Producer Jordan Kessler walks through a gray graveyard of cubicles and soul-dulling, overhead fluorescent lights inside the Baton Rouge offices of Omni Link. There will be no 9-to-5 today, though. Work is likely to go much longer. That’s because Omni Link exists only on removable decals on the glass doors of the office and in Courier type on the pages of a quick-witted screenplay. For the next three weeks this office is a film set. Kessler leans back comfortably in front of a flat-screen monitor to watch this morning’s scene take shape.
“You went with the big one, too?” he asks director Adam Busch, raising his venti iced coffee from Starbucks. “Yeah,” Busch says, sipping from a cup that matches Kessler’s in heft. “I moved up to the big one the first day of shooting.”
It is day three of production on Drones, a dry corporate comedy about cube jockeys who may or may not be incognito aliens from other planets. One casting agent describes it as The Office meets Close Encounters of the Third Kind. “Any time you have people in a ‘fish bowl,’ like an office, problems are heightened and exacerbated,” Busch says. “So, for instance, whether someone will go out with you becomes a threat like the end of the world.”