David lived in the Manhattan Plaza apartment complex in Midtown Manhattan, a subsidized development for struggling artists. Across the hall lived Kramer, another comic, a handsome, laid-back guy with a head full of thick, dark curls. David and Kramer would leave their doors open so that they could wander in and out of each other’s places at their leisure. Kramer wore a bathrobe as he grazed in David’s refrigerator while David watched Knicks and Yankees games. Kramer would ask the score, then leave again. In their more conversational times, Kramer shared tales of his previous and current efforts to make a living—making disco jewelry, managing a rock-reggae band.
Kramer dragged David along on errands, somehow turning David into his unwilling sidekick, to David’s perpetual irritation. “Come take a ride for ten minutes,” Kramer begged. “I’ve just gotta run into this building and pick up a package.” Of course, it was never ten minutes; it was always more like forty minutes, with David stuck in a car by himself. Then Kramer would say he had just one more thing to do, and another one more thing, and before David knew it, it would be 5:00 P.M.
David would cook dinner for comedian friends, promise them dessert—meaning ice cream bars—then scream at Kramer when he found the bars were missing from his freezer. “It’s embarrassing!” he would yell. “I have company!”
Of course, this arrangement worked the other way, too. Because David hated to shop or do dishes, he once decided to reduce all of his food-related accoutrements to one plate, one knife, one fork, and one spoon. With nothing to eat in his apartment, David wanted to be able to “borrow” Kenny’s food without feeling guilty. So he decided that he’d pay his friend for everything he ate. If he ate one Mallomar, he’d figure out how many were in a box and compute how much he owed based on percentage. He wrote it all down on a legal pad and paid Kramer every few weeks.
Kramer witnessed David and Seinfeld at work on early versions of their script, writing them out in longhand with their Bic clear-barrel pens on their yellow legal pads—a practice they would continue throughout the show’s run. At the time, much of their discussion centered on whether to include a Kramer-ish character. Seinfeld worried the wacky neighbor was too cliché, but David was convinced he could make the character fresh. David prevailed. Seinfeld emphasized one thing: He wanted to use Kramer’s real name for the character. It was funnier-sounding than any alternative they came up with.
Despite David and Kramer’s friendly living situation, complications ensued when Castle Rock presented Kramer with a release to clear use of his name. Before David could shoot the script with Kramer’s name in it, he had to have explicit permission from Kenny, it seemed. And the release stipulated that Kramer wouldn’t get a cent for its use.
Kramer would have none of that. Once there was fancy studio paperwork at hand, it seemed to him that there should be some compensation in the offing.
David tried to call his bluff. “We’ll just use the name Bender then.”
Script drafts went through several phases, marked by which name they used for the neighbor character. Bender. Hoffman. Kessler. (A vestigial reference to “Kessler” remained even in the final taped pilot.) But Kramer still felt like the best name. (The character would never go by his first name, they decided, so the “Kenny” part was moot.) David’s and Seinfeld’s musical ears for comedy couldn’t settle for anything else. That plosive consonant K sound is known to be among the English language’s funniest phonemes. (H. L. Mencken argued this in The New Yorker; Neil Simon made this point in his play The Sunshine Boys.) They couldn’t resist.
Finally, Castle Rock ponied up some cash to Kenny Kramer, though he had one more demand: He wanted to play this Kramer fellow.
Absolutely not, David and Seinfeld said.
He signed the contract this time anyway. Hey, a guy had to try, but he had to take what he could get, too. He would, in time, become a symbol of that new dimension, the first person who could pass freely from real life into Seinfeldia and back again.
WHEN THE NBC EXECUTIVES READ the pilot script, they okayed it with yet another shrug. It had a sensibility about it. It seemed fun. That’s what pilots are for: to see how the script works out in the flesh.
David would write the show but didn’t even consider starring as the character based on himself. (How can I write and act at the same time? he asked himself, even though Jerry planned to do exactly that.) So he needed a stand-in character to engage in the comedic dialogues that he and Seinfeld had conceived as the show’s centerpiece. For this purpose, Larry David created George Costanza. David and Seinfeld got his last name from Seinfeld’s real-life New York friend Mike Costanza, another name they found funny. David and Seinfeld had a rough idea of who George would be: at least a little bit of David himself, but more than anything, they were looking for someone who could serve as a counterpoint to Seinfeld’s character. Castle Rock executives had complained during early drafts of the pilot that George and Jerry were too similar. David wondered why the two guys would be friends if they weren’t similar, but also saw the sense in having two main characters who were distinguishable from each other.
The producers and casting director Marc Hirschfeld saw dozens of actors who fit the basic age parameters. Stage actor Nathan Lane, sitcom vet Danny DeVito, indie film actor Steve Buscemi, bit-part actor David Alan Grier, comedy writer Brad Hall, Top Gun costar Anthony Edwards, and Seinfeld’s actor friend Larry Miller read for the role. Stand-up Robert Schimmel auditioned as well, but spent the whole time picking apart the script—never a great move. Particularly unwise when auditioning for Larry David.
But Castle Rock executive Rob Reiner had seen Jason Alexander in the play Jerome Robbins’ Broadway, and Seinfeld had noticed Alexander’s work in a Neil Simon play called Broadway Bound. And Hirschfeld had cast Alexander in a short-lived 1984 hospital sitcom called E/R. All agreed that Alexander could serve as a perfect physical counterpoint to Seinfeld—short, stocky, and balding to Seinfeld’s beanpole build and thick hair.
Alexander had toiled in the trenches of TV commercials throughout the ’80s, singing and dancing in praise of McDonald’s McDLT and pushing nearly fifty other products, as he said later, “from chicken to carpet fibers.” He had struggled to find a niche as an actor. In his early twenties, casting directors wanted to peg him as “a young Belushi.” He had a baby face but started losing his hair as soon as he hit adulthood. Sometimes he was cast as a Belushi-like wild man; other times he was cast as a suburban dad. On E/R, he played a villainous hospital administrator, even though he was only twenty-four and unlikely to be running an entire institution at that age.
A New Yorker who loved the theater, Alexander hated being in Los Angeles. Eventually, when E/R ended in 1985, he and his wife couldn’t afford to stay because she’d taken a leave of absence from her New York job to come west with him. While his wife went back to work in New York, Alexander stayed at the urging of his agent, who felt like Alexander was just gaining momentum in TV. For four months, he continued to audition. He knew he definitely hadn’t gotten the job whenever the casting directors said, “That’s great!” The more enthusiastically they responded, the less likely you were to get the part. In New York theater, directors would simply say, “Thank you,” no matter how good or bad the audition. In L.A., a veneer of fake niceness covered everything, and it drove him crazy.
Finally, he returned to his wife and New York, vowing never to go back to Los Angeles unless he had a solid job lined up. He was happy to revisit the stage in Neil Simon’s Broadway Bound, then star in a short-lived 1987 sitcom shot in New York called Everything’s Relative. It was the first time he served as one of the leads of a TV show. Reviews were decent—the Christian Science Monitor compared Alexander to a young George Burns, “wearing a squint that seems to be viewing life from far off and almost laughing.” But the show lasted only ten episodes.
In 1989, Alexander starred in Jerome Robbins’ Broadway, playing an aspiring comedy writer. For that, he won a Tony. Having achieved one of his major dreams
at age twenty-nine, he quoted Pippin to his wife after the ceremony: “I thought there’d be more plumes.” He wasn’t sure he had anything left to aspire to.
Amid the hype for Jerome Robbins’ Broadway, Alexander was invited to read for the Seinfeld part from New York via video. He figured actors rarely got jobs by reading on tape for them, so he tried to determine what he could do to stand out. He knew little about the show—just that it would be about how a comedian goes about getting his material. He had only a few pages of the script, which was common practice for New York–based auditions; there, actors often got “sides,” or small packets of just the pages they needed for their part. Alexander knew nothing about the character besides his name and his lines of dialogue for the audition. He interpreted the character as a Woody Allen prototype because the dialogue about misreading women’s signals sounded a little Allen-esque. After working hard at Boston University to lose his native New York accent, Alexander now went right back to it, reading lines in Allen’s nasal, stuttering cadence while he wore wire-framed glasses. (The actor himself could see just fine.)
David and Seinfeld watched Alexander on tape in a Los Angeles screening room with Shapiro and his partner, Howard West. After two lines out of Alexander’s mouth, they knew: That’s the guy. They could see his talent and comedic prowess, as well as his strong acting ability, in just those few lines. They wanted a particularly polished actor to anchor the show against Seinfeld, who had less-developed acting skills.
About a week after Alexander first made the tape, he got a call asking him to come to Los Angeles to audition before Castle Rock and NBC executives. Alexander later said that when he got to the tryout and saw comedian Larry Miller there as well, he thought the audition was “a complete waste of time” because he figured Miller, as Seinfeld’s friend, was a shoo-in; he assumed he was there as a formality, possibly to keep Miller from asking for too much money.
But David gave him a little direction—“Not so obviously Woody, but the glasses, great, the accent, great.” When Alexander read, David could see the chemistry between Alexander and Seinfeld right away. Everyone in the room laughed. Whereas Miller had been good, they could see Seinfeld rise to Alexander’s performance.
Alexander got right into a car afterward and headed to the airport. By the time he landed at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, he had an offer to play George Costanza.
DAVID’S FORMER FRIDAYS COSTAR MICHAEL Richards seemed to Seinfeld like the perfect person to play the Kenny Kramer–like neighbor. Richards had appeared in bit parts on Cheers, Night Court, Miami Vice, and other shows, always stealing scenes thanks to his manic energy and wiry hair. He used his long limbs, rubbery muscles, and expressive face to such a degree that he didn’t need lines to get laughs. He practiced yoga, and the resulting suppleness clearly helped his comedy.
On Fridays, he was known for his one strange contract demand: Give him a thousand pounds of dirt on the set, he said, and he’d do the show. The producers delivered; he used it for a memorable bit he improvised with army toys that lasted an extraordinary seven minutes and involved truly disturbing battle scenes, real fire, and “amputating” a plastic soldier’s destroyed limbs with wire cutters.
Seinfeld knew Richards’s work from Fridays and elsewhere, so he was excited by the possibility that Richards might be available for Seinfeld. David remained doubtful about Richards, who didn’t match up with David’s vision of his neighbor.
Richards, in touch with his intuition, was sure he’d get the part the first time he met Seinfeld at his audition. The magic felt so palpable to him that he didn’t worry about the other guys waiting to read, which included TV regular Tony Shalhoub and character actor Larry Hankin. How could the producers pass up this chemistry? Seinfeld felt it, too: as he later described it, it was “the mysterious hand of the universe going, ‘You two are going to be together.’ ”
Richards worked perfectly as Kramer, the mysterious ne’er-do-well across the hall, who existed apart from the normal demands of humanity. Richards got the character from the beginning: Kramer was a guy who could fit into any situation, make it his own, and make it a little funnier.
Seinfeld had made up his mind. But to get final network approval, Richards had to read for the producers and NBC’s head of entertainment, Brandon Tartikoff. Tartikoff would cram him in between meetings in a suite at the Century Plaza Hotel, a nineteen-story crescent of a luxury hotel in the middle of a Los Angeles business park.
Outside the room, Richards paced the hotel lobby, guests hustling by as he mumbled his lines to himself. Richards exploded into the room from the start, his hyperkinetic energy in full force. David excused himself and listened through the door to avoid throwing his old Fridays friend off. Richards read his lines opposite Seinfeld, confident in their connection. Everything he did elicited screams of laughter, not the least of which included finishing the scene standing on his head.
When Richards left the room, Tartikoff said to the producers, “Well, if you want funny . . .” Richards got the job.
FOR THE FINAL POTENTIALLY REGULAR role, David and Seinfeld had to cast a woman to play the waitress at Pete’s, George and Jerry’s regular diner where they’d have many of their obsessive discussions. At the top of their list was Lee Garlington, a redhead who had mastered a tough-chick, Stockard Channing vibe. When she walked into the audition room, she was surprised to find Jerry and another actor seated at a makeshift dining table, ready for her to deliver her audition lines to them. She was used to reading lines to a camera, with a casting director filling in for the other characters.
When she finished, Seinfeld said to the others, “See, see, what’d I tell you?” Garlington got the feeling she’d get the job, and she was right. Soon, she was rehearsing with Seinfeld, Richards, Alexander, and David at Desilu-Cahuenga Studios in Hollywood. She lunched most days with Richards, Alexander, and Seinfeld, laughing the whole way through.
She enjoyed being the only woman among the main cast. While she hung out with her three costars, she whipped out her new video camera and shot some footage of them goofing around together. A security guard approached. “You can’t videotape,” he warned them, oblivious to who they might be.
Of course, she didn’t get too attached to the new job, either. She’d starred in enough TV pilots to know she couldn’t tell which would work and which wouldn’t.
Alexander had also done his share of pilots and short-lived shows, and he felt the same. Seinfeld asked him, “So, Mr. Experience, what do you think?”
“No way,” Alexander said of the show’s chances. “I think the No. 1 show right now is Alf. Who’s going to watch this? The audience for this show is me, a white guy, Jewish-Italian, who lives in a big city, between eighteen and thirty-two. And I don’t watch TV.”
As soon as Alexander got the full pilot script, he noticed a major difference between The Seinfeld Chronicles and other shows he’d done. The pages contained few to no behavioral cues or stage directions; they had nothing but dialogue. He had no idea what he was supposed to do during all this talking. He and his costars would have to come up with that themselves, lest they end up standing in the middle of the stage, simply reciting line after line. As they rehearsed on the set, he and Richards and Seinfeld started helping one another move around: Maybe go get something out of the refrigerator. Maybe doodle on a notepad.
This process grew in time and eventually helped to build a strong team mentality.
THE RESULTING PILOT EPISODE TURNED out to be a lightweight affair, with only glimmers of potential. Looking back on it, its quiet calm would be shocking to anyone familiar with what the show eventually became. The plot focuses on misinterpreted social cues between Jerry and a female acquaintance he’d met on the road. She comes to town and asks to stay with him. George and Jerry discuss it in the diner and in the Laundromat. Does this mean she wants to sleep with him, or not? (George: “All right, if she puts the bags down before she greets you, that’s a good sign.”) Jerry an
d George, with a bit of input from Kramer, debate this for the entire twenty-two minutes until the ironic conclusion: She takes a call from her fiancé while at Jerry’s place, just as Jerry’s about to make his move.
The inconsistencies with later episodes jump out in the pilot: George comes off as both supportive and better at reading women than Jerry; Kramer knocks before entering Jerry’s apartment. Seinfeld himself is, as he later recalled, uncomfortable as an actor, even when playing a version of himself. The show we’d come to know as Seinfeld only peeks through in this episode’s obsession with social details, its attempt at being an Oscar Wilde for television.
Its first test came at a screening for a few dozen NBC suits—from programming, advertising sales, marketing, management—in the network’s Burbank offices, a regular occurrence for pilots. When the lights came up, anyone could see that The Seinfeld Chronicles was no Cosby Show or Golden Girls—the same room had erupted with wild applause at the end of those pilots. But the executives had laughed throughout The Seinfeld Chronicles, despite its lack of high-stakes story, and noted that the show was fresh, different. Tartikoff wasn’t sure: “Who will want to see Jews wandering around New York acting neurotic?”
He felt he could say this because he was a Jew from New York.
Seinfeld’s biggest network supporter, Rick Ludwin, countered, “I’m not from New York, I’m not Jewish, and I thought it was funny.” As the head of late-night, he had no preconceived notions about what a sitcom should look like. He just responded to anything he thought was funny, and he’d had his eye on Seinfeld’s late-night performances for a while.
Seinfeldia Page 3