. And then we went with dialogue, [because] people are going to want to hear it even though it’s not elegant and articulated perfect. They’re going to want to hear it. So he chose the dialogue version, but I think both would have worked. I hate saying that, but either one would have been fantastic.