Film crews treat office equipment the way they treat extras: hired by the day, dressed beige, never named. Yet the record shows the copier working harder than most of the billed cast. In 9 to 5 (1980), Judy’s first-day catastrophe in the copy room was staged on a genuine Xerox 9400 — the 1977 two-a-second flagship — installed at the Fox lot and chaperoned on set by a Xerox technician while a studio hand worked the console lights. The machine hit every mark. The paper-blizzard hysteria was a slander (the 9400 was famously composed under pressure), and the sound department dubbed in extra noise, which is what sound departments do to dignified actors. Five stars; damages reserved.

The nineties gave the machine its dramatic range. In Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990), a copier in the Clamp Center is made an instrument of torture, Mohawk pinning Gizmo under the platen and running off copy after copy of the poor creature’s flattened distress — the exposure lamp, we note, rendered harmless by screenwriting. In The Firm (1993), photocopying is the entire third act: Tammy Hemphill duplicating the firm’s billing records page by stolen page, the genre’s old nocturnal-xeroxing ritual — evidence in the feeder, one eye on the door — promoted at last from montage to plot engine. And in Jerry Maguire (1996), a 3 a.m. copy shop becomes a confessional: 110 copies of a mission statement, collated while a night clerk delivers the decade’s best copy-counter benediction — “That’s how you become great, man,” as the clerk (played by Jerry Cantrell) has it. The scene was shot in a working Kinko’s dressed as “Copymat”, a stage name this desk finds unnecessary.

Then 1999, and the martyrdom. Office Space marched a chronically jamming machine into a field and executed it to hip-hop, and the public has called it “the copier scene” ever since. The machine was a printer. The error it displays — PC LOAD LETTER — is HP LaserJet dialect for an empty letter-size paper cassette. No platen, no exposure lamp, no sorter: a printer, miscast by its own mourners. This magazine considers the distinction load-bearing and will die on the platen glass defending it.

Now the case this desk actually convened for. The editor carries a memory, vivid and unbudging, of a film seen around the turn of the nineties: a man he recalls as Ike Roscoe, cornered and hunted, who lifts the front panel of an office copier — the editor is prepared to swear to a Canon NP-7550 — folds himself in among the toner and the paper path, and lets the machine sit there looking innocent while the pursuers sweep the room. It is, he maintains, the finest performance ever given by a mid-volume console.

The verification file reads as follows. The machine is real. The Canon NP-7550 exists; surviving print advertising places the NP-7050/7550 pair on the market by 1985, which makes it impeccably period-correct set dressing for any film of the late eighties — the memory’s hardware clears customs completely, though whether a grown fugitive clears the duplex unit is a question we refer to Canon’s service manuals. And the film, it transpires, was real all along. Days after this desk’s appeal was typeset, the witness himself closed the case: Switching Channels (1988) — the remake of The Front Page — in which death-row fugitive Ike Roscoe, played by Henry Gibson, conceals himself inside the press-room photocopier while the assembled press mills around it. The lineage is exquisite: the man who hid in the roll-top desk of 1931 had, by 1988, upgraded to the desk’s successor appliance. This desk, meanwhile, had frisked Malone while the correct Burt Reynolds picture stood beside it. Verdict: machine verified; film FOUND. One count remains open: the machine on screen.