Trailer
Plot summary
Carl Taylor and James St. James ride a garbage truck together and use the trash as material for pranks, which puts them on probation. Their supervisor has his brother-in-law, Louis Fedders, ride along to watch them. Off duty, Carl watches Susan Wilkins, a woman who lives across the street, through a telescope and sees her quarreling with a man. She walks out, and Carl fires at the man with a pellet gun. While the friends hide and laugh, two men go into her apartment, strangle the man and haul him off, and the barrel carrying him falls from their car. The next morning Carl, James and Louis find it on the route. Louis, a Vietnam War veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder, sees that the dead man was strangled, and has the pair put the body in Carl's home.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Men at Work (1990)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Emilio Estevez got the idea for Men at Work while he was filming St. Elmo's Fire in 1985: a garbage truck roaring down the alley below his Santa Monica apartment at 5 a.m. made him realize nobody had ever made a movie about trashmen.
- Emilio Estevez wrote 15 different drafts of the film and had no intention of casting his brother Charlie Sheen, but Sheen asked for a part after reading the script because he felt he needed a comedy at that point in his career.
- The studio disliked the film's original ending, and shooting a new one added ten days of filming; Estevez edited Men at Work during the day while he was making Young Guns II.
