Seinfeldia

by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

  Being a guest star had made Stoller sensitive to the outsiders on the set; he was so often an outsider himself. Once, his heart sank when he heard David say of a guest actor, “This guy has one fucking line and he can’t get it.” Stoller knew how hard it was to do, saying one thing out of context, possibly among actors you’d long admired but didn’t personally know.

  Even as the months dragged on without another script for Stoller, he began to see the time as a learning experience. He realized, for instance, the importance of taking your ideas to the actual person in charge, the person who gets to say yes or no—in this case, Larry David. When Stoller bounced ideas off of his “mentor,” his confidence would fall when the guy said, “I’m very concerned about that, bro, very concerned.” Later, he realized he should have gone straight to David without worrying what anyone else thought.

  After months of striking out with ideas and trying to find David and Seinfeld in the maze of backstage rooms and hallways for pitch meetings, Stoller got at least one more story line in before the season ended. David took it for a subplot on a script he was writing for the episode “The Face Painter.” When Stoller was a kid, his family went to a wildlife park in Miami called Monkey Jungle, and he saw men throwing rocks at the animals. “What are you throwing rocks at monkeys for?” a woman asked. One of the guys responded, “They started it.”

  That became a Kramer story line, and Stoller was thrilled that he got to meet the monkey who appeared on the show. He even had his picture taken with the animal. Because of his social phobias, he had always loved animals. At parties, you could find him with the pets. His time on Seinfeld had, if nothing else, allowed him to get himself a cat because he was off the stand-up circuit and home every night.

  As the sixth season wound down, things did not look good for Stoller to get another season at Seinfeld. He heard Mehlman talking about buying a house and mentioned it to David. “Yeah, that’s not for you,” David responded.

  Indeed, Stoller was not invited back onto the staff for another season. Years later, he’d still have nightmares that he was back in the Seinfeld offices, waiting again to be chosen, having flashbacks to clubs like New York’s Catch a Rising Star, where comics had to wait around and hope for a prime spot. “There was no dream where I’m on staff and it’s working out,” he later cracked.

  But he returned to the set just a year after he’d left—this time, with something specific to contribute.

  In the episode “The Secret Code,” he was cast as a guy Elaine was interested in only because he never remembered her. It was David’s idea to bring Stoller in for the role. After the table read, Michael Richards complimented his acting: “That was good. I do that, too, sometimes, where you hold back.” As if Stoller were Robin Williams or something! To return as a guest star felt like redemption. Everyone seemed happy to see him. Julia Louis-Dreyfus was particularly warm, a blessing since most of his scenes were with her.

  Thanks to that part, Stoller got more guest-part offers than ever: Mad About You, Wings, Murphy Brown, Suddenly Susan, Friends, and many others. People remembered him from the Seinfeld role, and often thought he’d appeared on more than one episode.

  He was one of many whose appearances on Seinfeld—as actors, as characters, or as characters named for them—would change the course of their lives in (there’s no other way to say it) really weird ways.

  7

  The Bizarros

  LARRY DAVID WALKED UP TO Joe Davola at a Robin Hood Foundation fund-raising party in Los Angeles in 1992 and greeted him thusly: “Joe Davola, Joe Davola, Joe Davola, Joe Davola.”

  Davola replied, in his deep Brooklyn accent: “What the fuck are you doing, Larry?”

  “I like your name. Can I use it?”

  Davola shrugged. Sure, why the fuck not?

  Six months later, Davola, now an executive at Fox, got a visit at his office from Castle Rock cofounder Glenn Padnick. Padnick had two fourth-season Seinfeld scripts in his hands, one with a blue cover, one with a yellow cover. Padnick seemed nervous, Davola told me, though he often did. “Joe, you need to read these,” Davola remembers Padnick saying.

  Davola took them home with him that night and tossed them to his wife. “I’m in these Seinfeld scripts,” he said. “Can you read these?”

  She did, and reported back. In them, the character “Crazy” Joe Davola develops a pathological hatred for Jerry out of professional envy; as Jerry is trying to sell a script to NBC at the time, so, too, is Joe. After that, he continues to stalk Jerry and George. “The guy’s a lunatic,” Davola’s wife told him. “He’s nothing like you. But you should do it.”

  Later, people often asked Davola what he’d done to David to deserve such a character named after him. They didn’t realize that he’d not only read the scripts beforehand but also went through quite a process to sign off on them. Davola even had to go to his own boss, Fox chairman Peter Chernin, for his approval. Under Davola’s Fox contract, the network owned his name and likeness, so Chernin had a say. He gave it his okay.

  David’s penchant for using real names and real-life stories in Seinfeld scripts, week after week, without any effort to conceal it, had a magical effect. It constructed a third dimension: There was reality; there was television; and there was Seinfeldia, where elements of both commingled, passed through, and, as the show’s audience grew, enticed fans into feeling like this was more than just another sitcom. This was a feeling, a place, another world, and one they could visit whenever they wished.

  And the longer this went on, the stranger things got.

  AT THE SAME TIME THAT Joe Davola was meeting his script doppelgänger, another onetime Fox executive had his own through-the-looking-glass moment with Seinfeld.

  Seinfeld’s first NBC liaison, Jeremiah Bosgang, had left to work for Fox, cutting some of his hair and losing some of his hair along the way. Now resembling a square-jawed Jason Alexander, he had since quit the executive ranks to follow his comedy-writing dreams. He did a two-week tryout in New York as a writer at Saturday Night Live but didn’t get a job offer. He returned to Los Angeles and instead got a full-time gig writing for Fox’s upstart sketch show In Living Color. At his office one day, he got a call from an actor friend, a guy he knew from back in the days when he himself had been trying to act. “I just got out of the strangest audition,” his friend said. “I was auditioning for a role where the character’s name is Jeremiah Bosgang, over at Seinfeld. A young network executive.”

  When Bosgang hung up with his friend, he tried to figure out what to do next. He hadn’t spoken to David or Seinfeld in the two years since he left NBC. He called George Shapiro. “I just heard that there’s some character on the show called Jeremiah Bosgang,” he said when he reached Seinfeld’s manager.

  “Oh, yeah. This season they’re planning to arc out over the course of the season that Jerry and George are approached by NBC to do a sitcom. It’s going to culminate at the end of the season with them actually casting the cast.”

  “George, wait a minute. How about this? Jeremiah Bosgang as himself! I can do this.”

  “Well, I don’t know. You’re an actor?”

  “George, I toured with Second City when I was in college. I’m trained. I studied acting in New York for years.”

  Shapiro promised to talk to David and Seinfeld and get right back to Bosgang. An hour later, Bosgang’s phone rang. “Listen,” Shapiro said, “I talked to the guys, and they said if you’d like to come in and audition, they’d be happy to see you.”

  “Wait a minute. I’ve got to audition? For Jeremiah Bosgang?”

  Shapiro explained to the former network executive that the network had to approve all casting choices. He needed to go through the same process as everyone else. He had an hour before they finished auditions for the day. “I’m on my way,” Bosgang said.

  He hopped into his car—still the used Mercedes he’d bought from Cherones, still with his credentials on the windshield for the Radford lot, where Seinfeld shot. He drove fro
m the KTTV lot where he worked, up and over the hills to where he’d visited Seinfeld two long years before. He felt like he was going back in time. Unlike when he’d been there, though, the Seinfeld offices now displayed an expensive logo sign and had receptionists.

  The front-desk secretary directed Bosgang down the hall, to the third door on the left. The last time he’d been there, doors weren’t even an option—they didn’t have enough rooms to worry about such luxuries. There, another receptionist greeted him, surrounded by four guys looking over scripts. When he explained that he was there to audition, she asked his name. “Jeremiah Bosgang,” he said, still out of breath from the rush.

  “No, not the character’s name,” she said.

  He smiled. “Actually, I am Jeremiah Bosgang.”

  She looked at him with impatience. She’d dealt with her share of method actors: I am Jeremiah Bosgang! I am Julius Caesar! “Okay, Jeremiah,” she humored him.

  He felt his fellow actors scoot as far away from him as possible when he sat down to wait his turn.

  The door to the casting room opened, and out walked an actor. David and Seinfeld spotted him. “Jeremiah!” one of them called. At least he had been vindicated with this waiting-room crew.

  Bosgang went in and chatted with David and Seinfeld for a bit, explaining that he now wrote for In Living Color and that he would very much like to play himself on Seinfeld. They asked him to read. His official line: “That’s right.” He performed it several times, several ways. Angry. Happy. Confused. “That’s right.” “That’s right.” He nailed it.

  He floated out of the room, thrilled. At last, he had won a role in a major production; he was sure of it. He returned to his office. He didn’t hear anything that day. He didn’t hear anything the next morning. Around 2:00 P.M., with still no word, he called Shapiro.

  “I just don’t know where I’m supposed to go,” he said to Shapiro, “or what I’m supposed to wear.”

  “Well, Jeremiah, I’m sorry, Jerry said he was going to call you.” Oh no. “They decided to go in a different direction with the Jeremiah Bosgang character.” As a comedy writer, Bosgang couldn’t deny the greatness of that line.

  But Shapiro went on to explain: David and Seinfeld didn’t want to imply that any of the characters at the network were real. They wanted the network characters to be free to engage in their share of Seinfeldian weirdness, like, say, the network president wrecking his career after falling for Elaine, or the female executive dating George. So they couldn’t have any obvious crossovers between reality and fiction—like Jeremiah Bosgang playing himself. They had, in fact, decided to change all of the characters’ names to avoid confusion.

  As the episode’s airing grew closer, Bosgang heard through industry contacts that David and Seinfeld had, however, tried to cast actors who looked like their real-life inspirations. He was terrified in anticipation of seeing who played “him.” He felt at least a little bit better when at last a hunky young guy appeared on-screen playing “Jay Crespi,” the character Jeremiah Bosgang had become.

  STRANGE THINGS STARTED TO HAPPEN to Davola early that fall, even before Joe Davola episodes aired. When he went to the set of The Edge, a sketch comedy show Fox was producing, he ran into Wayne Knight, who’d guest-starred in several recent episodes of Seinfeld as Jerry’s nemesis neighbor, Newman. When Knight heard Davola’s name, he looked terrified and tried to avoid Davola in meetings.

  Davola pulled him aside. “Wayne,” he said, “I know about it. It’s not a bad thing.”

  When Davola ran into David at the Emmys at the end of August, David told him, “You’re not in two episodes. You’re in five.”

  When the episodes started to run in September, Davola figured the weirdness was behind him. Granted, the character had gotten worse as the fourth season of Seinfeld progressed: Davola dates Elaine and becomes obsessed with her, cornering her in his lair until she escapes by spraying him in the face with Binaca. There’s also a bit where he dresses like the scariest clown ever. But the real Davola figured he and Seinfeld would now go their separate ways.

  Then he suggested to his wife that they go to Hollywood hot spot the Ivy for dinner one night. “You can’t just call the Ivy an hour before and get in,” she insisted.

  But Joe Davola did.

  From then on, he noticed everyone treating him differently anyplace he dropped his own name. Better restaurant tables, better Clippers tickets, upgrades wherever upgrades were possible. He’d been a well-regarded producer and executive before. Now people thought he was famous. And they were, just possibly, a little frightened of him.

  Once in a while, someone would have the guts to ask, “Are you that guy?” The bold ones would whisper, “What did you do to him?”

  Davola was now constantly explaining: “I didn’t do anything! I did him a favor.” (This was a favah in Davola’s accent.) “He liked me. It’s fine.”

  Every meeting he had: “Can I ask you a question?”

  Davola decided to use his Seinfeld predicament to his advantage. He’d long harbored a crush on Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Now that he was part of the Seinfeld family, he sent her a dozen roses, signed, “From the real Joe Davola.” He figured she knew the origins of the character’s name.

  After a few weeks went by, Davola heard no response. He mentioned it to George Shapiro. “I didn’t even get a note or a call! I was trying to make this funny gesture.”

  The following week, he got a signed photo from Louis-Dreyfus: “To the real Joe Davola: Leave me alone!” Until Shapiro mentioned it to her, she’d thought the flowers were from a real stalker.

  FOR THE MOST PART, VIEWERS didn’t yet get the joke that Seinfeld was in the habit of taking reality, chomping it up, and spitting it out funnier than before. Then they saw the episode that fourth season when Jerry is supposed to pitch executives at NBC an idea for a show in which he could star. He asks George to help him brainstorm.

  George has an idea as they chat: “See, this should be the show. This is the show.”

  “What?” Jerry doesn’t get it.

  “This. Just talking.”

  “Yeah. Right . . . Just talking? What’s the show about?”

  “It’s about nothing.” This is the best that George can come up with.

  “No story?”

  “No, forget the story.”

  “You’ve got to have a story.”

  “Who says you gotta have a story? Remember when we were waiting for that table in that Chinese restaurant that time? That could be a TV show.”

  With that scene, Seinfeld would forevermore be known as the show “about nothing”—to the annoyance of most who worked on it—and a new level of meta infiltrated the series. Despite his initial misgivings, fictional Jerry gives in to his desire to have something to pitch, even if it’s nothing. Or maybe he’s giving in to his penchant for wordplay: “Nothing?” George says.

  Jerry replies, “I think you may have something here.”

  George takes command when the two go in for their meeting with the NBC executives. “I think I can sum up the show for you with one word: nothing.” He continues, explaining, “Nothing happens on the show. You see, it’s just like life. You know, you eat, you go shopping, you read. You eat, you read, you go shopping.”

  Russell Dalrymple, the NBC president based on Warren Littlefield and played by character actor Bob Balaban, is skeptical. “No stories? So, what is it?”

  George, invigorated by the challenge, responds with a question: “What did you do today?”

  “I got up and came to work.”

  George is not deterred. “There’s a show. That’s a show.”

  “Well, why am I watching it?” Dalrymple asks.

  “Because it’s on TV,” George replies.

  “Not yet.”

  THIS PROGRESSED OVER SEVERAL EPISODES until the 1992–93 season culminated in a spectacular in-joke of a finale in which Jerry, the fictional sitcom, becomes a “reality,” filmed with other actors playing the characters withi
n the show. Jeremy Piven, doing double duty at the same time on the acclaimed Larry Sanders Show, plays fictional George as a balding ranter in sweatpants and thick glasses. (George is not amused by the portrayal.) Kramer, mimicking his real-life inspiration, demands to play himself and is denied. Larry Hankin, who also read for the role but lost out to Richards, plays the actor who plays Kramer.

  The layers of the plotline folded into and out of one another, into real life and then fiction and back again. Seinfeld writers Bill Masters and Steve Skrovan had planned to pitch Larry David a story idea at work, but David had to stay home sick that day, one of the rare times he didn’t make it to the office. David asked Masters and Skrovan to come to his house for the meeting instead. They did, and just as they started to pitch, David ran to the bathroom. The writers could hear him vomiting.

  “So, how do you think it’s going?” Masters said to Skrovan. Both were laughing as David returned.

  When they explained their laughter to David, he said, “This is good.”

  “Did you like the pitch?” Masters said.

  “No, it’s terrible,” David said. “But this, what just happened, is good.”

  That scene ended up in the episode “The Shoes,” in which George and Jerry go to Russell Dalrymple’s apartment for a pitch meeting because the network president is ill after eating some bad pasta primavera. The episode was the first Seinfeld to air in its Thursday-night spot following Cheers.

  In the end, TV Jerry’s deal falls apart—because of Elaine. Dalrymple falls in love with her and joins Greenpeace to impress her, then dies at sea. (Balaban later said his character was initially supposed to sleep with Elaine and give her her first orgasm. But as an actor, he enjoyed having a good death scene, complete with pretending to be on a boat in front of a green screen on the soundstage, while the crew sprayed him with water.) The new network president pulls Jerry off the air.