Seinfeldia

by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

  After the episode, however, Robin could barely function, so cowed was he by the pressure of working on Seinfeld. The acclaim for “The Junior Mint” made matters worse, pressuring him to top what he’d done on his first try. He often started a script, then gave up on it about two-thirds of the way through when it didn’t click. He didn’t feel much support from fellow Seinfeld writers, given the solitary way the Seinfeld staff worked. David and Seinfeld were too busy to take much time for mentoring, and Robin’s fellow writers were all working on their own pitches and scripts.

  GAMMILL AND PROSS—WHO WERE both in their mid-thirties and looked like an older Clark Kent and a fair-haired suburban dad, respectively—were thrilled to land at Seinfeld after Great Scott! ended. They had met while at Harvard, working on the Lampoon, and had been writing partners ever since. They were New Yorkers who’d moved to Los Angeles in 1987 to work on It’s Garry Shandling’s Show—a Showtime sitcom with some proto-Seinfeld qualities: a neurotic comedian who plays “himself” and a tendency to go meta. When Seinfeld first started, they hadn’t watched, because they had just finished working on Shandling and needed a break from anything close to it.

  But by the fall of 1992, when they were struggling to keep Great Scott! afloat, they would watch Seinfeld every week and wish they were working there instead of on their own show. Everything they saw on Seinfeld was what they wished they could do, and it looked so effortless. Among the few people who were watching Great Scott! was Jerry Seinfeld, who liked it enough to do a cameo appearance. When he shot the scene, he told Gammill and Pross, “When your show is canceled, and it will be, you should come over and work on our show.”

  Their résumés contained the usual stepping-stones to Seinfeld: Saturday Night Live, Letterman (where they first met Seinfeld, who was doing some of his late-night stand-up appearances). Their experience with showbiz in early-’80s New York made them a great match with David and Seinfeld. “Seinfeld was a show written in the ’90s about people remembering their New York lives in the ’80s,” Pross later told me. “So we had that in common with those guys.” In fact, they loved working at Seinfeld because it made them miss New York a little less: They could stroll “New York Street” (the set built to look like a Manhattan block), read the Village Voice and the New York Times in the office, and make obscure references to local New York television from the ’60s.

  When they finally reached refuge at the Seinfeld offices, they were at home, in a place where a lunchtime anecdote they told about a friend who’d worked on Wall Street and ate his Snickers bars with a knife and fork could become a script. That time Gammill bought a cigar store Indian, and his Native American next-door neighbor told him it was “like having a lawn jockey”? (Historically, lawn jockey statues were black and commonly used in the South—not considered in great taste for a modern liberal.) Another script.

  EVEN THOUGH THAT FOURTH SEASON demonstrated that Seinfeld was on an upward trajectory—in terms of both ratings and creativity—Mehlman, now an old veteran among the writers, saw signs of a direction he didn’t like—“The Bubble Boy” episode, for instance. It parodied the simpering news coverage of immune deficiency patients who had to live in quarantine bubbles, who were always featured in heart-tugging portraits. Seinfeld’s Bubble Boy, however, was obnoxious. To Mehlman, the story exemplified a move away from the show’s original intent to examine the smallest conflicts of everyday life and toward high-concept zaniness.

  Of course, he still liked working on Seinfeld, and he didn’t mind the social benefits, either. He didn’t always know if the beautiful women dated him for his connections or because they liked him. But he got to date a lot of them. Even one of his friends, a lawyer unconnected with show business, got dates by saying he was friends with a Seinfeld writer.

  Mehlman tried to preempt any awkward conversations about whether a date might end up inspiring an episode by saying, “Well, if you say some really funny things, that would be great.”

  Despite his disagreements with the show’s direction, Mehlman churned out winning scripts as fast as he could. “The Virgin” had Jerry in the unlikely position of dating a sexually inexperienced woman, played by the beautiful up-and-coming British actress Jane Leeves. “The Implant” had Jerry dating a woman whom he suspected of having fake breasts, played by the beautiful up-and-coming American actress Teri Hatcher. The idea for that one struck Mehlman while he talked to a female friend at a health club; when she caught him staring at a woman walking by, the friend said, “They’re fake.” At first, he considered using it as a throwaway interaction between Elaine and Jerry, but then he realized he could make it into an entire story line.

  Both of his episodes generated next-day discussions, particularly the parting shot from the “Implant” girlfriend: “They’re real, and they’re spectacular.” Mehlman was sure he’d now cracked the code of Seinfeld scriptwriting. He had four or five funny scenes that he’d come up with himself and gotten into that one script for “The Implant.” (The same episode also included an oft-quoted rant against “double-dipping” chips at a party.) He knew how to do this.

  But when he headed back to the drawing board for his next episode, he realized he knew nothing. Every episode was just as hard as the last. Still, he soldiered on.

  Mehlman’s script for “The Smelly Car” had Jerry battling the lingering body odor of a valet attendant—a story line swiped from the life of his lawyer friend. The friend constantly pitched Mehlman ideas for Seinfeld scripts, but they were never good. Then one day he told a story about a valet with B.O., never mentioning Seinfeld. Mehlman knew his friend had finally, unknowingly, provided him with a winner.

  Mehlman’s knack for conversation-starting episodes became one of Seinfeld’s defining trademarks.

  As he drove to work in his dark blue 1992 Saab 900 convertible one day in 1995, he heard an NPR report on his radio: The Today Sponge had been discontinued. He thought, Oh my God, what if Elaine is a sponge user? She would, of course, have to buy out the entire West Side’s supply. But she’d have a limited number, which would change her whole screening process.

  This was the kind of story inspiration that came straight from the heavens.

  In fact, Elaine’s trendsetting carried over into real life on this issue, causing many of the Today Sponge’s 6.4 million fans to agitate for its return to shelves. At the time, the manufacturer had said the stoppage was a temporary one, to fix a “water filtration” problem with the design, but Elaine had been right to hoard them; six years later women were still lamenting the sponge’s demise to Ms. magazine. “I should have stocked up early like Elaine,” one woman told the publication in 2000.

  LIFE WAS ALSO ABOUT AS good as it could get for Bill Masters, the former Cosby Show warm-up turned Seinfeld writer for the fourth season.

  He had, along with fellow writers Steve Skrovan and Jon Hayman, written a memorable episode that season called “The Movie,” with the four main characters continuously missing one another while they try to meet up at a theater. His wife gave birth. A comic friend of his, upon hearing that Masters now wrote for Seinfeld, marveled, “You know, you’re writing for The Mary Tyler Moore Show of our time. It’s that good.”

  Masters had gotten to appear in another episode, “The Airport,” playing the shuttle-van driver who picks up Elaine and Jerry. Even though Masters had plenty of stand-up experience, he knew he always froze when he had to do something on camera. Still, he didn’t want to say no to Larry David. His instructions were complicated, too, for a bit part: After Elaine and Jerry load their stuff into the van, he was supposed to say, “Okay!” and then hit the gas. He was terrified he would screw it up somehow and ruin his writing career forever. As it came time to shoot, crew members were standing within inches of where Masters had to drive. Cherones told him, “Just floor it and go!” He worried he’d kill them all.

  Finally, the cameras rolled. He said his line. He floored it. He didn’t hit anyone. One take. Cherones called it—on to the next scene. He was
a success.

  His year at Seinfeld had turned out okay.

  Then, in the summer of 1993, after the fourth season had ended, Masters got a call from Jerry and Larry telling him he wouldn’t be invited back to the staff the following year. David said they’d wanted to keep him, but felt funny choosing some of that season’s writers and not others. So they’d clear the deck of everyone except Mehlman, who’d been around longer. Masters wondered if David just said that to be nice, but a yearly staff purge was, in fact, standard practice at Seinfeld.

  In any case, Masters felt okay about leaving Seinfeld. It had saved him when he needed it most, and now he was on his way to a career in television. Even though he’d been too busy at Seinfeld the previous year to see what was going on with other shows, he felt confident he could get another job. In fact, he soon had a job writing for the sitcom Grace Under Fire, starring another comedian, Brett Butler.

  Robin left of his own accord. Despite his success with “The Junior Mint,” he remained disenchanted with show business and his own writing.

  AN NBC EXECUTIVE CALLED LARRY David and Jerry Seinfeld with an idea leading up to sweeps month in fall 1994, the beginning of the sixth season: The network wanted to have a blackout-themed night that would span all of the Thursday lineup. Now known as “Must See TV,” the night was a powerhouse on the rise. It included Friends, a new show about six comely twentysomething friends in New York City; the two-year-old Mad About You, starring Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt as a young couple; and Madman of the People, a destined-to-disappear sitcom in which Dabney Coleman played an irascible newspaper columnist. All the shows took place in New York City. So, you see, they could all experience the same blackout. Characters from one could even appear in another! And somehow, the suits figured, viewers would just love this.

  When the appointed Thursday came, there it was: On Mad About You, Jamie causes the blackout while trying to steal cable; on Friends, Chandler gets stuck in an ATM vestibule with Victoria’s Secret model Jill Goodacre; on Madmen of the People, the blackout ruins Coleman’s character’s birthday. On Seinfeld, Jerry dated an Olympian, with no blackout.

  NBC was no longer in a position to push Seinfeld too much. When Mehlman heard about the idea, he told David, “You know, we could have, like, the David Schwimmer character from Friends on our show, and we could kill him! Like, he dies! Maybe we should consider this.”

  Perhaps it sounded brutal. Perhaps it seemed as if the Seinfeld writers had grown snotty from their success, with no interest in being team players anymore. But network suits with so-called ideas just rubbed them the wrong way. They were banging their heads against the wall to come up with ideas, rejecting forty-nine out of fifty of their own thoughts every day. Then these NBC guys come up with one idea in a year, and they’re making calls.

  The fact was, the Seinfeld writers were right, and NBC was wrong, in ways that went beyond Blackout Thursday. (Though at least NBC was right enough to let Seinfeld do its own thing.) As Seinfeld’s growing ratings would prove, its detached, sardonic outlook was gathering steam across pop culture. With Johnny Carson stepping down from his longtime late-night throne, a new generation of hosts invaded the airwaves wielding an ironic edge: David Letterman, Conan O’Brien, a young Jon Stewart in his first major hosting gig on MTV. Other fringey shows were getting more mainstream, too, like The X-Files and Twin Peaks. TV was changing, with Seinfeld leading the way.

  FRED STOLLER WANDERED INTO THE thickening cloud of hubris at the Seinfeld offices that season.

  When the stand-up comedian and character actor—who looked like a cross between Seinfeld and fellow comic Ray Romano—showed up at Seinfeld to join the writing staff in its sixth year, he was amazed by the way the writers worked, each completely isolated from the other. It reminded him of homicide cops working their own cases. Even to a socially phobic guy like him, it seemed extreme.

  Soon, he learned that he had to get four story lines approved before he could start even one script: a Jerry, a Kramer, a George, and an Elaine. The real problem was that this required getting David and Seinfeld’s attention for a pitch. In the first few weeks of the season, before shooting started, this wasn’t so hard.

  After that, it felt impossible. (“If a woman doesn’t return one phone call, I’m not like John Cusack holding the boom box outside,” Stoller later told me, turning his overtly whiny delivery onto his favorite comedy subject: his own shortcomings. “You know what I mean?”) One time, he sat outside David and Seinfeld’s office for an hour, waiting for the door to open. It didn’t until two other writers showed up, went right in, and shut the door again. Stoller went back to his office and napped. Another time, he thought he’d take some initiative by mapping out an episode with a story line that had yet to be approved. When David saw it, he barked, “Hey, why’d you write up that outline?”

  David didn’t mean to upset Stoller. Once, after he yelled at Stoller, he apologized, and offered some advice. “You’ve got to be more aggressive,” he said. “These other guys are aggressive. You’ve just got to track me down, give me any idea, throw it out.”

  “All right, now that I’ve got your attention . . . ,” Stoller said, then proceeded to pitch an idea.

  “That’s stupid!” David responded. Stoller hung his head. “I’m sorry,” David added. “I did tell you to throw anything. But that’s stupid, Freddy.”

  DAVID HAD BEEN THE REASON Stoller got the job. The two met back on the New York comedy club scene, waiting in many smoky, sticky-floored rooms together to hear when they would go onstage. But David was a decade older than Stoller, and Stoller had always been intimidated by him. David perhaps took some advantage of that when he routinely greeted Stoller back then with “How are you doing? When’s the last time you got laid?”

  But then Stoller ran into David at a surprise birthday party for Seinfeld writer Steve Skrovan. The two started chatting about what they were up to now. At that time, in 1994, everyone in Hollywood wanted David to read a Seinfeld spec script; another partygoer interrupted David and Stoller’s talk to ask about submitting one. David then asked Stoller, “How come you never wrote a spec script?” When Stoller said he was focusing more on guest-starring roles than on writing, David insisted: “Write one. Nothing will happen, but I will read it.”

  At first, Stoller wasn’t going to bother. But then he realized how lucky he was to have Larry David ask him for a writing sample. He also thought it might be good to have a sample on hand in case any other similar opportunities came up.

  What he wrote then did, in fact, get him a job on Seinfeld. It also meant one assignment for the following season, based on his sample script, revised by David into what would be titled “The Soup.” Like most writers, Stoller mined his own life for the stories: He once bought an open-ended ticket to the United States for a woman he’d met while doing stand-up in London. But when she arrived in America, he felt like she was a different, terrible person.

  In his spec script, Stoller gave that story to Jerry. But David felt ladies’ man Jerry couldn’t stoop so low, so he gave the plot to Elaine instead. Jerry got another story from Stoller’s life: A comedian friend named Bruce had given him an Armani suit and wanted Fred to buy him a meal to pay him back. Fred took him to Jerry’s Famous Deli in Los Angeles, and Bruce got soup and a soda, saying, “I’m going to save the meal for another time.”

  Stoller hoped that he’d get a box of free Armani suits when the episode ran. Other writers had gotten swag from companies whose products they’d mentioned. No such luck this time, though.

  Stoller found pages of the original banter he’d written struck from the final version. (Among the deleted lines were George’s, on Elaine giving her frequent flier miles to a guy she met in London so he could visit her: “When attractive people do things like that, it’s passionate and spontaneous. Any move I make with a woman is desperate.”) Stoller started another episode that never got made, stymied by David’s meticulous attention to the tiniest story questions. A major plotline
hinged on Kramer calling a cruise ship Jerry was on to give him his messages, but David dispatched this with one scrawled note on Stoller’s outline: “Why can’t Jerry call for his messages?”

  STOLLER DIDN’T WANT TO GET back on the stand-up circuit, traveling all over and vying for stage time. But he had been a little nervous about taking nine months out of his acting career to lock himself in a tiny, blank room in the Seinfeld office and do this writing thing. It never occurred to him that he could leverage his Seinfeld experience into other writing jobs, or maybe even into a deal to make his own shows. He saw the Seinfeld job as a way to pocket a regular paycheck for a while and save up.

  As it became clearer that he’d have little to do at this job, he gave up on writing and spent his days wandering around the studio lot, playing pinball at a pub across the street, where he could also get a beer or a taco. He bumped into other comics he knew who wrote for The Larry Sanders Show, Third Rock from the Sun, Just Shoot Me!, and Roseanne. Stoller had no friends at Seinfeld and made none at Seinfeld. One fellow writer (whom he won’t name) pretended to be his mentor, he said, then spent all their time together trying to undermine Stoller. When Stoller approached David’s office, his “mentor” would intercept him and say, “This is not a good time, bro. I’ll read the room. I’m good at reading Larry. I’ll tell you when to go.” Looking back, Stoller is sure he was sabotaged.

  The “mentor” did give him one good tip, though: He told Stoller that Writers Guild members could see movies for free at the Galleria mall in Glendale. Stoller ditched work once to go see The Professional, a thriller about a hit man directed by Luc Besson. So at least his time on Seinfeld wasn’t a total wash.

  When he stayed on the Seinfeld stage, he spent his time bonding with security guards and stand-ins. He became friends with Ruthie Cohen, who played the cashier at Monk’s and, in fact, became the answer to a trivia question: Who appeared on Seinfeld the most besides the four regulars? A widow with no income, she had started doing extra work and ended up with a regular job for nearly a decade, manning the register at the fictional restaurant. Later, when Stoller guest-starred on The Nanny, he got Cohen some extra work on that show as well.