Pretty, Pretty, Pretty Good Read online

  PRETTY, PRETTY, PRETTY GOOD

  Larry David and the making of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm

  Josh Levine

  ECW Press

  ECW Press

  Copyright © Josh Levine, 2010

  Published by ECW Press

  2120 Queen Street East, Suite 200, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4E 1E2

  416.694.3348 / [email protected]

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press.

  library and archives canada cataloguing in publication

  Levine, Josh

  Pretty, pretty, pretty good : Larry David and the making of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm / Josh Levine.

  ISBN 978-1-55022-947-9

  1. David, Larry. 2. Curb your enthusiasm (Television program).

  3. Seinfeld (Television program). 4. Comedians—United States—Biography.

  5. Television producers and directors—United States—Biography. i. Title.

  PN1992.4.D39L49 2010 791.4502'32092 C2010-901398-0

  Cover and Text Design: Tania Craan

  Cover Image Photo by Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic

  Typesetting: Mary Bowness

  Production: Troy Cunningham

  Printing: Easy ePub / Easy Press

  This book is set in Bembo and Interstate.

  The publication of Pretty Pretty Pretty Good: Larry David and the Making of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm has been generously supported by the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit, by the OMDC Book Fund, an initiative of the Ontario Media Development Corporation, and by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

  Photo Section Credits:

  1: ABC Photo Archives/ABC via Getty Images; 2: Dennis Plehn/ABC via Getty Images; 3: Bob D’Amico/ABC via Getty Images; 4: David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images, Joseph Del Valle/NBCU Photo Bank via AP Images; 5: Chris Haston/NBCU Photo Bank via AP Images; 6: Richard Corkery/NY Daily News; 7: Archive via Getty Images, AP Photo/Matt Sayles; 8: David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images, AP Photo/Chris Polk

  PRINTED AND BOUND IN THE UNITED STATES

  For Yoyo,

  the other fan in the house

  Introduction

  The Near Failure

  Curb Your Enthusiasm is a show that divides people. There are those who love it, find it excruciatingly funny, and revel in its taboo-breaking humor, in the aggressive outbursts of its characters, in its depiction of social, moral, physical, and sexual humiliations. They see Larry David as a Freudian id out of control, unable to conjure up the social restraints that stop the rest of us from saying what we really think and feel. And yet they appreciate that Larry, for all his selfishness, his childlike and neurotic behavior, is a man who enjoys and even embraces life.

  These fans see the show as a step up from the more conventionally framed Seinfeld, with its traditional set, three-camera shooting, punch lines, and laugh track. They consider Curb a far less comfortable show: darker, edgier, and more honest. They appreciate its use of improvisation and handheld camera work, the result of which is rougher and gives a more “real” feel to the show, despite the often-complicated plotlines. They appreciate its fearless examination of cultural attitudes to religion, race, physical disabilities, and sex — in a manner that, while highly politically incorrect, is in no way conservative or right-wing. They see it as just as funny as Seinfeld but in a more painful way.

  And then there are those who can’t stand Curb Your Enthusiasm, who have tried to watch it and find themselves unable to sit through its excruciating social embarrassments, its scenes of characters almost apoplectic with rage, saying things that should never be said, and its relentless references to sex acts, sex parts, rashes, bruises, injuries, urination, and defecation. What, they say, is enjoyable about any of that?

  What’s amazing is that the descriptions given by both sides are totally accurate. The show is all these things. And it is these things because of one man and his skewed, dark, hilarious, distressingly honest revelations of human behavior. Larry David.

  As the co-creator of Seinfeld and the author of nearly sixty of its scripts, Larry David was already one of the most successful television creator/writers of all time before Curb Your Enthusiasm. His wealth has been estimated at somewhere in the vicinity of $300 million and even as you read this it is growing rapidly from Seinfeld’s syndication rights. Now, as the creator, writer, and star of Curb Your Enthusiasm — a show with a large, cultlike following compared with the blockbuster Seinfeld — he has become one of the most innovative artists of the small screen.

  When someone is rich and famous it seems to the world to have been inevitable. But with Larry David, success was no sure thing. In his early forties, he was a little-known, modestly successful comic, receiving muted responses from audiences and low pay for his gigs. He had a crummy apartment and sometimes made barely enough money for food. He had tried some television writing, making money for short periods, but had made no impression on the shows he worked for. He was frustrated and even angry, not only by the lack of success but by the lack of understanding and interest from the comedy-club audiences. In fact, he didn’t like the audience much, which may be why they, in turn, didn’t like him.

  Larry David looked, in fact, like he was headed for failure. But even so, he refused to compromise, to change his act or his comic approach in order to pander to an audience that he considered to have grown soft and complacent from watching Tonight Show–style comics. He had a fresh, unusual view, not always a pleasant one, and though he was no intellectual (he didn’t much like reading books) he had insights into ordinary, seemingly trivial aspects of human behavior that others had missed.

  These innovations did not come from nowhere. They were rooted in his Brooklyn Jewish middle-class upbringing. They were rooted most particularly in Jewish comedy, a humor descended from the Jewish tummler, the comic figure who would joke and ridicule and tease guests at traditional Jewish weddings back in the shtetls of Europe. It was a humor that found its way into American vaudeville and then into the mouths of the great Jewish comedians of the past (Groucho Marx, Jack Benny, Shelley Berman, Don Rickles, Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen), a dark comedy of cynicism, complaint, aggravation, aggression, humiliation, neediness, and restless energy — an insider kind of humor that by some miracle became popular with the larger American audience.

  When his mother would phone Larry to ask how he was doing, Larry wouldn’t want to tell her the truth. “Pretty, pretty, pretty good,” he would say, each “pretty” qualifying the one before. It is very possible that Larry David could have continued to travel the small New York comedy-club circuit, scraping by, becoming ever more disgusted and bitter. Or he might have finally quit, to take on the kind of low-level job that he had worked in after college. But another comedian, an infinitely more successful one, as much a professional colleague as a friend, asked Larry for help. A television network had asked him to develop a show, and the comic, Jerry Seinfeld, had a hunch that Larry might be able to help him.

  It was a good hunch.

  CHAPTER 1

  The End of the Beginning,

  or Farewell to Seinfeld

  Each member of the audience, even family members, had to go through a metal detector to ensure that there were no secret recording devices hidden under shirts or in pockets. Each had to sign a confidentiality agreement; nothing of what was seen or heard would be told to anyone before the broadcast. They sat on bleachers before the stage.

  This was the taping of the final episode
of Seinfeld, the last before it went off the air forever (except, of course, in endless reruns). By this time the entire nation was addicted to the show, and its ending, at the height of its popularity, had been major news ever since the announcement. Coming out to warm up the audience, Jerry Seinfeld — the star, co-creator, and sometime writer of the show, who was most associated with its success — joked that the audience members, who had actually managed to acquire tickets, thought they were “hot shit.” He compared it to having seats on the Grassy Knoll for the Kennedy assassination. It was a cocky, even arrogant thing to say, but Seinfeld could easily get away with it. The show had made him the most popular comic on the planet.

  He asked whether he ought to say something to make everyone cry. Actually, Julia Louis-Dreyfus was already crying.

  Seinfeld reiterated to the audience the need not to tell people about the show before it aired. Jon Lovitz, one of the celebrities in the audience, yelled out, “Do you have any hush money?”

  The taping was long and arduous; it didn’t end until 2 a.m. The ostensible director was Andy Ackerman, a veteran of the show. But there was another man moving about the set, helping actors with their line readings, deciding whether a take was good enough or had to be done over. Tall and lanky, balding and bespectacled, he gestured broadly with his hands stretched out, hummed under his breath, broke up laughing, or consulted the script in his hands. It was his script after all. He, Larry David, had been tapped to write the very last episode of the country’s most popular sitcom. And he had been given twice the airtime, an hour.

  The television audience was not familiar with Larry David. Most did not know his name. Few knew what he looked like. They did not realize that he was as responsible — perhaps even more responsible — for the success of Seinfeld as Jerry was. He had written its most famous episode, “The Contest,” and many other great episodes, and he had presided over the first seven seasons of the show. He had come up with the idea that it would be about “nothing.” That it would break the conventional sitcom rules. That there would be “no learning, no hugging.” The character of George was based on him. Kramer was based on a man who had lived next door to him. Jerry’s parents were modelled on Larry David’s parents. Many of the story lines came from Larry’s own life. The show had made him very, very rich, but not famous the way that Jerry and the other actors on the show were.

  If Larry David was frustrated by the lack of recognition, he kept it to himself. But the press had written extensively about his writing the script as part of the lead-up to the airdate. The pressure had been on him to end the show on an appropriately high note.

  Jerry had been running the show without his co-creator since Larry had quit in 1996 after seven seasons. But before the ninth began to film, he met with Larry to tell him he thought this would be the show’s last. The characters, he thought, were getting too old to keep acting so immaturely. As Larry later put it, “All the dating would have been unseemly.” Jerry asked Larry to come back and write the last episode. Jack Welch, chairman of General Electric, which owned NBC, personally offered Jerry $100 million to keep the show on the air for another season. But Jerry, already rich beyond his wildest dreams, said no.

  Even though Larry had wanted the show to end when he himself quit, the thought of it actually finishing made him feel quite depressed. He had been thinking about the last episode ever since he himself contemplated leaving. His first idea was a show without any story lines at all but just conversation about the usual little things that obsessed the characters. But after a few pages of writing, he found it boring and gave up. He also considered bringing Jerry and Elaine together romantically, but Jerry, on one of his off-season tours, had asked audiences about the possibility and the responses had been mostly negative. Julia had long harbored the idea that they drive off a cliff. Larry David’s mother, who didn’t like the episode in which Susan dies, begged her son not to kill off the characters.

  Strangers offered Larry suggestions in the street. So did friends and people on TV talk shows. Larry himself told one of the reporters who began to call regularly, “I haven’t really thought about it too much. It’s a difficult show to write a final episode for. The nature of final episodes is ‘big ideas.’ People get married, they go to Europe. It’s a big thing. So I don’t know what I’m going to do yet.” He also said, “I would say that, knowing George, you know more about me than you do if you speak to me. Because I feel like I’m the phony. I’m the fake. People who are talking to me, they’re not getting sincerity, for the most part. . . . I think George is much more real than I am.” It was the sort of ruminating that would eventually lead to Larry playing Larry on Curb Your Enthusiasm.

  More articles appeared, raising the stakes. The New York Times Magazine asked, “Can the last episode ever do justice to the dozens that preceded it?” Larry took his time writing it. Or even starting. But one morning he woke at 3 a.m., heart pounding. He realized he had to get on with it. He gave it a code name title, “A Hard Nut to Crack,” and began.

  The script that Larry finally sat down and wrote was possibly the least sentimental of any Seinfeld show. It begins with a new head of NBC giving a green light to the television show that George and Jerry had come up with years before. NBC loans its private jet to them, and they take Elaine and Kramer to Paris. Except that the plane has engine trouble and needs to land almost immediately. While walking in town, the foursome witnesses a very fat man being mugged. Instead of helping, they comment and laugh, and Kramer even videotapes the crime. The four are charged by a cop for breaking the new “good Samaritan law” and are put in jail.

  There are several moments in the last show that anticipate Curb Your Enthusiasm. The meeting with the NBC executives is a precursor to several network pitch meetings from the second season of Curb. The expression “walk and talk” will be rewritten as the more memorable “stop and chat.” The intention of Jerry and George to move to California to do the show anticipates the L.A. setting of Curb. There are several jokes about Ted Danson, a friend of Larry’s who will become a recurring character on the latter show. Even the plane getting into trouble is an earlier version of the plane ride that Cheryl takes in season six of Curb, which results in her decision to leave Larry.

  But all that was in the future and totally unknown and undreamed of. A trial follows in which Larry brings many old characters to the witness stand — the Low-Talker, the Soup Nazi, Babu Bhatt — reminding the audience of past episodes. Despite the histrionics of the attorney, the characters are convicted and sentenced to a year in jail. Jerry gives a poorly received stand-up show to the other inmates. Our last view of them is sitting in a cell talking, as always, about nothing.

  When Larry finished the last page of the script, page 152, he actually choked up.

  When the show aired, on May 14, 1998, 76 million people tuned in. Advertisers paid NBC up to $20 million for a twenty-second spot. And in the opinion of most viewers, and the newspaper reviews that came out the next day, the show was . . . a stinker. The last episode was a flat, dull disappointment. Or as the Houston Chronicle put it, “. . . one of the least loved conclusions in the history of television.”

  It was not Larry David’s finest hour.

  In 1995, during the seventh season of Seinfeld, Larry decided that he wanted out. Each year he had felt more pressure to produce great scripts and now, with the show at number one, the pressure was even worse. He had been grumbling about the show from its earliest days, claiming he wanted it to be cancelled, but this time he really meant it. In 1993 he had married a television producer named Laurie Lennard; they were expecting their second child. He wanted to spend more time with the kids. Television, of course, works on a brutal schedule of days, nights, and weekends. So he wrote one last episode, a particularly edgy one in which George’s girlfriend Susan dies from licking bad envelopes, and then he quit.

  Jerry too had been thinking that the show ought to end. And the stars — Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jason Alexander, and Michael Richard
s — knew that its creators wanted to finish on a high note and not wait until the show was losing steam. In fact, Larry assumed that if he quit Jerry would too, ending the show. After all, it was their mutual creation; it couldn’t possibly go on without him.

  But like an angry employee who made a pact with his fellow workers to hand in their resignations only to discover that only he is without a job, Larry found himself alone. Jerry, it turned out, wanted to keep going. And the actors, who were making a small fortune per episode, didn’t want to leave either. And so Jerry decided to run the show without Larry. Larry wasn’t at all happy about it, but there wasn’t anything he could do. “I can’t stop them from doing the show,” he said. “I probably won’t watch it.”

  It was perhaps an odd comment from the co-creator of a hit show. But then, Larry David wasn’t like other people. Seinfeld had brought him from obscurity and near poverty to the pinnacle of show business success. But it hadn’t changed him, not in any substantial way. And it hadn’t made him any happier. He was still the same Larry.

  CHAPTER 2

  An Unfunny Kid

  “I never thought I would be involved in anything successful,” Larry David once said. “My plan was to try and get by. Maybe at some point I’d get involved in a bank robbery or something.”

  Born on July 2, 1947, he was the second son of Morty David, a Brooklyn clothier who would later retire and become president of his condo association, like Jerry’s dad on Seinfeld. Larry’s mother went to work for the Bureau of Child Guidance. Later she wanted Larry to take the civil service test, figuring that he better get himself a secure job — postal worker, teacher — with good benefits. (On Seinfeld, when George moves back into his parents’ house, his mother has the same idea.) His parents were both Democrats, sharing their values and eventually turning Larry into one too.