Pretty, Pretty, Pretty Good Page 4

  The next season, Larry was in charge of twenty-two episodes, what seemed to him an impossible number. Even back then, he carried a notebook around to write down his ideas in. Seinfeld said at the time, “Most of the stories are from his life, almost all of it. He just has a tremendous wellspring of ideas. I mean he just fills notebooks with ideas and I try to help him, but Larry is really the designer of the show. There are just some people who literally have funny lives and things happen to them that sound like stories. He has that kind of life.”

  Larry put his source of inspiration in a different light. “My life has been pretty depressing, actually. I feel I am completely devoid of experiences. Other people, they travel, they do things, they have a life. My experiences are so minor. I go for acupuncture or I see something strange on the subway. Big deal.”

  Larry and Jerry continued to work well together, each filling in what the other lacked. Peter Mehlman, a writer who joined the show, said, “George is the dark side of Larry, and Larry is the dark side of Jerry. Larry is very in tune with his own deepest, darkest, most embarrassing thoughts — and he’s utterly unabashed about sharing them.”

  Larry David also brought Larry Charles onto the show as supervising producer. Before that NBC hadn’t let him hire Larry Charles, who had no sitcom experience. Instead, they wanted to assign veteran sitcom writers to the show — none of whom Larry could tolerate. NBC found Larry David stubborn in other ways. He refused to take notes from the network; he didn’t even pretend to listen. Elaine Pope, another writer on the show, later said, “Larry David is basically writing for his own amusement. . . . Larry really has carte blanche to do whatever he wants to do. Nobody’s interfering with his vision at all.”

  The show was modestly successful until 1992–1993, its breakout season. That was the year that Larry wrote perhaps the most famous Seinfeld episode, “The Contest,” in which the four friends have a contest of masturbatory restraint. Once again he based it on a real episode that occurred with his friends, but its origin should not mask the inventiveness, artistry, and comic brilliance that Larry brought to the idea. He would win an Emmy Award for writing the show, later joking, “I walk around with the Emmy wherever I go, but I’m very casual about it.”

  The show was now a hit and Larry was making a huge paycheck, but it is easy to forget how little he was surviving on just a few years earlier. And how poorly his career had been going. Yet he had the vision, courage, and confidence to insist on writing the show the way he wanted to. For example, it was in season three that the show began to use multiple plotlines. Larry and Larry Charles were talking over a new episode story line involving a library cop. They had two story lines when suddenly others came up and they began weaving them together in a complicated but comically satisfying way that got Larry tremendously excited. It was a structure that he would pursue on the show and continue in Curb.

  That was also the year that Larry decided to try a season-long story arc, something not usually done in the sitcom form but a sign of his increasing ambitions. After Jerry performs in a club, two NBC executives approach him to say they are interested in him “doing something” for the network. Back at the coffee shop Jerry talks about the proposal with George, who comes up with the idea of a show about nothing. Although Jerry is skeptical, George, who wants to write it, persists. Jerry asks, “Since when are you a writer?” George answers, “What writer? We’re talking about a sitcom.” The taping of Jerry and George’s pilot occurs in the last episode and the story line, while not dominating the season, flits in here and there. In this season can be found the origins of the show-within-a-show of Curb’s season seven (the Seinfeld reunion) as well as the sitcom pitches in season two. Indeed, it is where Larry learned how to write a season-long story, a skill he would take with him to all but the first of the Curb seasons.

  Larry later joked that he found the transition from impoverished comic to rich television writer and producer pretty easy to take. But he himself must have been feeling like it was a half-dream, half-nightmare. Larry’s mother would call him up and say, “Do they like you, Larry? Do they think you’re doing a good job? They must like you, otherwise they would fire you, wouldn’t they?” Mrs. David wasn’t used to her son being a success any more than he was.

  At the same time, Larry was finding himself a success in a whole other sphere: romance. Eleven years younger than him, Laurie Ellen Lennard was a talent booker for David Letterman when she first saw Larry doing stand-up at the Duplex in New York. Afterward she went up to him on the street to talk; she wanted to get him on The Late Show. She never did get him on the show but the two became friends. They had a first date in a Mexican restaurant (perhaps giving Larry the idea of the Mexican restaurant hot sauce scene in the fourth season closer of Curb), but it didn’t go much farther. “I never, ever showed up for a date without being in a horrible state of anxiety,” Larry said. “Women will take looks and money over a sense of humor any day. I was such a loser.”

  Lennard had begun her career working for Letterman but went on to manage comedy writers and comedians and to produce comedy specials for HBO, Showtime, MTV, and Fox. When Larry David moved to Los Angeles to work on Seinfeld, Laurie Lennard happened to be living there too, working for Fox. They began to date and became serious but Larry took a long time before he was ready to marry. Any time Lennard spoke of marriage he had physical sensations of anxiety — cold feet, hives on his neck. Laurie Lennard (who would become Laurie David) recounted, “He was so panicked. He was afraid that he wouldn’t be funny anymore if he was happy.” At last in March 1993, when Seinfeld had become a definite hit, they took a flight to Las Vegas and got married at a drive-in wedding chapel.

  No doubt it was having the security of Larry David’s wealth that helped Laurie David to switch from a career in entertainment to becoming a vocal and highly involved environmental activist, especially around the issue of global warming. She founded the Stop Global Warming Virtual March along with Senator John McCain and Robert F. Kennedy. She wrote a book and was a producer on Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth. And she became a trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council, the organization where Larry’s fictional wife Cheryl would work on Curb Your Enthusiasm. (Laurie David would not go uncriticized by her opponents. Conservatives and gossip bloggers would point to her using private jets to fly to events, to owning houses on both coasts, and to damaging protected wetland by building a tennis court on her and Larry’s Martha’s Vineyard estate.)

  Larry left Seinfeld in 1996, after the seventh season. His and Laurie’s first daughter, Cassie, had been born in 1994 and Laurie was pregnant with their second, who would be called Romy. Although some critics believed that the quality of the show declined, Seinfeld would carry on for two more seasons, and then Larry would come back to write the final disappointing episode. Larry, however, was already onto the next stage of his career, or so he hoped. He would become a writer and director of his own films, like his heroes Mel Brooks and Woody Allen. And his first movie was already making it to the big screen.

  CHAPTER 6

  Sour Reception

  Larry David was living the high life. He, Laurie, and their daughters lived in a virtual mansion in Los Angeles. They took vacations on the other side of the country, at their isolated getaway home on Martha’s Vineyard. There they had dinners with celebrity friends like Ted Danson and his wife Mary Steenburgen. They sometimes hired a private jet, a cost that for Larry was now equivalent to taking a cab ride, something he once couldn’t even afford to do. He had fallen in love with golf while at summer camp; now he belonged to the Riviera, the most exclusive and expensive golf club in Los Angeles.

  Larry preferred that people didn’t know about the Riviera membership. Or talk about his wealth — which grew exponentially as Seinfeld went into syndication. It was hard to turn on the television and not see an episode of the show. Later the DVD releases brought in even more (after a controversy about compensating the actors for their commentary). But Larry had
to live with everyone knowing because the media just loved to talk about it. “He has more money than God,” pronounced Esquire.

  Later, when Curb Your Enthusiasm was airing, it was reported everywhere that Larry had made over $200 million from syndication revenues. “People would say, ‘You deserve it.’ I’d go, ‘What do you mean, I deserve it? What do I deserve? I don’t deserve anything.’” He found himself apologizing for his success. When people remarked on his splendid house, he would say, “I’m sorry.”

  “It feels strange that I have it because I really didn’t feel like I was supposed to have it, and it’s never been anything that I sought to have. I’m not allowed to complain anymore about anything. And I feel very restricted by that,” Larry said. “I mean, I’m a guy who’s complained his whole life, and all of a sudden I can’t say a word. . . . It’s like cutting my arms off.”

  Later Larry would bravely allow his vast wealth to be alluded to on Curb Your Enthusiasm, always as a way of attacking him. There is the episode in which Larry accuses an NBC executive (to whom he’s trying to sell a show) of stealing shrimp from his order of Chinese food. “You know what, Larry?” the executive screams. “Take your $475 million and buy yourself some fucking shrimp.” The actor improvised the line — a big risk — but Larry thought it was funny. And then there is the episode where Larry accidentally trips Shaquille O’Neal, causing Jeff to lose his season’s tickets. The only way to make it up, Jeff shouts, would be for Larry to “buy the team!”

  The thing was, although Larry was expected to act differently, he didn’t feel any different. And having money did nothing to satisfy his need to work and to be funny. He hadn’t quit Seinfeld to live a life of retired leisure. He’d quit because he feared growing stale. He thought it was time to move into the big leagues of motion pictures.

  For years before Seinfeld Larry had been working on movie scripts, but it was only after quitting the show that he was able to get back to them. Before the show he did not have the contacts or the schlep to get a film made, but for the co-creator of Seinfeld it was a different matter. After all, he had made hundreds of millions of dollars for Castle Rock Entertainment, the show’s production company, he still had an office in their building, and it was only right that they back Larry’s first feature film. Considering what he’d made them, what was a few million dollars?

  The script that Larry wrote, Sour Grapes, seems to have emerged, at least indirectly, from his own sudden wealth that seemed so unearned. What did a sudden influx of money do to a person? More interestingly, what did it do to his relations with other people? Those were the questions that Larry asked, comically, in his script. Two best friends (not unlike Jerry and George Costanza or, later, Larry and Richard Lewis) decide to go on a weekend gambling trip to Atlantic City with their girlfriends. When Richie runs out of quarters at the slot machine, his doctor-friend Evan gives him two quarters. Richie feeds the machine and comes up with a jackpot of over $400,000. The foursome celebrate Richie’s good luck but Evan nurses a belief that, since the quarters came from him, he deserves half the money. Richie offers him $1,000 and later three percent, resulting in a seemingly unbreachable rift between the two.

  Evan decides to get even with his former friend. When some test results come back, he tells Richie that he’s got a terminal illness. Richie takes the news badly, of course, but he also realizes that his doting widowed mother will never be able to deal with the news. So he decides, rather improbably, to have her killed. He hires a homeless person (Larry used homeless people to advance plots in Seinfeld and would use them again in Curb) to go into the house, knowing that his mother’s weak heart would not be able to take the fright. In fact, she ends up in the hospital and Richie has to ask Evan to operate on her.

  The problem is that Evan has stopped working. In a subplot similar to those in Seinfeld and later in Curb, the reason is that he has operated on a male television star, accidentally removing the wrong testicle. But finally Evan agrees and when the operation is a success he charges Richie exactly half the amount of the jackpot. Richie is glad to pay him and all’s well that ends well.

  Castle Rock must not have had enormous faith in the script because the producer, Laurie Lennard (Larry’s wife, using her maiden name) couldn’t get Larry more than a small budget. So small that no well-known actors who might bring in an audience, could be cast. Nor did any of the important crew members have a track record that made an impression. For the main role of Richie, Larry chose Craig Bierko, an unknown who had won small roles in various television series and small Hollywood films. (He had been offered the role of Chandler in Friends but had turned it down.) For the slightly smaller role of Evan the doctor he went with Steven Weber, who had modest fame from his role in the television series Wings. At least one critic would notice Weber’s resemblance to Jerry Seinfeld. Richie’s stereotyped Jewish mother — the only explicitly Jewish note in the script — was played by Viola Harris, an actress who had been getting small parts for decades. Perhaps the most notable actor was Robyn Peterman in a girlfriend role. Peterman is the daughter of J. Peterman, the clothing catalog businessman whose fictional counterpart was Elaine’s boss on Seinfeld. Even a new soundtrack was out of the question; instead, previously recorded classical music, mostly well-known chestnuts, was used. The film looked cheap too, more like a television special than a feature film, although that was also the fault of first-time director Larry David.

  Larry’s direction was dull, stilted, and unimaginative. He got hammy performances from the actors, who overplayed their lines, burying the humor. The story itself might have been enough for a half-hour sitcom but couldn’t sustain a movie. And there just weren’t enough good lines or comic situations. Quite possibly the feature-length form intimidated this writer used to a much more concentrated format.

  Yet there are signs in the film of the show that is still to come. For example, Richie develops a suspicious relationship with a hospital secretary, eventually accusing her of stealing his mother’s cookies. In Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry will have many such encounters with receptionists, secretaries, and restaurant hosts. Then there is the doctor who only pretends to hold an elevator for Richie, resulting in Richie not wanting the man to operate on his mother. This situation prefigures episode five of the first season of Curb. Even the awful soundtrack gives a hint of the much livelier one for Curb, which also uses previously recorded music — but more effectively chosen. Overall, though, there is something bloodless about the film — the acting, the script, the direction. It feels reserved, held back. Even the characters’ unspoken Jewishness seems to drain the film of its possible energy.

  Larry must have had an inkling that the film’s reception might not be good. “I wish I had a different name on it,” he said defensively before it came out. He thought that people would have a hard time accepting him as the creator of other characters. “They’re not going to like anybody as much as they like Jerry and Elaine and George and Kramer.” The film premiered in 1998 before the last episode of Seinfeld. It was neither widely distributed nor reviewed, although the New York and Californian media took their shots. Actually, Janet Maslin of the New York Times was charitably disposed toward it. “While Seinfeld may be leaving,” she wrote, “the essence of the show is alive, well and funny — if also slightly threadbare — here.” She noted that the cast lacked the spark of the TV show and that the look was “bland and static.” (In fact, Curb also has a bland look to it, but there the uninteresting look and lack of visual texture enhances its comic qualities.) “Mr. David,” Maslin went on, “still invokes the very same spite, pettiness, and scheming . . . expect coffee-shop conversations, escalating wild twists of fate, and a strong sense of déjà vu.”

  Larry’s hometown paper, the Los Angeles Times, wasn’t so kind. Jack Mathews used Seinfeld as a way to swipe at the movie. “Sour Grapes is a ninety-minute sketch, in which the jackpot feud in Atlantic City sets off a chain of increasingly ridiculous events. . . . Some of this is very funny, but it wo
uld probably be a lot funnier with a live audience, made up of people who are on the verge of hysterics even before the show begins.” He added, “David’s attempts to flesh it out — with desperate subplots . . . merely amplify the shallowness of the script.” He criticized the direction and concluded that watching the film was “like being stuck in a room with Kramer during one of his manic cycles.”

  Tim Goodman of the San Francisco Examiner was even more blunt. “Perhaps if people didn’t know that Seinfeld co-creator Larry David wrote and directed Sour Grapes, it would merely be a bad film. Knowing that it was David behind this project [makes] this a horrendous disaster.” Goodman called it “painfully unfunny,” a movie that looks “cheap” and “never feels like more than a bloated TV show.”

  And just when the reception couldn’t get any worse, it did. Roger Ebert, perhaps the best-known and most popular movie critic in America, weighed in. In the Chicago Sun-Times he gave it zero stars. “A comedy about things that aren’t funny,” Sour Grapes was “tone-deaf comedy . . . labored and leaden.” Insisting that “I can’t easily remember a film I’ve enjoyed less,” Ebert called it “a dead zone.” This was the review that stung Larry the most.

  Because humiliation and failure are always interesting to Larry, it’s not surprising that he went on to mention Sour Grapes on Curb Your Enthusiasm. There is a poster from the film hanging by the receptionist at his office. In episode six of the first season a friend of Cheryl’s borrows a copy of the film and then, struggling to find a compliment, tells Larry that it was just the right length. Larry would find a way to get back at Roger Ebert too — in the guise of thumbs-down restaurant critic Andy Portico during season three.

  Between the bad reviews and the quick disappearance of the film, and the heated criticism of the final episode of Seinfeld, Larry must have felt like a king knocked from his throne. One moment he was being lauded as the creator of the greatest television comedy of all time and the next he was being lambasted for his lame writing, unfunny jokes, and bad direction. It could not have felt good. Later Larry would merely say, “I survived it.” Some wondered whether it marked the beginning of the “Seinfeld Curse.”