About Schmidt|Woodmen Tower, Omaha — The Clock Runs Out at Five

The film opens on a wall clock and an office already packed into cardboard, and it waits with Warren Schmidt until the second hand finishes his career for him. Alexander Payne shot that scene where it actually happens. The Woodmen Tower stands at 1700 Farnam Street in downtown Omaha, thirty storeys of pale 1969 concrete that held the title of Nebraska's tallest building for nearly forty years, and it houses the fraternal insurance company Warren gives thirty-two years of his life to — Woodmen of the World, now trading as WoodmenLife. Payne is an Omaha native and he did not build a set for this. He borrowed the real firm, the real floor plates, the real view over Farnam.

You can stand on the plaza and look up at it any day of the week. The lobby is a working lobby; nobody is running tours. What you notice from the sidewalk is how ordinary the building is — a solid, unglamorous slab in a solid, unglamorous downtown — and how exactly that ordinariness is the point of the whole film.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.