Thanks to John Early, It’s Time for ‘Clockwatchers’ to Become a Cult Classic

“From the moment I saw it, I became very evangelical about it,” comedian John Early says about his cherished childhood classic Clockwatchers, “and, obviously, still am to this day.” What, exactly, is the gospel of this John? For over two decades, the actor and comedian best known for his role in the show Search Party has been more than just a fan of Jill Sprecher’s 1997 droll workplace comedy. Early has become an activist and advocate for the film, and now that his cause célèbre has arrived on multiple streaming platforms (including Amazon Prime), fans finally have the opportunity to see his obsession for themselves. John Early prepared the way for decades, and now a largely forgotten film of American independent cinema may finally have the cultural moment it deserves.

Early’s long journey with the film starts, like many such stories do, with humble beginnings. As a budding 11-year-old cinephile growing up in Nashville, he perused the shelves at Blockbuster on his own while his mother went grocery shopping. One fateful day, Early wandered into the “special interest” section that housed unclassifiable movies from emerging festivals like Sundance and found himself “haunted” by the VHS cover of Clockwatchers. The artwork, consisting of nothing more than a tightly framed portrait of the four leading ladies, is nothing of particular note. But the distributor clearly understood the assignment by emphasizing the biggest commercial draws of the film: Lisa Kudrow, Parker Posey, Alanna Ubach, and rising Aussie sensation Toni Colette.

Because he recognized Friends star Kudrow, who was then fresh off an uproarious turn in the movie Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, Early left the Blockbuster thinking he signed up for a film with four funny women that had a bit of an indie bent. What he got was something totally unexpected – not to mention life-changing beyond sparking his lifelong obsession with Colette, who stars as the mousey Iris. “I was not prepared for how much of an emotional impact it would have on me,” he recounts to Decider of his first childhood viewing. “It was the first movie that ever spoke to me like an adult. I had not seen anything that, really.”

It’s tempting to look at Clockwatchers as a kind of feminine predecessor to Mike Judge’s Office Space (a film Early says he still has not seen “truly just in protest because it was more successful”). Sprecher has a similar skill for adding expressive minutiae to the environment that now feels entirely of a different period – the muzak playing softly in the waiting room, the dim glow of fluorescent lighting, those claustrophobic cubicles. Even an object like a rubber band ball feels chosen with consideration and care for how it embodies the neatly entangled web of relations within a depressingly generic environment. This could be any office in the world in the late ‘90s, and yet it’s also ruthlessly specific.

But while the two might share a cold corporate milieu that now feels like a bit of a time capsule as their setting, Clockwatchers shares more DNA with the era’s prickly American comedies like Todd Solondz’ Welcome to the Dollhouse. Through four female workers at a nondescript credit company, Sprecher explores the way how sterile workplaces facilitate the formation of fast friendship between Iris and a trio of fellow temps played by Kudrow, Posey, and Ubach – as well as how quickly those bonds can fizzle under the stress of a management crackdown. Her keen observational eye for how absurd details can contain both droll and devastating dimensions drives home how the modern worker is often little more than a dehumanized and replaceable cog ground down in a larger machine. Sprecher’s “sour” comedy, as Early dubs it, “didn’t soften the edges of the nature of friendship or even the capitalist workplace or time.”

Pity the person who has to convey this nuance in bite-sized chunks to prospective audiences. The trailers for Clockwatchers pitch it as one part Wes Anderson-esque quirk-fest, one part girl-powered genre flick, while the posters reduced it to the lowest common denominator of its headlining actresses. Rather than artfully alluding to Sprecher’s delicate tonal balancing act, the marketing flattens the film down to either something formulaic – or, worse, a complete jumble of mood and style. Early concurs that the film was mismarketed, but as his knowledge grew of the film’s bungled release, he began to recognize the unsuccessful rollout as symptomatic of a larger problem. “No one ever really understood the movie or liked the movie that she was like working with,” he characterizes Sprecher’s relationship with the film’s distributors, “so no one was ever really championing it.” (To his point, one of the buyers actually went on record in the Gray Lady to call the film “overhyped.”)

In this way, Clockwatchers embodies the fraught state of American independent cinema’s transitional period that was underway at the time of its release. By 1997, when it premiered at Sundance, the foundational wave of energy from overnight sensations like Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, and Kevin Smith had begun to crest. The scrappy sensations cashed out, and the big studio apparatus swooped in to fill the void. Before specialty divisions like Fox Searchlight and Sony Classics hit their groove, companies looking to straddle the divide between art and commerce saw Sundance as a feeding trough to devour product for release on home video. With the proliferation of video technology enabling filmmakers to produce work on the cheap, these distributors could pick up inexpensive releases with an eye toward bountiful return on investment in the rental market.

Clockwatchers played the 1997 film festival circuit, including a stop at the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival. It earned glowing notices from prominent critical voices like Roger Ebert and major outlets like The New York Times. The film deserved a robust theatrical run on the merits, and yet the one it received in May 1998 was treated like more of an afterthought. “We’re just happy for the video market because that helped us get the movie out and shown,” Jill Sprecher told The New York Times as she lamented more people were unable to see the film in her preferred viewing environment. “It’s a very quiet movie, and will play well in a person’s home. It will seem more intimate if people are in a contemplative mood.”

Early, who has come to develop a friendship with Sprecher in recent years, characterizes her modesty in such statements as entirely in line with her personality and filmmaking ethos. “I feel the movie is kind of responsible for its own demise,” he postulates. “It’s modeling its own ephemerality.” Through the four temps at the core of Clockwatchers, she exposes how – for lack of a better word – temporary any connection is when rooted in a foundation of cold, calculating capitalism. Sprecher spots the profundity in mundanity without insisting that workplace rituals and totems belong on some exalted plane of meaning. Her film swoops into supply quiet compassion for the workers that their employer, solely focused on extracting their work, will not.

That understated authorial approach made it both authentic and anomalous among similar films bursting with the discontent of the laboring class. Films like the aforementioned Office Space and the century’s final Best Picture winner, Sam Mendes’ American Beauty, teem over with grandiosity and self-importance in a way that Sprecher never dares indulge. “If Clockwatchers were insisting on its own greatness in the way that many male auteurs do, it wouldn’t be as good!” Early declares. “You wouldn’t trust it. It would be contradicting its own message.”

Sprecher’s film simply lets women be, not forcing their existence to represent something inherently polemical. People today still struggle to recognize or applaud universal truths from stories that do not center the perspectives or desires of straight white men. But back in the ‘90s, the few Clockwatchers detractors such as Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman did not hesitate to deride the quartet as “poor-little-victim heroines” and “sulky, overgrown high school girls.” That immaturity, of course, rarely merits such a negative frame when the era’s bombastic comedians of the opposite gender popularized the “man-child” archetype…

The film’s narrative framing device of Iris recounting the events of the film in epistolary form even calls to mind Paul Schrader’s famous dictum about cinema’s iconic lone wolves: there is nothing more dangerous than a man alone in a room. Yet the prevailing conception of Clockwatchers is not that it speaks to something profound about the human condition, just something within the realm of the feminine. Iris’ diaristic activity is not a gossipy commentary track about the film’s events but a ponderous, often ironic challenge to whether they have any meaning or impact at all. “Clockwatchers doesn’t deliver any perfect little bows of meaning by the end,” Early observes. “I think that’s what scares people the most about it.”

Even as the film receded from cultural consciousness, Early kept the flame alive … primarily by trying to foist it upon his elders. “I wanted to share it with the adults in my life, thinking they would maybe appreciate it more than my peers,” he describes. “And they were always horrified.” Nonetheless, he always kept two VHS tapes of Clockwatchers and also acquired multiple DVD copies as the format gained popularity. Yet as the DVD craze transitioned into Blu-rays only to have streaming overtake physical media altogether, Early noticed that the film was stuck in the analog era. “Once everything became available on streaming, I was like, ‘Well, where the hell is it?'” he recalls. “I not so patiently waited for it to become available, but it just never did.”

Around this time, the mission to proselytize on behalf of Clockwatchers began to take a more personal turn. Early connected with Jill Sprecher through their alma mater, NYU, to interview her for a class assignment. The paper was “absolutely horrible,” he says, but their three-hour chat for his essay did plant the seeds for a relationship to bloom in the future. As Early’s star rose in the comedy world, he used his emerging platform to preach the virtues of Clockwatchers … even as it had become an unattainable curio for the average moviegoer. A few years later, he reconnected with Sprecher to enlist her help in organizing a special screening at an indie theater. If the outlook was bad at the time of the home video release, it was downright miserable then.

A despondent but self-deprecating Sprecher responded that she shipped off her personal print of the film to a festival overseas in 2010 – and they lost it. According to Early, “she was very characteristically resigned to its obscurity, and she just gave up on it.” But ever the indefatigable Clockwatchers cheerleader, he kept plugging away. At a particularly low point of access, Early took to harassing the production company Goldcrest Films in “furious DMs” on their Vimeo page because they posted a single high-quality video clip from the film. “It became this relic to me because I had been watching it either on VHS or the shitty DVD for years,” he explains. “It haunted me to actually see it as intended.” Goldcrest never responded to the messages, which led to him enlist the services of programmers skilled in the art of tracking down difficult-to-find films.

Enter Jake Perlin and Metrograph, a two-screen theater in lower Manhattan that programs an eclectic array of new releases and repertory programming. There’s a storied history of theaters like these reviving the reputations of misunderstood works or prompting the re-evaluation of films that fall off the map. Think of them as like a third or fourth draft of cinema history. Early contacted a number of venues across both New York and Los Angeles, but it was Perlin who jumped at the chance to help make Early’s longtime dream into a reality. He was among the select few who saw Clockwatchers in its theatrical run, and he remembered it with fondness as well. The suggestion of showing the film and hosting a live event (in pre-pandemic times) organized with Early, he says, was an immediate yes for Metrograph.

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But there was still the lingering problem of actually tracking down a print of the film and licensing it for exhibition, a process that would meet years of dead ends and frustration. “With a certain generation of American independent films, the rights situation can get tricky,” Perlin explains. “Rights and companies change hands.” The transfer to the outfit Shout! Factory made all the difference; Clockwatchers suddenly appeared for digital rental during the pandemic, and Perlin found no problems booking it to play on Metrograph’s nascent streaming platform. “There certainly wasn’t any direct action, [but] it’s possible that I’ve maybe made enough people Google Clockwatchers that the algorithm has absorbed a kind of interest in it,” Early postulates, swatting away the suggestion some have made that his activism made the newfound access possible. (Shout! Factory declined to comment for this article with any specifics around their acquisition of Clockwatchers.)

With the backing of Metrograph’s sterling reputation among discerning film lovers, Clockwatchers received something of second premiere in late April 2021. Early presented the film and then wrangled Jill Sprecher and Parker Posey for a post-show Q&A. “It was a really great success in terms of viewership,” Perlin confirms. “It was attributable to the film itself and John’s ambassadorship for it.” Serendipitously, Clockwatchers became available for streaming across a number of subscription and ad-supported streaming services. Early says he’s seen a surge of people reaching out over social media in recent months to tell him they finally caught up with his beloved and much-ballyhooed favorite.

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Across multiple dimensions, the Clockwatchers resurgence feels perfectly timed. Early notes that people are ready for something that feels authentically independent and unafraid to be bold or ambiguous. The market is oversaturated with what he calls “fake movies” born of the Park City prestige, such as the “little indie that could” that’s seemingly reverse-engineered to be the next Little Miss Sunshine or the “female performance showcase” that exists purely as an empty vessel for an actress’ awards campaign. There’s something so pleasurable in simply getting to luxuriate in these four actresses at the top of their game, elevating material that allows them the opportunity to find unexpected ways to convey their characters’ interiority. “Seeing it again reminded me of a very exciting energy of that period that is sometimes forgotten,” Perlin raves. “There’s some very, very special energy that Jill created with that cast.”

But Clockwatchers is more than just the latest piece of ‘90s pop culture up for reevaluation because deeply ingrained biases and prejudices obscured their true face at the time. Sprecher’s film expertly identifies the larger structures and apparatuses powering the modern workplace. While the aesthetic of the office has transformed from drab office park to chic WeWork, the gears grinding down workers remain the same. That understanding makes Clockwatchers uniquely equipped to speak to contemporary corporate drones at a moment when the future of the office is set for a major facelift.

Though it might be tempting for white-collar workers to feel some nostalgia for the office amidst a deadening deluge of Zoom calls, Clockwatchers details the ways in which that physical space imprints itself on an employee. The subtle surveillance operations undertaken by the managerial class are meant to facilitate efficiency, yet it ends up inducing paranoia above all. Sprecher does not shy away from the brutality of its effects because she’s not duped by the Clintonian smile slapped on the naked greed that characterized the ‘80s. Rather than letting her characters explode like a recognizably satisfying genre work, she forces the audience to watch from a distance as their entropy gives way to implosion.

Clockwatchers sees through the hollowness of rhetoric that posits colleagues as akin to a family. Sprecher shines a light into how corporate platitudes are often but a veil covering up unapologetic exploitation of labor. “When I watch Clockwatchers now,” Early says, “it feels like going back to the localized beginnings of that false optimism that’s masking craven injustices.” The irony is not lost on him that the vast majority of new converts to his cause are seeing the film thanks to Amazon, a company frequently under fire for the way it treats workers. “It’s so devastating,” he mordantly quips.

For now, Early is just glad other people get to see the film that has meant so much to him. The journey isn’t over, however, as he does hope to finally experience it with a crowd projected on a big screen once theater capacities return to normal levels. He also has the goal of reuniting as many of the actors in person for the screening as possible to continue elevating the profile of Clockwatchers.

If that’s not enough, he’s also been dreaming up a whole program alongside it. “My dream, recently, has been to do a Clockwatchers screening series where I screen it with Annihilation and Black Narcissus,” he describes. “I feel like these are movies where you have a group of women going into a strange new territory where the environment eats away at you and causes this paranoia and releases these repressed Freudian urges and threatens the bonds between its characters.” The arc of history is long, but it seems to be bending towards justice for Clockwatchers.

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based freelance film journalist. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared on Slashfilm, Slant, Little White Lies and many other outlets. Some day soon, everyone will realize how right he is about Spring Breakers.

Where to stream Clockwatchers