No Lessons Learned, page 2
Seinfeld won multiple Emmys during its nine seasons. David had cocreated and showrun one of the most successful sitcoms ever, and discovered key talent along the way, including writer-directors Jeff Schaffer, Alec Berg, and Dave Mandel (who would later work on Curb). But it was in 1997, after seven seasons, that David finally left the NBC sitcom, returning only for the finale.
“When you have a successful show, you start to compete against your previous seasons,” says David. “‘How is next season going to be better than the season before?’ You feel all your great ideas have been done, you’ve used them all. But it’d also been seven years and I just wanted to try something else…”
Larry on set shooting the last few episodes of Seinfeld in 1998.
Larry David. The name was familiar, but the face? Not so much. The Seinfeld writer, cocreator, and executive producer was behind one of the most successful sitcoms ever, but by the show’s 1998 finale, most folks still couldn’t pick David out of a lineup.
Audiences did, however, know more about David than they realized, thanks to a character he based broadly on himself, his Seinfeld alter ego, George Costanza. Played by Jason Alexander, the balding, bespectacled New Yorker was insecure and self-centered. He suffered from social anxiety and concocted elaborate lies in the name of self-preservation. His lifelong desire to be admired, while doing nothing to earn such praise, meant no steady job or prospects of a career. And he was paranoid about, well, everything.
George was an expertly crafted sitcom sidekick, but hardly leading-man material. Building an entire production around such a character would certainly equal career suicide. Naturally, Larry David had to try it.
The 1999 HBO mockumentary Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm featured David playing an exaggerated version of himself: a semi-retired cocreator of Seinfeld living comfortably in West LA while attempting to make his way back into stand-up comedy. The one-hour special was envisioned as a singular event—the perfect project for a guy who dreams big but dreads actually having to do the thing that he’s dreamed about. If David was lucky, he’d only have to do it once, or maybe not at all if the networks passed on the project.
“I don’t like pleasing people.”
—LARRY DAVID
“I didn’t care for stand-up comedy,” says David. “I didn’t look forward to going onstage the way the other comics did. In fact, if the show was running late and they told me I wasn’t going on, I would be relieved. You’re walking up there, you’re vulnerable, and you have to please people. I don’t like pleasing people.”
And it was David’s apprehension about stepping back onstage as a stand-up that became the basis for the HBO film.
The first inkling of the Curb special began with a 1998 conversation between David and Jeff Garlin, who’d later play Larry’s manager, Jeff Greene, in the film and the sitcom. The two were discussing potential post-Seinfeld projects over lunch when Garlin suggested a documentary that followed David back onto the stand-up circuit as he prepared for his first HBO comedy special.
“I thought about it, me going back to do stand-up with the cameras following the whole thing,” says David. “We’d see me onstage. We’d see my act develop over the course of the documentary. But it couldn’t all be onstage. What would happen offstage, when I wasn’t performing? That seemed boring to me. So I thought I could make it more interesting and funnier if I made up a life offstage. I’d have a wife and kids, because there were originally kids in the special. Then I’d make up funny stories that would have to be improvised to make it seem like a documentary. So that version sounded doable. It didn’t sound all that bad.”
David teamed up with old friend, writer, and documentarian Bob Weide to help shape his idea into something he could pitch to studios and/or networks. “Larry was thinking about doing a special that would be shot as a documentary and he wanted me to direct it because I made real documentaries,” says Weide.
“Larry, Ari Emanuel [Larry’s agent], and Gavin Polone [producer], pitched the idea to David’s former manager, Chris Albrecht, who was head of original programming at HBO,” says Garlin. “Chris said, ‘How can we not do this?’ You never hear that in Hollywood. Ever.”
Larry in “The Special Section,” S3, E6.
An early list of possible titles for the special.
Bob Weide and Larry on set for “The Shrimp Incident,” S2, E4.
Albrecht’s eagerness may have been more about his love and respect for David—or morbid curiosity about how such a project might turn out—than any expectation of a hit. Even the film’s title warned viewers not to expect much, preemptively signaling failure in the event that things went south.
The name—Curb Your Enthusiasm—was floated during a small screening of the unfinished special, where David had invited a group of friends to give their honest opinions of his work. “Larry and I had been brainstorming titles for the show, and I would jot them down whenever he or I had an idea,” recalls Weide. “I wanted to call it Regrets Only. Larry said it’s clever, but it sounds too much like a Richard Lewis Showtime special, and it kind of did. He came up with Curb Your Enthusiasm. At the screening, we passed out a little questionnaire with the presumptive titles and asked people to check their favorites. One idea got a few votes, another got some more, and Curb Your Enthusiasm got no votes. None. That’s when Larry said, ‘Too bad. I like that one. Curb Your Enthusiasm. That’s what we’re going to call it.’”
The odds were slim to none that a comedy about a socially challenged industry insider would connect with a mainstream audience accustomed to the humor of shows like Full House and Friends. Curb was irreverent, risky, and behind the paywall of subscription cable television. Most viewers still thought of HBO as a place to rewatch your favorite films long after their run in movie theaters. The platform’s early original series like Oz, Sex and the City, and The Sopranos were challenging norms and ideas about what makes for a great drama or comedy, but network TV was still king. It didn’t help that the Curb special aired at 10 p.m. on Sunday, TiVo was still in its infancy, and, again… who the hell was Larry David?
Larry, Jeff Garlin, and Cheryl Hines in various scenes from the Curb Your Enthusiasm special.
“The industry knew who he was, but unless you were a hardcore Seinfeld fan, it could absolutely escape you who Larry David was,” says Weide. “I remember a billboard for the special on Sunset Boulevard. It was Larry’s face and it just said, ‘Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm,’ and I thought, ‘How is that supposed to get anyone to watch this?’ It didn’t say, ‘From the man who brought you Seinfeld.’ It was just his mug and his name. Really?”
“Larry’s not really a behind-the-scenes kind of personality,” says Jason Alexander, who played George on the NBC sitcom Seinfeld. “He’s a performer. So I wasn’t surprised he was starring in Curb. I was however surprised by the format, because with Seinfeld he was such a detailed writer who was not happy if a word changed. He scripted carefully, so this idea that he was going to throw caution to the wind and do improv seemed unusual, but I also thought, ‘Oh, it’s a one-time thing. He’s doing an HBO special. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, then no harm, no foul.’”
The special didn’t break any ratings records, but no one expected it to. It did, however, generate plenty of praise within the industry and among critics. Variety’s Phil Gallo wrote: “No matter how Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm is interpreted—an indictment of the people within the entertainment industry or a linear delusion of one of comedy’s funniest thinkers—it is the work of genius. David shrouds this dark comedy in nihilism and defense mechanisms, distancing it from films that have taken similar tacks (Waiting for Guffman, for example) and produced more obviously humorous works. Beyond the intriguing nature of the bizarrely ‘normal’ David, the big question of what is real and what isn’t should definitely add to repeat viewings, transforming this hour-long into the comedic equivalent of The Blair Witch Project.”
Spontaneity was a large part of the special’s appeal. It felt fresh. No canned jokes. No scripted pauses for laughs. “The Curb documentary had to be improvised so it would pass as a documentary, and it did,” says David. “I felt like I had a facility for improvisation. I don’t know why I felt that confidence, maybe it was from that one improv class I took when I was doing stand-up. I got a compliment from an actress in the class, and, of course, I never forget a compliment.”
An image of Larry that was featured in the promotional poster for the Curb special.
Handheld cameras followed fictional Larry as he acted upon his terrible instincts, unwittingly offending everyone around him, including his wife, Cheryl. “When we were looking to cast Larry’s wife, he didn’t know what he wanted,” says then-casting director Marla Garlin, Jeff Garlin’s former spouse who worked on the Curb film and the first season of the show. “I would bring in these shrewish women for him, and he was like, ‘No, no, no, that’s not what I want.’ He was looking for someone who was a great foil, not someone that would beat him down. It also had to be someone that would handle their own with Larry, not somebody he can steamroll over because he’s so clever and smart. That’s when Cheryl [Hines] came in.”
Just as Cheryl found charm in Larry’s madness, so too would viewers. There was something cathartic about watching this odd fellow embrace ideas and advice that would send others running. He did and said things that most of us wish we could, or fear we might. His actions throughout the film were liberating and hilarious, and David was only just getting started.
“It was after Larry and I had filmed on a Saturday and we were sitting by an empty desk, I remember it clearly,” says Garlin. “Larry said, ‘Wouldn’t this be great to do as a TV series?’ I thought, ‘He’s in the moment. He’s happy. But it won’t last.’ Then he called me after the special came out. It was very under the radar, but it got a lot of respect, especially inside HBO. So he and Ari went to Chris and told him they wanted to do it as a series. And that was the start of the show.”
There wasn’t anything like the quirky cable series among television’s top comedies. Frasier and Everybody Loves Raymond featured flawed yet lovable protagonists whose personalities were redeemed at the end of each episode. Curb would do nothing of the sort. Lessons be damned—Larry would remain a misanthrope. Curb’s format was also unique. The series was the first mockumentary sitcom on American television. The Office wouldn’t debut on NBC for another five years, and blockbusters like Modern Family and Abbott Elementary were years if not decades in the future.
Larry posing in front of a poster for Curb’s first season in Los Angeles.
And there was that delightful theme music…
“The Curb theme is a song called ‘Frolic’ by Italian composer Luciano Michelini. He wrote it for an obscure 1970s film,” says editor and music supervisor Steve Rasch. “Larry had heard it on a bank commercial and asked Laura Streicher [then David’s assistant] to track it down, and she did. It was in a production music library called Killer Tracks, and anyone could license it. I knew one of the guys there, so I asked if he could send me all the CDs from that artist. But it turned out to be a collection from an Italian subsidiary of RCA that had all these TV tracks from Italian composers that Fellini had used. They were working on the side doing TV shows. It even included Ennio Morricone’s work. The tracks were all in the vein of ‘Frolic,’ sort of like a circus band, recorded with tuba and classical Italian instruments like accordions. It was the kind of thing you’d hear at the circus when acrobats are performing. So I used them to score montages and transitional elements between scenes.”
From Curb’s quirky soundtrack to its boundary-breaking humor, Larry David had the sort of creative freedom most showrunners dream of. HBO trusted David thanks to his prior success as a sitcom creator. But that also meant the bar was high for David’s new show. After all, how does one compete with the monster success of a comedy like Seinfeld?
“I didn’t even think about that,” says David, “because, like Seinfeld, I never expected Curb to go anywhere.
One thing was clear when the pilot episode, “The Pants Tent,” premiered on October 15, 2000: The half-hour sitcom was not your parents’ comedy, or even your uptight brother’s. Larry’s misunderstandings, social faux pas, and disastrous attempts to fix his blunders were hard to watch, but even harder to turn away from, because they were so damn entertaining. During a night at the movies with friends, Larry wears pants with puffy pleating that cause Cheryl’s friend Nancy (Robin Ruzan) to believe he has an erection. Larry also offends Jeff’s parents and angers Richard Lewis’s new girlfriend, who accuses Larry of looking at her breasts during an argument at the movie theater. He justifies these insults with a string of lies, all of which are exposed by the end of the episode when the storylines converge with pinpoint accuracy.
“I have such a low attention span that, when I’m reading a book, if there’s not a compelling story, it’s torture,” says David. “I need to turn a page. I need to know what’s going to happen next. Same with a movie. I want good stories. It wasn’t that way at the beginning of Seinfeld. I was like, ‘We’re just gonna talk. Stories are incidental.’ But I learned very quickly that, no, you can’t do that.”
“I newer EXPECTED CURB TO GO ANYWHERE.”
—LARRY DAVID
Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen played themselves (and started their prolific run as season regulars) in “Ted and Mary,” S1, E2.
Finding the right performers to flesh out the characters in those stories was just as critical, and many of them came from the stand-up comedy circuit. Susie Essman did not audition for the role of Jeff Greene’s high-decibel spouse, Susie. “Larry just called me up one day. I hadn’t seen him in about ten years, because I lived in New York, and he had moved to LA to do Seinfeld,” says Essman. “But I knew him from back in the Catch a Rising Star days, when we were doing stand-up. We were always very friendly, not the kind of friends who go for dinner or anything, but, you know, comic friends. He saw me on a roast I did for Jerry Stiller on Comedy Central. And those roasts are super, super blue. That’s what’s required. He apparently had a scene in mind where whoever is playing Jeff’s wife just goes crazy, [screaming at] Jeff. When he saw me do the roast, I think it was a light bulb moment, like, ‘Oh, Susie’s perfect for this part.’ He called and offered me the job.”
“I remember the phone call,” says Essman. “I was like, ‘Well, what’s the character?’ He said, ‘Don’t worry about it. You can do it.’ I said, ‘Send me a script.’ He said, ‘There’s no script, and there’s no money. It’s low-budget. You’re going to have to fly yourself out and put yourself up.’ And I was like, ‘Nah, tell them to find the money to fly me out. I don’t mind not making money, if I get to work with you, but it’s not going to cost me money.’ So I was in three episodes in that first season, and the first one I shot was ‘The Pants Tent.’ There wasn’t much for my character to do. I was just talking about [my kid] Sammi, who was a boy at that time. He was a boy until season two, when Larry needed Sammi to be a girl, so he became Samantha.”
Comedy couple Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen weren’t exactly sold on the idea of Curb when they heard about David’s plans for the new series. “We met Larry and [David’s then wife] Laurie years ago on Martha’s Vineyard,” says Danson. “We didn’t really know each other that well, but we had had a handful of fun evenings together. So he invited a group of about five or six to the rental house, and we had to go up to the attic and sit on the stairs to get a Wi-Fi signal so he could show us the pilot of Curb that he had shot in New York with Jeff Garlin. And I thought, ‘I really like him, but oof. No.’ But being the sycophant that I am, at the end of it, I said, ‘Hey, fantastic!’ I don’t think this is my wife Mary’s truth, but it was mine. Anyway, we both said, ‘If you ever need us just to play ourselves for whatever reason, call us.’ I was doing it with the idea that it would never happen. But it did.”
Ted and Mary’s first appearance on Curb was in the show’s second episode, aptly titled “Ted and Mary.” Danson was certainly no stranger to TV comedy, having starred in Cheers for eleven seasons. And his initial reticence about David’s new series quickly changed once he’d shot the episode.
“It was so crazy, smart, and bright,” says Danson. “It was like guerrilla filmmaking. He called us two days beforehand. For wardrobe, we wore our own clothes. It was kind of like, OK, let’s just go have fun.”
Behind the scenes of “Beloved Aunt,” S1, E8.
Curb was referred to inside HBO as the cable network’s “little experimental show,” a nickname that was at once affectionate and shorthand for a sitcom that would likely be short-lived. After all, how would Curb survive, let alone thrive, without scripts or a writers’ room? The answer: It probably wouldn’t, which would explain why the show operated on a shoestring budget well past its first season.
“I suspect HBO was investing all of their money into the wardrobe of Sex and the City. Their costumes, their hair and makeup,” jokes co-executive producer Laura Streicher, who started as David’s assistant in 1998. “The first few seasons, it was a rogue situation for us at times. We didn’t have trailers, so sometimes actors would be getting ready in bedrooms of the homes we shot at or out in the street. It was very fly by the seat of your pants, but there was a beauty to that.”
