From Jenna Fischer’s MySpace blog, dated October 18, 2005:
See the employees of Dunder-Mifflin in our costumed glory on tonight’s episode. Michael is told at the beginning of October that he has to fire someone by the end of the month. He waits until the absolute last day of October – Halloween.
Some fun facts from behind-the-scenes:
- The employee that gets fired is now doing a play off-Broadway.
- Angela broke several cookies in the “What did you bring” scene with Pam. She kept slamming them down on the plate in disgust during the scene.
- One of the ears on Angela’s costume kept falling down and ruining the takes.
- Stop the presses – Pam wears her hair down! This was a much-debated decision. Would she look too good?
- Our director for this episode was Paul Fieg who has directed a ton of Arrested Developments and Freaks and Geeks. He’s also written 2 great books!
- I ate WAY too much of the candy corn on my desk one morning and got really sick. (See previous post for details.)
- John (Jim) and Rainn (Dwight) and Brian (Kevin) have major Playstation 2 boxing contests in our down time. They staged their first tournament the week we shot Halloween. You could hear them cheering all the way into the parking lot. The episode finished shooting before they could finish the tournament. Rainn and John were on their final fighters.
- This episode was written by Greg Daniels – our executive producer and genius behind the show. Greg has written for The Simpsons, Seinfeld, and co-created King of the Hill. We love Greg. He wrote the Basketball episode from last season.
- Steve Carell almost NEVER laughs during a scene. He has this amazing ability to contain himself until the director yells “cut”. In this episode, after a scene with Toby where the actor who plays Toby (Paul Lieberstein) improvised a very funny line, Steve had to hold the scene for another 2 minutes. When the director yelled “cut” he collapsed onto his desk laughing so hard he cried.
- Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant visited our set one day when we shot this episode. They stayed for a long time – it was awesome! I took a picture with them and some other people on set. It’s a really funny photo because I am the only one dressed in a costume. It was taken in the hallway and looks like they came to see me in some play where I was a cat.
I’ll post a bunch of photos from this episode soon.
Jenna/Pam
P.S. We are shooting a scene right now!