It’s Only Temporary

“Haiku Tunnel” is an offbeat comedy about a downtrodden office worker; it’s co-written and co-directed by two brothers but, no, it’s not the latest Joel and Ethan Coen eccentricity or a new off-color joke fest from the Farrellys.

“Haiku Tunnel” is from Josh and Jacob Kornbluth, Hollywood’s newest fraternal duo. In addition to collaborating on the writing and directing of “Haiku Tunnel,” which opens Friday, Josh stars in the film as a character named, not coincidentally, Josh Kornbluth. The film is not a documentary, though it is closely based on Josh’s years of experience as an office temp.

“At my peak I think I was doing 85 words a minute with very few errors,” he boasts of his tenure in front of a typewriter keyboard, in the halcyon days before word processing. Having first worked as a copy editor, Josh wanted to focus on his own writing and turned to temp work as a way to pay the bills. A New York native, he’d moved to Boston and then San Francisco, where he began writing and performing autobiographical monologues.

“Haiku Tunnel” debuted in that form in 1990, while Josh Kornbluth was still working as a full-time legal secretary. Jacob was just graduating from high school the year “Haiku Tunnel” premiered, but within a few years he, too, had moved to San Francisco. The brothers began collaborating on scripts for Josh’s monologues and a film script for “Haiku Tunnel.” With a minuscule budget of “a bit over $200,000,” financed in large part by a San Francisco entrepreneur who had been a fan of Josh’s theater work, “Haiku Tunnel” was shot last summer.

The original monologue was expanded to include other people in the office where the Josh Kornbluth character worked. A semblance of dramatic conflict was added: Josh is offered a “promotion” from temp to permanent status. He is so thrown by this change he cannot accomplish the otherwise simple task of typing and mailing 17 letters for his tax attorney boss.

True-life elements from Josh’s experiences have been retained, such as the tax firm setting, but “Haiku Tunnel” is more an attempt to validate the humdrum existence of the office underling. Jacob, 28, says it’s about “how you tell the story that gets you up every day, that gets you to put on your clothes and do whatever it is that you do to make it through the day until it’s time go to sleep again.”

This “regular guy” sense is personified ably by Josh, 42, whose looks are not classic movie star material. The brothers Kornbluth even considered working some of the physical descriptions offered of Josh from theater reviews into publicity for the film, volunteering examples such as “neurotic blowfish,” “shambling” and “balloon-headed.”

But Kornbluth’s very ordinariness serves him well in “Haiku Tunnel.” He looks like someone who might well work in the office cubicle next to yours.

“Haiku Tunnel” “is the latest film to depict the plight of the worker bee, a cinematic theme dating back at least as far as Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times” (1936). Set during the Great Depression, Chaplin’s story uses the indomitable Tramp as the stand-in for harried working people of all time.

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“Desk Set” (1957) stars Spencer Tracy as an efficiency expert hired to use a newfangled computer to streamline operations at a television network research department run by Katharine Hepburn.

Billy Wilder’s classic “The Apartment” (1960) sums up the depersonalization of the contemporary working man, when C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) says about his job at Consolidated Life Insurance by relating in voiceover that he’s been at desk No. 861 on the 19th floor for three years and 10 months.

The voices of working women began to be heard more clearly after the strides made by the women’s movement. “Nine to Five” (1980) is about three secretaries (Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin) who seem to have nothing in common until they band together to get revenge on their “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical” and generally abusive boss (Dabney Coleman).

“Working Girl” (1989) tells the Cinderella story of Manhattan secretary Melanie Griffith, an honest, ambitious self-improver who is deceived by her duplicitous boss (Sigourney Weaver). So much for female bonding outside the secretarial pool.

As the technological age predicted in “Desk Set” came to pass by the 1990s, films about office work have taken on a bleaker, darker edge, culminating in 1999’s “Being John Malkovich.” In the film, the LesterCorp employees can’t even stand up straight in their offices on the 71/2 floor, and they seek escape via a magic portal into the actor’s brain.

Mike Judge’s 1999 “Office Space” (based on his 1991 short of the same name) focuses on cubicle-bound Peter (Ron Livingston), who decides one day not to go to work anymore. This unusual move results in Peter’s being noted as a go-getter by outside consultants who have been called in to rally the Initech forces.

Closest to “Haiku Tunnel” in theme, if not in spirit, is “Clockwatchers” (1997), about a quartet of temps who see their personal and professional lives going nowhere on parallel tracks. Of his real time as an office temp (which he hopes is now permanently behind him), Josh Kornbluth recalls that the very “tempness” of the work was part of the attraction.

“Everything is set up for you” he points out. “There’s a set structure, and in the time you’ve got you can actually complete the job--unlike if you want to write a novel or make a movie. Then, it takes a while, and the chances of doing it well are sometimes described as slender. But I can generate a letter.”