Pretty, Pretty, Pretty Good Page 3

  In retrospect the most important and lasting event on the SNL show was Larry David’s meeting Julia Louis-Dreyfus. She had joined as a performer in 1981, at the time the youngest member ever at twenty-one. She was going out with a writer/performer named Brad Hall who would later become her husband (and would appear, along with her, on Curb). A year before Larry arrived, Brad had a major argument with Dick Ebersol, the show’s producer. Seeing Larry David also getting into arguments with Ebersol endeared him to Louis-Dreyfus.

  Fed up with never getting anything on the show, Larry stormed in one day and told Ebersol that he was quitting. But almost immediately afterward he regretted the move. For one thing, he actually had a decent salary. For another, he had no other options. He moaned to his friend Kenny Kramer who lived across the hall. Kramer told him to go in the next day and pretend it never happened, and that’s just what Larry did. Later Larry used the same events for a story line with George in episode two, season two of Seinfeld. Except, unlike Larry, George gets humiliated. (It was the first episode that Larry wrote without Jerry’s help. It was also the first time Newman’s voice was heard, on the telephone — only the voice was Larry’s. The actor Wayne Knight had not yet been cast in the role. Later Larry’s voice would be dubbed over by Knight for reruns and the DVD release.) But Larry didn’t last much longer on Saturday Night Live, and when the season was over so was he.

  Work life was slow for a while. He continued to work on screenplays (he wrote one called Prognosis Negative) and to appear in the clubs. He was looking for writing work too and managed to get a job as co-writer for a television pilot called Norman’s Corner. This forgotten and rarely mentioned single episode was Larry’s real introduction to writing situation comedy, a warm-up for Seinfeld.

  In fact, it had much in common with Seinfeld. The main character, played by the comedian Gilbert Gottfried, one of Larry’s friends from the clubs, goes on about nothing, talking as if he’s doing stand-up. (In fact, like Seinfeld, it used Gottfried’s stand-up material.) There was nothing warm and fuzzy about the show either. Gottfried played a bad-tempered newsstand owner and the show had a strong New York flavor. The plan was for celebrities to come by the newsstand, perhaps something like the parade of celebrities who would appear on Curb, but the show was not picked up. Instead, the pilot aired as a comedy special on the cable network Cinemax.

  No success, but Larry David was at least getting work. In 1987, the same year that Norman’s Corner aired, he was hired to write for a Lifetime show called Way Off Broadway. A combination of talk show and comedy with music, it was hosted by Joy Behar. Larry both wrote and got to perform on it. As part of the show’s opening, he got to improvise being a network executive. Network executives would become favorite characters for Larry on both Seinfeld and Curb. But what Larry remembered most about the show was coming into meetings with a stack of notes and ideas and getting excited when they got to order in food.

  Larry even got a few bit parts in movies. He’d already had a small part in Henry Jaglom’s 1983 low-budget anti-romantic comedy, Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? And now he had his first encounter with one of his heroes, Woody Allen. He got a very small part in Radio Days (1987) and in 1988 he shot a scene for Woody Allen’s third of the trilogy New York Stories. Larry played a stage manager and got to act with Allen backstage at a magic show. He put on a heavier than usual Brooklyn accent, stuttered his lines quite realistically, and used his characteristic wide hand motions. He could not have thought for a single moment that he might one day actually star in a Woody Allen picture.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Real Seinfeld

  By 1988, Larry David was living in New York, performing stand-up, and getting the occasional writing or acting gig. He was living without any major responsibilities. During the day he could even play golf, the sport that he had fallen for at summer camp. And then one day Jerry Seinfeld came looking for him.

  Brandon Tartikoff, then head of NBC, had approached Seinfeld. Tartikoff had been the youngest person ever to be named president of an NBC division. He shared much of the credit for the creation of such shows as Hill Street Blues, The Cosby Show, and Miami Vice. Would Seinfeld, he wanted to know, be interested in creating and starring in a situation comedy for NBC?

  The sitcom form is a genre as old as television itself. Its origins go back even farther, to the pre-television radio shows whose approach to humor was in turn adapted from vaudeville theater (where many of the comedians were Jewish). From the beginning it was a broadly based comedy with a wide appeal and no great intellectual demands. Through the years the sitcom evolves to the point where, over and over again, the form seems to have exhausted all possibilities. Then a new show comes along — All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Cheers — to give it new life.

  Sitcoms are usually set in a home, whether it be Ralph Kramden’s Spartan apartment in The Honeymooners or the Huxtables’ house of bourgeois comfort in The Cosby Show. Sometimes the setting is a workplace, such as the police station in Barney Miller or the radio station in WKRP in Cincinnati, which functions as a kind of surrogate home, with the people who work there acting like a family. Usually these people drive one another crazy but the audience knows that they really love and care about one another. No matter how vicious the sarcasm, how loud the screaming, in the end the characters learn something about life, kiss, and make up.

  Despite the formulaic nature of sitcoms, no television executive has ever come up with a surefire recipe for making a hit. For that reason, the networks commission hundreds of pilots (a single trial episode of a show), often testing them before audiences, hoping that this or that combination of ingredients will strike gold. The network might be attracted to a pitch because of the track record of its creator, but even successful producers have more flops than hits. Norman Lear created All in the Family but who remembers his show The Dumplings? Or they might draw on an audience favorite, but even the beloved Mary Tyler Moore couldn’t find another success. Sometimes an unusual idea with a big hook might perk the network’s interest. Alf (1986–1990) starred a sarcastic but lovable alien, although in every other way it was a standard sitcom. It was a success, but Harry and the Hendersons (1991–1993), whose novel attraction was a seven-foot-high bigfoot, wasn’t.

  Then television began to tap the talents of comics in the hope that a strong personality and a natural gift for humor would invigorate a tired sitcom idea. Some comics, such as Richard Lewis in Anything But Love (1989–1992), could hold viewers’ interests for a while, until the comic’s limited style began to grate. Paul Reiser had more audience appeal but couldn’t make a lousy script funny and so moved from one show to another until finally getting the formula — and the casting — right in Mad About You (1992–1999).

  Seinfeld himself knew the pitfalls of television. He’d already had a bad experience on Benson. Earlier in 1988 he had received an offer to star in a sitcom that was appealing enough for him to consider for a few weeks. He took some meetings but his reservations grew. “Don’t you feel bad when you see one of your favorite comics doing some [lousy] show?” he asked. He also knew that agreeing to a television show would take away the remarkable freedom and independence that a comic had.

  Seinfeld knew that his acting skills were limited; just the idea of acting a love scene or having to show a lot of emotion made him uncomfortable. He was already making more money than he’d ever imagined. Did he really need a sitcom? But on the other hand, a successful television show could thrust him into the top ranks of entertainers rather than just in the specialized field of stand-up comedy. When NBC came calling, his interest was no doubt piqued by the idea of not just starring but creating as well — a show that might be tailored to his talents as a comic and his limitations as an actor. It might even be possible to create something really new.

  But Seinfeld didn’t think he could do it on his own. He needed a collaborator. And the person he first thought of wasn’t necessarily his closest friend, but the person he felt most comical
ly attuned to and whose conversation he took the greatest pleasure in — Larry David. “Maybe it’s because I’m a comedian and he’s a comedian, but I don’t see anything in him that seems odd,” Seinfeld has said. “Everybody else is odd. He’s one of my favorite people in life that I’ve ever met.” It didn’t hurt that Larry already had some television-writing experience.

  So one night in November, Seinfeld went to Catch a Rising Star to look for Larry. After closing, the two shared a cab to the west end — Larry lived in Manhattan Plaza, a federally funded apartment house at Forty-third and Tenth Avenue where tenants who were in the performing arts did not have to pay more than thirty percent of their income in rent. Jerry told his friend about NBC and said that he would like to brainstorm with him. Along the way they stopped at a Korean deli and began making comments about the products. Seinfeld looked at the unlabelled fig bars and said that it looked like “somebody had made them in their basement.”

  Larry looked at Jerry and said, “This is what the show should be. This is the kind of dialogue that we should do on the show.” The light went on for Jerry. This was the kind of talk that he and his friends engaged in every day but that he had never heard on television.

  “The essence of the show, originally,” Seinfeld said, “was my desire to transplant the tone and subjects of my conversations with Larry to television.”

  The pair ended up at the Westway Diner on Ninth Avenue. Seinfeld said, “The number one question when you’re a stand-up comedian is, ‘Where do you get your material?’”

  Larry David responded, “That’s what the show should be. How comedians come up with their material.”

  Seinfeld looked at David across the table. “They do this,” he said. “They hang out with their friends.”

  From there the two comics began to expand. Comedians found their routines around them, observing their own lives and those of the people they knew. Above all they liked talking, so any show about a comic would have to have conversation at its center. Seinfeld could play the comic and the rest of the cast would be made up of his friends. “The idea [for the pilot] was that Jerry was supposed to do a Tonight Show,” Larry later remembered, “and he didn’t have any new material, so we were going to see how he got the material. At the end, we’d see him doing the material on television.”

  The idea was not only original, but it played to Seinfeld’s strengths. He and Larry decided that Seinfeld should play himself rather than some fictional character. There was already a precedent for it in the recent It’s Garry Shandling’s Show. A major difference was that, unlike Shandling, Seinfeld wouldn’t break the illusion of reality by talking to the audience.

  Almost everything was unusual about the origin of the show. It was the brainchild of two comics who had never created a program before. As Seinfeld put it, they were rowing a “two-man canoe.” In truth, neither Larry nor Jerry really expected NBC to bite. Seinfeld said, “Every step of the way we were waiting for somebody to come in and say, ‘You can’t do this on network TV.’”

  Sure enough, the executives at NBC had some doubts. They wanted a more conventional sitcom and they wanted it filmed with three cameras on a set. Larry’s idea was that there should be only one camera following the characters, as if it were a documentary. (The idea would not come to fruition until Curb.) They also didn’t much like Larry. For one thing, they didn’t know who he was. For another, he seemed aggressive and stubborn. “This is not the show,” Larry kept saying in response to the network’s ideas. Larry thought the executives would have liked to get rid of him but he and Jerry were a package deal. And they had enough faith in Seinfeld to give the pilot a green light. That meant an investment of about a million dollars.

  What Jerry Seinfeld brought to the show was first and foremost himself. What Larry David brought was most of the rest. His was the vision that would set the tone and atmosphere: cranky, pessimistic, even dark. It was because of his sensibility that the characters would be unable or unwilling to sustain a real romantic relationship. The show would have a tart, witty, edgy, New York feel. And a vaguely Jewish feel as well, although that would rarely be made obvious. (In fact, NBC worried the show might feel too Jewish, a problem that Larry wouldn’t have at HBO with Curb.)

  Most important of all, Larry insisted, the show would be about — well — nothing. By nothing, he meant that the plot of each episode would not really matter. More important were the small daily activities that make up people’s days, the tiny frustrations, the mistakes and absurdities. Most of life, in Larry’s view, was in fact mundane and annoying, like losing your car in the parking lot or having to talk to old friends with whom you no longer have anything in common. Larry wanted to find the funny in those situations. “We want the show to be about the problems no one is trained to handle,” Larry said at the time. “All this education and conversation and parental guidance that you’ve had in your life does not prepare you for a huge number of things that come up. I think that what goes on in people’s lives is that most of their mind, most of the day, is occupied with tiny struggles. That’s what people’s lives are about.”

  CHAPTER 5

  A Show and a Phenomenon

  Jerry Seinfeld would act in the show; Larry David wouldn’t. Probably the two realized that Larry would be far too busy as the show runner, the head writer who was also in charge of all the scripts, making sure that the details, style, and atmosphere were right. Very likely the network wouldn’t have okayed Larry as an actor, given his less than stellar work on Fridays. But there still had to be a Larry on the show, and for that reason George Costanza was created. Despite his Mediterranean name (a disguise really), George was imagined as another thoroughly Jewish New Yorker. Larry made him into an extreme version of himself — angst-ridden, insecure, stingy, emotionally ungenerous, difficult, even explosive. “George is the sickest part of me,” Larry said. “A sick part of my personality — but only one side.” The other sides would have to wait for Curb.

  In casting Jason Alexander, Larry chose an actor who was losing his hair — and would lose a lot more by the show’s end. Larry himself had become extremely self-conscious of his baldness. “We [bald people] have to dress a little better, make a little more money, and have a little more charm just to compete,” he would say later. Baldness contributed to his insecurities, especially around women, but with the balding Jason Alexander playing a version of himself, Larry would be able to exploit those feelings on the show.

  The pilot episode, titled “The Seinfeld Chronicles,” aired on July 5, 1989, during summer replacement season. It was deliberately low-key, its humor remarkably understated compared to how the show would develop. Not seeing enough potential for ratings and profit, NBC took a pass on turning it into a regular show. Larry wasn’t at all surprised. His previous shot at a pilot didn’t get picked up either. But a few months later Rick Ludwin, at that time head of late-night programming, liked the pilot and offered the two comics a limited run of four shows for the following summer.

  Larry thought four shows didn’t sound too “traumatic” to write: “Maybe somehow I could write four shows. Somehow.”

  In retrospect, this limited offer proved a good thing. It allowed the show to develop a little more and gave Larry and Jerry a chance to do some writing without being overwhelmed by the obligation of a twenty-two episode season. It also gave them a chance, at the urging of NBC, to add a female character, who turned out to be Elaine. The episodes ran and once more the show came to a halt. “That’s the end of that crap,” said Larry.

  But then NBC, like a baseball team calling up a player from the minors when a star gets hurt, scheduled the show as a mid-season replacement. They asked for thirteen episodes.

  “All of a sudden I’ve got this huge undertaking that I am emotionally ill-equipped to handle,” Larry said. Besides the workload, doing the show meant leaving New York and moving to Los Angeles. But at least Larry and Jerry were largely able to create the show they wanted.

  Larry’s own a
ttitude to the network was made obvious on the day that Warren Littlefield, president of NBC Entertainment, first visited the Seinfeld set. Littlefield had the power to kill a show he didn’t like. Executives from NBC and Castle Rock, the production company, crowded into Larry’s office and stood silently as Littlefield told them his ideas for the direction the show should take. Larry listened and then said, “Okay. Now get out of my office.” Jerry was horrified. There was a long pause and then everyone started to laugh. But Larry’s joke was no joke at all. He simply refused to take notes from the network.

  Writing a weekly television series meant a workload and a gruelling pressure that Larry had never experienced before. Unlike some, he didn’t thrive on it. In the early days he constantly expressed hope that the show might be cancelled. And yet the show allowed him, for the first time, to express his humor to an appreciative — a wildly appreciative — audience. He could treat the show as a kind of television comedy laboratory, for example, writing with Jerry, in that first mid-season replacement series, an episode set in real time as the characters waited to be seated at a Chinese restaurant.