Jerry’s manager, George Shapiro, ran into Danson shortly thereafter at a party and hugged him tightly in greeting, like a father greeting his long-lost son. “Thanks for quitting Cheers,” he told the baffled star.
Larry David, however, hated the idea of moving to Thursdays. “I don’t want to be Cheers’ little brother,” he complained to Alexander.
David complained more to the writers. “We’re on Wednesdays,” writer Alec Berg remembers him saying. “That’s when we’re on. If they’re not watching us on Wednesday, I don’t want them watching us on Thursday.”
Fortunately, no one cared what Larry David wanted.
Then, in Seinfeld’s first four weeks in the new Thursday spot, its ratings rose by 57 percent, taking it from TV’s fortieth-most-popular program to its fifth. NBC had thought it was rescuing Seinfeld, when, in fact, Seinfeld was now rescuing NBC. Seinfeld was being groomed to replace NBC’s biggest show on its biggest night.
6
The Writers
BILL MASTERS—A TALL, HANDSOME former stand-up with thinning brown hair and a thick mustache—stood before Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld in their office, ready to make a pitch.
He knew Seinfeld from the days when they both did comedy and lived near each other on Eighty-First Street in New York. Like Seinfeld, Masters had worked the club circuit back then, but he also collected a paycheck for doing the audience warm-ups at The Cosby Show tapings in Brooklyn. Now, in the fall of 1991, Masters was in Los Angeles after he had sold a feature script and gotten a three-movie deal with Disney’s Hollywood Pictures. As he waited for his film scripts to be made—and waited, and waited—he hoped to get a writing assignment from David and Seinfeld.
Masters had no idea how to pitch for sitcoms, he later told me, but he went in that day in 1991 with five ideas and winged it. The first didn’t fly. The second, he’d gotten from a script he’d written on spec for The Cosby Show that never went anywhere, about a guy whose job is to move cars from one side of the street to the other to comply with New York City’s constantly shifting parking rules. That pitch was obviously more Seinfeld than Cosby, and it got him the holy grail of sitcom pitching: hard laughs in the room.
Satisfied, Masters went on to his next idea, but producer Larry Charles, who sat right next to him, stopped him and whispered, “Go back. They liked that one.”
Masters reversed gears to the parking story and fleshed it out some more. David and Seinfeld bought it. He had his first sitcom assignment, reworking his idea from a traditional sitcom of the old guard—with limited, indoor sets and a limited concept of what makes a story line—to the new approach for which Seinfeld was now known—on-location shoots, quick cuts, and a boundless sense of where plots could go.
Masters was amazed by writing for television, even though so far he’d gotten only this one freelance script deal. He’d written several movie scripts, none of which had escaped the stacks of paper on which they had been written. Even though the scripts had been purchased, Masters hadn’t seen anyone say a word of his dialogue. With this TV thing, he wrote something, and then David rewrote a lot of it, granted. But within a few weeks, he saw his words performed at a table read, and a few weeks later acted out on a stage, and a few weeks later shown on television.
After selling that Seinfeld script, however, Masters hit a run of bad luck. By the following year, his movie deal had collapsed, and his wife, Gail Berman, who worked in a production office on the Fox lot, was consigned to bed rest after she became pregnant with twins. At forty-one, Masters had no idea what he wanted to do with his life, but he knew he needed to do something soon, something more permanent than a one-off Seinfeld script.
After visiting his wife at her office before her maternity leave, he called to check his messages, and one was from Larry David, who left a callback number that was in New York. Masters was annoyed. Before moving to Los Angeles, his wife had made her name as a wunderkind Broadway producer, so Masters figured David was calling to ask them to get him theater tickets.
Masters said to his wife, “I’m not calling him. Fuck him.”
However, Masters did eventually return David’s call, and it turned out David wanted to tell him that Seinfeld was hiring writers for its next season. Masters had a full-time job on the fourth season. His luck had instantly turned back around.
Peter Mehlman got a call from David at that time as well: He was the only writer who’d been on staff hired back for the fourth season. Everyone else on the third-season staff had been let go, which became a common pattern on Seinfeld: David would bring in a batch of former stand-ups, use all the best material from their lives for plots—the only way to keep that Seinfeldia dimension between fiction and reality alive—then start fresh with a new batch of lives to harvest the following year. Larry and Jerry didn’t go in for traditional sitcom procedure and rarely hired writers with much, or any, sitcom experience. The pile of spec scripts they’d gotten from writers who attempted a Murphy Brown or a Cheers sat ignored.
It was a particular honor to be asked back, so the rehiring boosted Mehlman’s confidence. He’d been nervous throughout that year, his first in the Seinfeld office full-time, given his total lack of experience with television writing. Now he felt better. He was embarking on what would become a great season for him, possibly his best.
MASTERS WENT TO WORK AT the Seinfeld office along with Mehlman and four other new writers. He particularly loved working alongside Mehlman, whom he knew from the mid-’80s back in New York, where Mehlman’s then girlfriend had worked with Masters’s wife. They had become friends back then, and Mehlman even wrote a Washington Post piece in which he followed Masters through his life as a comedian for a week.
Masters soon learned that being on staff at Seinfeld meant being an idea factory—specifically, turning your own life experiences into pitches, and using your life as a laboratory for possible pitches, and listening to other people’s life stories so that you could turn them into pitches. If David and Seinfeld liked one of your pitches, you’d get to write a script. Masters ran across a typo on a Trivial Pursuit card: The answer to a question was “the Moors,” but the card read, THE MOOPS. That went into an episode called “The Bubble Boy,” featuring a climactic Trivial Pursuit match between a sick boy forced to live in a plastic quarantine “bubble” and George. Masters sat in on a freelance writer’s pitch to David for a story line that would turn into “The Pick,” featuring Elaine’s accidentally X-rated Christmas card. The guy brought a visual aid: a photo of a man smiling for a camera on Christmas morning in a robe as he unknowingly exposed himself.
If a pitch didn’t sound real, David didn’t want it.
Besides mining real life for stories, the writers also, once in a while, helped David with a script problem. He’d come into the writers’ offices and present the issue; then they’d pitch solutions. If he liked a writer’s solution, he’d walk out without another word. If he hated a writer’s solution, he’d walk out without another word. The writers never knew which had happened until later, when they saw the script. Once, for instance, David came into a room full of writers and said he was writing a script about a contest in which the three guys would see who could abstain from masturbation for the longest. But he needed a story for Elaine.
One of the writers suggested that Elaine participate, too. David had, of course, already considered that, but he needed the right way to challenge her. “Who would be the guy that Elaine would be hot for?” Hot enough, in other words, to take her out of the running.
One of the writers knew: “John F. Kennedy Jr.”
In this case, David walked out and went right back to work, writing that into the script that would become “The Contest.”
As each new season began, the writers knew their goal: Get time with Larry and Jerry to pitch some stories. Get into that office where the two worked with their desks pushed together, and get enough material approved to write a script. Assignments didn’t happen here like they did on other sitcoms.
&n
bsp; Pitching them was difficult, especially when it came to pleasing Larry. When he was bored, which was most of the time, he’d stretch one of his shoulders in circles, one direction and then the other. To reject an idea, he’d say, “No, I don’t love that one.” If he hated something, he’d say, “I could see that on another show.”
Both Larry and Jerry loved a quick pitch that came through in one or two sentences. Anything longer and they drifted off because they knew an idea too convoluted couldn’t be that funny.
AFTER EACH RAUCOUS TABLE READ, David held court in the office he shared with Seinfeld. The two would sit at their facing desks, surrounded by writers sitting on chairs and sofas. The network reps would find themselves with no place to sit—perhaps by design. A rep might offer a small suggestion: “Jerry’s too harsh in this scene.” David would fidget with the golf club he kept in his office, then answer: “Nah, I don’t think he’s that harsh.” Occasionally he might promise to work on it. No demands, no arguments. David and Seinfeld were in charge now that they were on their way to their vaunted Thursday-night time slot and No. 1 ratings ranking.
The writers braced themselves, however, for a confrontation with the network over “The Contest,” that masturbation episode David had been working on.
The trick, in a broadcast situation comedy, was to launch this as a plotline without offending standards and practices. Thus George explains it to his friends this way: “My mother caught me.” Doing what, Jerry asks. “You know. I was alone. I stopped by the house to drop the car off. . . . My mother had a Glamour magazine. . . . So one thing led to another. . . .” George explains that his shocked mother screamed, fell, threw her back out, and ended up in traction at the hospital.
But the real action begins when George says to his friends, “I’ll tell you one thing. I am never doing that again.”
“What, in your mother’s house?” Elaine asks. “Or altogether?”
“Altogether.” George’s certainty elicits groans all around. “What, you don’t think I could do it?”
“Well,” Jerry says, “I know I could hold out longer than you.”
George smirks. “Care to make it interesting?”
George, Jerry, and Kramer wager $100 each on who can hold out the longest. Elaine wants in, too, but the guys balk. “It’s easier for a woman not to do it than a man,” Jerry protests. “We have to do it. It’s part of our lifestyle.” But they relent, as long as she gives them odds; she’ll put up $150.
To keep this up as the main plotline in a prime-time network television show, the Seinfeld writers had to come up with a euphemism for masturbation. In fact, they went one better: They came up with a new term that meant something new. To abstain from masturbation was to be “master of your domain.” This allows the characters free and easy discussion of their sexual thoughts and exploits throughout the episode without one dirty word. Part of the humor came from the script’s abstinence from even the word “masturbation,” much less anything more graphic. An early draft had George using the word “tugging,” but even that was cut. Kramer caves because of the woman walking around her apartment naked with her shades open, and later sleeps with her. Elaine caves when she stands behind John F. Kennedy Jr. in a workout class. Sly scenes depicting each character in bed at night clarify the status of everyone in the contest: Those who are still “masters” toss and turn, while those who have been satisfied sleep well.
As with most Seinfeld plotlines, it came from a real-life bet David was involved in. (He claims to have won.)
The table read for “The Contest” had gone well, with even more laughs than usual the first time through. Still, the subject matter left the writers with little doubt that the network would protest. Louis-Dreyfus, meanwhile, kept waiting for the executives to object specifically to her character’s participation in it. A woman talking about masturbation on prime-time television seemed like an obvious place to draw the line.
Instead, a shock. “It’s perfect,” the network reps said. “Don’t touch it.” They had come a long way since the showdown over “The Chinese Restaurant.”
The episode helped Seinfeld win its first Emmy, and was often cited as the show’s breakthrough episode. “Master of my domain” became Seinfeld ’s first catchphrase.
ANDY ROBIN GOT HIS FIRST Seinfeld script assignment in the fourth season, after he was already a fan of the show. Robin felt a kinship with David and Seinfeld. Even though he was in his twenties—with a boyish handsomeness and dimples that made him look even younger—he loved stuff from the ’50s and ’60s, smooth crooners like Johnny Mathis and Petula Clark, the ’69 Mets. He knew Seinfeld was the kind of operation where he could throw some Burl Ives into a script, and Larry and Jerry would get it.
Robin had come to Los Angeles to work for Tom Gammill and Max Pross, who’d eventually also write for Seinfeld, but at the time ran a sitcom called Great Scott!, starring a young Tobey Maguire. While Robin worked on his script for Gammill and Pross, he got a call from the Seinfeld office saying they were ready for him to submit some stories. Soon, Great Scott! was canceled, and all three guys headed over to the Seinfeld staff.
Robin had been editor of the Harvard Lampoon and worked at Saturday Night Live as a writer. He knew he’d stumbled onto something big with Seinfeld, his favorite show. He felt a huge responsibility to help keep the show so great. How would he maintain that level of quality? Or would he be the one to ruin it?
Now he couldn’t write a thing without ripping it apart. He grew hypercritical of others’ work on the show as well—that whole thing where you don’t want to be a member of any club that will have you.
He found that desperation led to some bizarre pitches, none more so than the one that became his first episode, “The Junior Mint.”
He had some reasonable plots lined up: Jerry dates a woman whose name he can’t remember; Elaine visits an old artist boyfriend in the hospital to rekindle their romance when she sees he’s lost a lot of weight; George buys a piece of art by Elaine’s paramour in case he dies in surgery and the value increases. Tying them all together was the tough part, and out of that difficulty came one of the series’s first memorably absurd moments, when Jerry and Kramer observe the artist’s surgery from the gallery above while they snack on Junior Mints, eventually dropping one into the open body cavity below.
Robin was happier at Seinfeld than he had been back in New York at Saturday Night Live. At SNL, he found himself in a surprisingly corporate environment, nothing like the creative haven he’d expected. Instead, all anyone talked about were ratings. Everything felt overly cautious and bureaucratic, full of fiefdoms. People who had been there for decades were protective of their power.
After he landed at Seinfeld, he was happy he had escaped for sitcoms. But now, with his very first Seinfeld script, he was sure he had wrecked his career, and possibly an entire sitcom, with this dumb Junior Mint plotline. Robin couldn’t believe David had approved it. As he went to his office to write his script, Robin thought, This is crazy. People would say, “They let some amateur in and he came up with this stupid, unsterile-hospital-environment story.”
He called David while mid-draft and said, “I just realized, this can’t happen.”
David’s response: “Just write it.”
When Robin had finished with it, he was proud of one part: the story line in which Jerry couldn’t remember the name of the woman he was dating. Robin always forgot people’s names, so that idea came naturally to him.
In the episode, Jerry tries to find out his girlfriend’s name through acts of subterfuge, like digging in her purse. She mentions that her name rhymes with a female body part. Exasperated, he guesses: Is it Mulva? Maybe Bovary? No, but she realizes: “You don’t know my name, do you?”
Jerry finally figures it out when she leaves in a huff, and he shouts his final guess out the window after her: It’s Dolores. (We don’t know for sure, but we assume he’s right.) Could this have been the first network-television acknowledgment of the clitori
s? It seems likely. Cloris had been the scripted choice for her real name, but when the warm-up comedian asked the studio audience, just before the taping, to guess the woman in question’s name, someone guessed Dolores. David and Seinfeld decided that was a better choice and subbed it in at the last minute.
Director Tom Cherones liked Robin’s “Junior Mint” script more than its author did. He always enjoyed Seinfeld’s weirder little directorial challenges, none more so than the climactic fall of a piece of candy into a body mid-surgery. The quarter-size chocolate disk wouldn’t show up on camera while in flight, so he shot a York Peppermint Pattie—about four times the size—instead. Viewers wouldn’t be able to tell the difference without other objects in the shot to allow for comparison.
As the episode proceeded through the production process, Robin was shocked that no one raised an objection. The audience at the taping laughed, but he figured that was just because they were excited to be on the Seinfeld set. He saw the edited version and still hated it. Finally, it aired. And though the public revolt he expected did not happen—many fans and critics loved the episode—he was still certain he had ruined the show. Regardless of what people thought, he still hated the episode. It wasn’t up to his own expectations of himself or of Seinfeld.
In fact, Junior Mints became almost synonymous with Seinfeld, and Seinfeld himself cited the episode’s success as one of the signs that the show had reached another milestone: If it could pull this off, it could do no wrong. Anything was game. Even Jerry’s own character reached a new level of darkness in this particular script. Once the show’s anchor for normality, TV Jerry was getting closer to the edgier real Jerry. As Kramer begs Jerry to join him in the surgical gallery to observe, Jerry sighs, “All right, all right. Just let me finish my coffee, then we’ll go watch them slice this fat bastard up.” You can see the barely contained glee on Seinfeld’s face at getting away with this line.
Seinfeldia Page 9
