Mindy Kailing stars as Kelly Kapoor on NBC’s “The Office.” She has also written 23 episodes of the show and recently wrote a piece in The New Yorker that includes the following statement: “I am always surprised at what movie studios think people will want to see. I’m even more surprised at how often they are correct.” The interesting part is how she reaches this statement.
Kailing was called into the executive offices at an anonymous studio she refers to as Thinkscope Visioncloud where they wanted to see if she had any feature film ideas. Here’s what happened:
The junior executives’ office at Thinkscope Visioncloud was nicer than any room within a fifty-mile radius of the “Office” studio. After I finished pitching one of my ideas for a low-budget romantic comedy, I was met with silence. One of the execs sheepishly looked at the other execs. He finally said, “Yeah, but we’re really trying to focus on movies about board games. People really seem to respond to those.”
For the rest of the meeting, we talked about whether there was any potential in a movie called “Yahtzee!” I made some polite suggestions and left.
Considering “The Office” is an NBC/Universal production and Universal has been tinkering with Monopoly, Candy Land, Ouija and Clue and have Battleship directed by Peter Berg coming out next May I have to assume that’s the studio Kailing met with.
The strange thing about the quote Kailing gives, though, is the “People really seem to respond to those” part. What? Have their even been any movies about board games recently? Who are these “people” and what are they responding to?
The only thing that statement tells me is that execs are watching how much news comes out of the blogosphere when it comes to one of these stupid ideas and it’s a bit scary a studio, meeting with a writer who goes on to admit she loves romantic comedies, would even consider bouncing ideas off someone who obviously wouldn’t be interested in such a genre.
