Her parents wouldn’t allow her to pursue acting as a child, so she waited until she went to Northwestern University in Chicago, where she met her husband, fellow actor Brad Hall (an early candidate to play George Costanza), and got spotted in a comedy revue by Saturday Night Live producers. She left Northwestern before graduating; she and Hall both appeared on SNL for three seasons, from 1982 to 1985, then moved to Los Angeles.
When Louis-Dreyfus arrived for her Seinfeld audition, she found Jerry eating cereal and waiting to trade lines with her. She saw Larry at the audition and felt at ease, a Pavlovian response to the presence of the one bright spot from her most miserable years. She sat on a sofa with Seinfeld and read lines. When Seinfeld heard her read, he thought she’d mesh well with George and Kramer. “That,” he told his colleagues afterward, “is Elaine.” She would, David later said, give the show “luster.”
After her audition ended, Louis-Dreyfus left, and David ran out onto the sidewalk after her. “What do you think?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said honestly. The even more honest version would have been: I’m not sure if this is the right move for me.
But in the end, she accepted David and Seinfeld’s offer to join the four-episode “special” series, as an NBC press release categorized it. Her hard time at Saturday Night Live had paid off, though she didn’t know yet how much. She figured this thing would get canceled in a week, but it beat her recent film projects, such as the self-explanatory Troll.
When she showed up on the set in cowboy boots, Richards knew: Oh, yes, this is our girl.
She became one of the guys on Seinfeld, getting lines as funny as the other cast members’ without (too often) having to play just “the girl.” An early rant, for example, questioned people’s affection for cats: “What evidence is there that cats are so smart, anyway? Huh? What do they do? Because they’re clean? I am sorry. My uncle Pete showers four times a day and he can’t count to ten. So don’t give me hygiene.” As Jerry’s ex-girlfriend, Elaine could play up her feminine energy when she wanted to or rib Jerry like only a former girlfriend could. As an ex instead of a current girlfriend—a compromise with the network, which would have preferred the female addition be a potential love interest, and would continue to push for romantic involvement—she and Jerry could both maintain healthy dating lives, and thus dating story lines.
David modeled Elaine partly on an ex of his own named Monica Yates. The two had transitioned seamlessly from dating to being friends, a feat he thought was extraordinary. David and Yates dated for three months in the summer of 1983, when Yates, twenty-five at the time, had just been fired from her job as an assistant at Vanity Fair.
The real woman Elaine was based on was tall and athletic; she couldn’t be bothered to dress up much or fuss with makeup except for eyeliner. She had dark, shoulder-length hair and liked to frown a lot. She was mourning the loss of her glamorous gig and living low on unemployment when she accompanied a friend to a recreational softball game involving a bunch of New York comics. The pitcher, David, had just finished a year at Saturday Night Live. She and her magazine assistant friends were impressed. When the group went out for beers after the game, David and Yates bonded over what she later called “the same aesthetic distaste for lots of things.” After the breakup, the two remained such good friends that as David wrote his new scripts for Seinfeld, he often called Yates in New York to read scenes to her.
Louis-Dreyfus helped to shape the character of Elaine from the beginning, even though she’d never seen herself as a comedian or written her own material before. She knew part of her lack of comedic confidence came from her upbringing. Boys were always encouraged to be funny, whereas humor wasn’t something cultivated in girls. Even after being part of the Second City comedy troupe in Chicago and on SNL, she didn’t identify herself as particularly hilarious.
She ended up being good enough to worry Alexander, though. He was supposed to be Jerry’s confidant. If she was another friend, and a network-mandated one at that, where might this leave him? Still, Alexander and Louis-Dreyfus bonded in her earliest days on the set, mainly over their mystified reactions to the scripts. Why were there heated conflicts that were never resolved? Why didn’t the characters ever learn anything? What had they gotten themselves into?
As David and Seinfeld wrote Garlington out and Louis-Dreyfus in, they made one other little change. They had George and Jerry switch to a new diner, so as to sidestep the entire issue of the waitress we’d met in the pilot. Because there was a Thelonious Monk poster in the office where David and Seinfeld worked together, they named the new fictional place Monk’s.
IN THEIR NEW STUDIO HOME, behind the distinctive white Ren-Mar Studios entryway arch, David and Seinfeld refined their routine together, careful not to settle into their office too much just yet. They were making only four episodes, after all. Jerry crunched on cereal while the two bandied about premises for shows. What if Kramer starts a make-your-own-pizza restaurant? What if Elaine plots a hit on her boyfriend’s cat?
David chomped on his after-lunch cigar, which gave him an air of absurd authority. He looked and felt contemplative, reminding Seinfeld of what he’d thought about David since first talking with him at the club years earlier: “This guy’s got some head on him.”
And now, no one seemed to be stopping them from doing what they wanted on TV. NBC would probably cancel the show soon enough, but that would come as a relief for David. He wasn’t sure he wanted to do any more of these things anyway.
As these four new episodes started to air, Seinfeld began to feel more and more like a real television show. It had exceeded David’s and Seinfeld’s own expectations twice now: first, by getting on the air at all, and second, by getting all four follow-up episodes on. Even better, the episodes aired after reruns of NBC’s biggest current sitcom, Cheers. Seinfeld surprised everyone in the business by holding on to most of Cheers’ audience and suddenly showing up in the TV ratings’ top five every week.
Once again, NBC executives faced a decision about committing to Seinfeld or moving on for good.
As NBC dithered over whether to pick up Seinfeld yet again, David got a call from Joe Davola, the guy who’d once asked him to write for MTV’s Remote Control. Davola now ran the alternative-programming department at the three-year-old Fox network. He’d kept track of David since then because David’s manager turned girlfriend, Laurie Lennard, had been a friend of Davola’s since his MTV days. He’d also seen Seinfeld and liked it.
David and Lennard went to meet with Davola at Fox. Davola tended to ramble a bit in his thick Brooklyn accent, but he eventually got to the point: He thought Seinfeld was great. He’d told his boss, Peter Chernin, that Fox ought to pick it up if NBC didn’t, Davola later told me.
They thanked him and awaited a verdict from NBC. Others, like Castle Rock’s Glenn Padnick, later recalled Fox rejecting the idea of picking Seinfeld up from NBC at some point. But surely any interest from another network helped spur NBC to a decision.
With the deadline approaching to renew Seinfeld after the first four episodes, Bosgang, Ludwin, Littlefield, and their colleagues locked themselves in a conference room and watched all five episodes again. Once again they said, “It’s too Jewish. Too New York.” Yet an overriding sentiment emerged: “They don’t tell stories, but the fucking thing is funny.”
Preston Beckman, the network’s executive vice president of program planning and scheduling—in other words, the top ratings guy—wrote a memo debunking the New York and Jewish myth: The show played as well in Chicago and Seattle as it did in New York. People across the country (and presumably not just Jews) responded to it equally, many not even thinking about its “Jewishness” or lack thereof. (Personal note: My family was among the many in the Midwest who thought nothing of Seinfeld’s ethnic background.)
Buzz was building, too. Philadelphia Inquirer critic Ken Tucker was an early supporter, noting the show’s “brisk funniness” and writing that NBC was making a mistake i
f it didn’t pick the show up. Washington Post critic Tom Shales wrote, “This Jerry Seinfeld is a very funny fellow. . . . [Seinfeld] is sweet and breezy and, as cowritten by Seinfeld, full of witty, pithy asides about modern social behavior.”
NBC was finishing up its fifth season in first place among the four networks. It could afford a gamble, and comedies were still hot—four of the top five shows of the 1989–90 season were sitcoms: ABC’s Roseanne and NBC’s The Cosby Show, Cheers, and A Different World. In fact, the network needed to take some fresh chances: None of its five new shows from fall 1989 would live to see the 1990 schedule. And Cosby was fading in its later years, while Fox’s new hit animated show The Simpsons was siphoning off the young viewers advertisers most coveted. Seinfeld, though a long shot, showed promise among the young audiences the network was losing.
And though NBC executives didn’t know it at the time, they may have prevented a true nightmare scenario for them: With Davola’s interest in Seinfeld, NBC could have found itself competing with a Seinfeld/Simpsons superpowered comedy block.
The decision was made: NBC would take its chances on Jerry Seinfeld again. Seinfeld would get a respectable order, thirteen whole episodes (only twelve would be made after the start of the season was unexpectedly delayed by a week). Of course, the show wouldn’t return until midseason, starting in January 1991. But the order was hope. Hell, it was a miracle.
OF COURSE, THERE WAS ONE person who didn’t quite see it that way. When David and Seinfeld got the news at their office, David told Seinfeld not to accept the offer. Already, this was becoming a tradition: David, afraid he’d run out of creative juice, didn’t want to come up with an entire thirteen episodes’ worth of stories. It reminded him of when he used to drive taxis for a living. When he dropped off a passenger, he always thought it was his last fare. There were so many cabs in the city—why should anyone else choose him?
Seinfeld accepted the offer anyway, and promised to give David $15,000 toward buying a car.
David told his comedian friend John DeBellis, who was visiting that day, “I’m going to get a Lexus. I’ll never be able to afford one again.” David figured this was as good as his career would ever get. Which was just fine with him. In fact, he sort of wished the show would be done with so he could return to New York. Instead, he realized he’d be settling in Los Angeles for at least a little while.
As Seinfeld took to the air in January 1991 for its first regular-season spot, Littlefield took over as NBC’s entertainment president when Tartikoff left to run Paramount’s movie studio. With NBC’s lead slipping, Littlefield felt the pressure.
The first episode was scheduled to premiere on January 16, 1991—the day the United States bombed Baghdad at the start of the Gulf War. The Seinfeld premiere was preempted for news coverage. When the show finally debuted the following week, it began to build an audience, though a select one. It lost out most weeks to CBS’s crime drama Jake and the Fatman.
Cherones was happy to hear the good news about the full season order, even though he was still a little mystified by this show he’d signed on to direct and produce. He’d worked in network television since 1975 and had never seen anything quite like it; it was a little like directing something in a language he didn’t speak, though he got the feeling there was something special about it. As he read scripts for the upcoming thirteen-episode “second” season, he was still flummoxed. This story line all about Jerry buying a suede jacket and everyone flipping out about the lining being pink-and-white striped . . . Why was the lining of a jacket such a big deal? Who fucking cared? Why were they doing this?
Eh, at least it was no ordinary show. He kept his questions to himself and went with it, figuring it had to end soon enough. But as he and David planned for Seinfeld’s certain demise, TV viewers were just starting to catch on to this new show.
4
The Cult Hit
PETER MEHLMAN BELIEVED THAT SEINFELD could not fail. He believed it was too good to fail.
Peter Mehlman was not in the television business.
And yet, in what was becoming true Seinfeldian form—outsiders only, please—he became one of the first writers whom Larry David trusted with a script.
David, who was now clearly in charge of all of Seinfeld’s backstage operations while Seinfeld concentrated on being the star of the show, assigned Mehlman the fifth installment of the thirteen-episode season in 1991. When Mehlman turned it in, David told him, “If by some off chance we get picked up again, you’ve got a staff job.” Mehlman figured this was a sure thing, he later told me. He had no idea that quality was not a reliable predictor of longevity in television. In fact, it usually doomed a show to “cult” status and a short life at that time.
Mehlman looked a bit like a younger David, with blue eyes, scraggly eyebrows, and wild, graying hair. At thirty-four, he’d written one other TV script, a sample episode of The Wonder Years that never got shot. He was a freelance magazine writer, and when he moved to Los Angeles from New York in 1989 for a change of scenery, he figured he should take a shot at scriptwriting, since everyone around him was doing it. He believed his spec script would magically get sold and cover his moving expenses. His script never even made it near The Wonder Years office, but it did land him a TV agent.
Still, the agent didn’t lead to any jobs; an old acquaintance, Larry David, did. When Mehlman bumped into David at a Los Angeles party, about a year after moving west, David mentioned some show he was doing with Jerry Seinfeld. Maybe Mehlman could write a script?
David had no idea that Mehlman had never written dialogue. Mehlman, unsure what this little show even was, offered David a writing sample: not his Wonder Years script, but a piece he’d written for the New York Times’s About Men column, a bittersweet, funny essay called “Star Trekking” about wandering the city while getting over a recent breakup. David liked it and passed it on to Jerry Seinfeld, who felt the same. Soon Mehlman had his first TV assignment—which, when word got out, would make him an inspiration to freelance magazine writers everywhere.
Later, Mehlman heard that David had made similar offers to many of their mutual friends—give him a writing sample, and he and Seinfeld would consider it. Many of them had real scripts to offer, and had known David much longer than Mehlman had. For whatever reason, though, Mehlman was the first to get through.
THE SEINFELD CAST AND CREW switched stages once again, taking up permanent residence on the CBS-MTM Studios lot in the San Fernando Valley, where Get Smart, The Bob Newhart Show, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show were shot. They reached back into sitcom history to come up with a more ironclad production schedule. A typical show started its weekly cycle on Monday, leading up to a Friday shoot; but The Dick Van Dyke Show’s producer, Carl Reiner, figured out that if he started on Wednesday and shot on Tuesday, he’d have weekends to rewrite. David and Seinfeld had no personal lives at the time, so that sounded like the perfect approach to them.
Even the Reiner-style schedule began to slide away from them, though. Time had little meaning in Seinfeldia. The Wednesday table read would slip from 10:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. Then cast members would get another call: “It’ll be at ten on Thursday.” Then: “Take Thursday off.” They could end up coming in on Saturday or Sunday afternoon. The three weeks off meant to be built into the regular schedule would disappear. Between David’s and Seinfeld’s inexperience at running sitcoms and Rick Ludwin’s inexperience with overseeing them, nothing went quite as expected.
Of course, this led to the show’s unusual take on comedy as well as its disorganization. David and Seinfeld had written jokes and sketches in their past, so they considered stories that typical producers wouldn’t; Ludwin, too, approved stories that average network executives wouldn’t. As Seinfeld said at the time, “Some of the writers who want to work on the show, they have a hard time getting a grip on what funny is. They give us all these sitcom ideas. I tell them we don’t want sitcom ideas. I tell them what we don’t want to do, but it’s hard to explain what we d
o want.”
SEINFELD THOUGHT HE HAD MEHLMAN pegged. When they met, Mehlman remembers the comedian saying to him, “God, you seem like such a total New Yorker. I can’t believe you moved out here.” Mehlman didn’t feel that way at all. He grew up in Queens, but when he came to L.A. to cover the 1984 Olympics for ABC Sports, he fell in love with the place. It seemed fun. New York exhausted him, which could be good—it was nice to, as he said, “put out some effort once in a while.” But he was ready for some sunshine and laid-back attitudes.
In fact, he used just that feeling as inspiration for his first Seinfeld pitch. He suggested a story in which Elaine was exhausted by New York and wanted to leave, which would make Jerry confront any feelings he had for her. Producer Larry Charles, however, suggested that instead Jerry could accidentally get her an apartment in his building. Mehlman agreed that was better—more opportunity for humor, less worrying about Jerry and Elaine’s relationship. This resulted in “The Apartment,” which first aired in April 1991.
With almost no rules or outlines to write by, Mehlman could throw whatever he felt like into the script for “The Apartment.” George could wear a wedding ring to a party to see if it helped pick up girls! Mehlman put it in, and it sailed through without a change. Most other shows planned out every episode beforehand, scene by scene, and then handed it to the writer to flesh out. Seinfeld’s free-for-all approach was unusual, although Mehlman didn’t realize it at the time.
After he turned in his script, he started hanging out at the Seinfeld offices even though he wasn’t an official staffer. That’s when he got nervous about this TV writing thing. It seemed like such a great place to work; now he wanted this possible staff job for this possible next season.
Seinfeldia Page 5
