Summary

• Fans of Office Space inspired Swingline to create red staplers, fulfilling demand for the iconic prop.
• Mike Judge based much of his work on personal experiences, like Milton being inspired by a real coworker.
• After the success of the film, Swingline has continued to produce the red staplers due to popular demand.

MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: Office Space fans forced Swingline to start making red staplers.

While the film wasn't much of a box office success when it was released in 1999 (I saw it opening night, and I was one of four people in the theater), Office Space became a cult classic once it was released on VHS. The film about the ways that corporations try to break down its lower rung employees really struck a nerve for many real life people in similar situations (it helps that Mike Judge intentionally bases almost all of his characters on real people he has met over the years, giving his work an excellent sense of verisimilitude), and in the 25 years since the film was released, fans have turned a number of scenes from the film into memes and catchphrases.

The love that fans had for the film was expressed in an oddly commercial way, as well, as fan demand for the infamous red stapler used by the character of Milton in the film led to the creation of a red stapler by Swingline, when it didn't exist before that!

UPDATE: 2024/04/26 16:10 EST BY BRIAN CRONIN

I updated this old Movie Legends Revealed to add some new information, and bring it into line with CBR's current standards.

Who was Milton in Office Space?

See how Milton predated Beavis and Butthead

In an oral history of the making of Office Space by Jake Kring-Schreifels for The Ringer for the 20th anniversary of the film in 2019, Mike Judge recalled the inspiration for the breakout character from Office Space, Stephen Root's Milton, who was also the character that the entire Office Space concept was based upon! Judge had been working for a military contractor, processing the schematics for jets, when he encountered a co-worker who loved to complain:

He just went into this whole thing about how he was going to quit because they moved his desk again. I said, ‘Well, why don’t you want the desk to move?’ It was something about his fish tank: ‘I told Bill, they move it one more time, I’m outta here.’ I remember thinking, they could move your desk 20 more times; you’re not going to quit. He just enjoyed complaining.

That whole routine turned into Mike Judge's first mainstream cartoon, which appeared on MTV in 1991, BEFORE Judge's iconic cartoon creations, Beavis and Butthead.

After the success of Beavis and Butthead, and its follow-up, King of the Hill, Judge wrote and directed his first film, 1996's Beavis and Butthead Do America! in 1996. The film was a big hit, and so Judge was able to next turn his Milton cartoons into an Office Space movie, that Judge wrote and directed, the first live action film written and directed by Judge (obviously, since it was his first film not part of his blockbuster cartoon franchise, this was a small budget film).

The film stars Ron Livington as Peter Gibbons, a low level employee at Initech, a company that is about to do massive layoffs. Peter gets hypnotized for stress relief, and due to the psychiatrist having a heart attack during the session, Peter is never awakened from his calm trance, and suddenly, he stops stressing about life, and just starts living it. This disturbs his best friends and co-workers, Samir (Ajay Naidu) and Michael (David Herman), who are more skilled than Peter (they are programmers while he just does data entry), who can't help but be stressed out all the time.

Meanwhile, their slimy boss, Bill Lumbergh (Gary Cole, who gives a somewhat similar performance on NCIS), seems to delight in torturing his employees, and that particularly includes the seemingly mild-mannered, but actually festering in rage, Milton.

How did Milton's love for his red stapler affect actual Swingline stapler sales

How did Office Space come up with a stapler that didn't exist?

Throughout the film, even as Lumbergh torments Milton, one thing that Milton has fixated on was his red stapler, that he brought in from home, as it helps his collation work better than traditional staplers. Slowly but surely, as Lumbeergh strips away more and more of Milton's dignity, he finally came for the stapler, as well...

That was a bridge too far, and Milton ends up burning the company to the ground, and absconds with money that was in the office due to another plot, so the film ends with Milton enjoying a vacation with his ill-gotten goods, finally standing up for himself in a dark way.

Anyhow, Milton's thick glasses left Root practically blind, and so he explained to The Ringer, "I had to have contacts and then I’d put on the glasses to see, but I had no depth perception. I had to practice reaching for the stapler, otherwise I’d be off by 3 inches."

Stan Gilbert, the film's prop master, told The Ringer how the stapler was his big claim to fame:

I made the stapler. Mike asked me to show him as many staplers as I could. So I went out for several days and scoured the universe for every kind of stapler I could find, from vintage to new to futuristic. He picked out a couple, then he homed in on one, which was a Swingline, but he wanted it to have a bigger hump on the top; he wanted it more bulbous. I got some Bondo and Bondo’d up a hump and sanded it down and made it as pretty as I could. The mandate was that it would be red.

The reason it had to be red is that,at the time, when Office Space was made, there was no such thing as a red Swingline stapler, just black or gray.

Swingline made red MINI-staplers for years...

but not regular staplers.

So while Swingline would approve the use of its stapler in the movie, Judge wanted it to stand out (which would also help Root see it better), so he said it had to be red.

Gilbert noted to The Ringer, "I just grabbed a can of spray paint and painted it red. Mike and the production designer say, “OK, we like that, that’s great.” I got permission from Swingline to make a vinyl graphic to put on the side of the stapler, because the logo was [originally] on top. I made a total of 10 staplers."

As the film became a cult classic, fans began to demand red staplers and finally, in April 2002, Swingline debuted their red classic stapler...

They've been making the red stapler ever since. Amusingly, the cast of the film recently reunited for a commercial about...office supplies.

The legend is...

STATUS: True

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