Jason Bateman, perpetually playing the beleaguered office denizen that you’d actually like to have in your office.
The Hollywood Reporter tells us that Mike Judge has signed up to write and produce a comedy, Extract, for Miramax. Judge is best known for his animated TV successes Beavis & Butthead and King of the Hill. His live action, big screen comedy Office Space played in theaters with little attention, but went on to become a big hit on DVD.
Extract also covers workplace material, focusing on “a flower extract plant owner dealing with workplace issues and a stream of bad luck, including his wife’s affair with a gigolo.” Jason Bateman will star as the plant owner, and that, to me at least, already wins half the battle for this film, because it seems like perfect casting. Bateman has excelled lately on the big screen in making supporting roles stand out; I’m looking forward to seeing him get a chance to carry a movie. And I’m a big Office Space fan. All right, I guess I might as well go buy my ticket now.
This will be the first film for Judge’s newly formed tv, film, and new media company, Ternion Productions. Judge’s partners are John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky, the pair behind Blades of Glory. Altschuler and Krinsky have a comedy spec script in the pipeline based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Napoleonic war era short story, Brigadier Gerard. I just finished a biography of Conan Doyle, and Brigadier Gerard was another in a long line of stories and characters that he liked much more and thought were much, much better than his creation Sherlock Holmes. Put Conan Doyle on your list of people not to trust in matters of reading the market and judging literary quality.
