It became clearer that the writers were to function mainly as an idea farm, and they were to harvest these ideas from their own lives. David had already plucked his own past nearly bare by writing most of the episodes so far himself. Mehlman carried a notebook everywhere to write down any little thing that happened that might make a story. As a journalist, he had spent years observing professionally, but he usually noticed things that went on around him, not inside him. For Seinfeld, he trained himself to notice his own smallest thoughts, the things he worried about and obsessed over. For instance, he met a woman he liked, and as they made out, all he could think about was the fact that every woman had her own “kissing system.” Like, lip here, hand here, open mouth, close mouth. Then he realized: He wasn’t in the moment, even when kissing a beautiful woman. He was merely observing his own life. Seinfeld had consumed him.
JASON ALEXANDER’S SENSE OF INDIGNATION was raised to George Costanza levels once again. He would have no more of this.
He had never confronted Larry David with a problem, but now, in the fall of 1991 as Seinfeld’s third season began, he had to. Alexander had felt a little territorial ever since Julia Louis-Dreyfus had been cast in the second episode. In the third episode of the third season, his worst fears came true: The new script, called “The Pen,” contained neither Michael Richards nor Alexander. Just Jerry Seinfeld and Louis-Dreyfus’s Elaine, going to visit Jerry’s parents in Florida. Alone.
Alexander didn’t need this TV career. He had won a Tony on Broadway! He still had a New York apartment. He could go back. He didn’t want to waste a minute in Los Angeles that he didn’t need to.
After the table read for the episode, Alexander pulled David aside. “If you write me out again,” he said, “do it permanently.” David stammered, tried to explain the difficulties of servicing every character equally every week. “Don’t tell me your problems,” Alexander snapped. “If you don’t need me here, I don’t want to be here.”
At the same time, Louis-Dreyfus was routinely voicing her own similar complaints to David: She felt that she wasn’t getting enough quality screen time. In this case, the producers saw her point, though they were still struggling to find exactly the right comedy groove for Elaine.
Louis-Dreyfus even came into the writers’ office crying one day to talk to producer Larry Charles, David, and Seinfeld about her concerns that she wasn’t being used to her fullest abilities. Though she clocked plenty of face time in front of the camera, she felt she wasn’t getting material as funny as the boys’. They promised to do better.
But George was also a breeze to write for; the basis for him was walking around the set all the time. Jerry’s character, too, often came naturally—he was, after all, among the first sitcom characters to acknowledge his similarity to the actor who played him by sharing the same first and last name. Kramer’s dual poles—real-life inspiration Kenny Kramer (though Richards never studied him the way Alexander studied David) and Richards’s genius with physical comedy—made him a rubbery character who could stretch to almost every extreme.
Then there was Elaine.
Of course she was distinctive, and played by the gifted Louis-Dreyfus, whose giant smile and dark hair made her the object of many a secret crush in the writers’ room (and among many of those watching at home). But her story lines came the hardest for a lot of the writers. Most of them were men, for starters, though that didn’t stop them from throwing her story lines inspired by their own lives—that was part of what gave her such a liberated persona. In fact, David and Seinfeld told writers to feel free to write her “as if she were a guy.” While she was no doubt a heterosexual woman, her femininity did not stop her from doing whatever she pleased.
What vexed many writers about her more than her gender was her functionality. She was the most well-adjusted of the Seinfeld characters: She was the only one who almost always had a steady day job, a robust dating life, plenty of confidence, and even friends outside the core four. She was smart; she’d graduated from Tufts (and that was, as she often noted, her safety school). Perhaps Elaine’s functionality was what made Louis-Dreyfus’s portrayal of her seem so effortless; Richards reported that he “never saw a process with Julia when she worked.”
Peter Mehlman felt like he was the only one on staff who liked to write for Elaine and Jerry—the more “normal” characters—than for George and Kramer. He loved to see what new shades Louis-Dreyfus would bring to his lines. He developed a theory that Elaine was the linchpin in the entire series, that if she didn’t have a strong story line in an episode, it would fall flat no matter what else went on. He had the most trouble with Kramer stories, in fact. It took him a few years to figure out that if he had what he thought of as an “extra” Jerry story lying around, he should give it to Kramer. A normal story for Kramer would become big and cartoony through Richards’s acting. Thus an idea originally intended for Jerry—switching to boxer shorts due to low sperm count, for example—became a Kramer idea, and seemed wackier for it.
One of the Seinfeld cast’s most remarkable feats, in the end, was that almost none of these cracks showed in the final product. The actors nailed their characters so completely that no one watching could imagine any of them feeling shortchanged in the funny-line department, or experiencing an identity crisis via the writers. Viewers could hardly guess that a story line meant for one character had been transferred to another. The Seinfeld cast and writers were on their way to becoming legendary, and for good reason.
5
The Production
A BEAUTIFUL BRUNETTE LOOKS INTO George Costanza’s eyes and pleads, “Save the whale, George. For me.” A hopeful crowd surrounds them on the beach where a whale emergency has occurred. Only a marine biologist can rescue this magnificent creature. Unfortunately, George has told this woman that he is a marine biologist. But he is not a marine biologist. George has, once again, lied for personal gain. And once again, he will not cop to the truth, even when caught in the most incriminating circumstances.
He heads, with grand purpose, straight into the ocean.
The audience titters, expecting more. But the script is supposed to end there. On Seinfeld, however, the script should end with a huge laugh. A wow moment.
It would be another long night on the set of Seinfeld.
Seinfeldia was not built on lukewarm audience reaction. It needed a wow moment. A ho-hum ending meant pitching ideas on the shoot; any and all good ideas were welcome. The producers huddled, then Larry David asked Jason Alexander: “How long would it take you to learn a monologue?”
Soon, Alexander was presented with new pages. He focused his nearly photographic memorization skills on those pages, then settled into the gang’s favorite coffee-shop booth opposite Seinfeld and Michael Richards. The cameras rolled.
George speaks. “I don’t know if it was divine intervention or the kinship of all living things, but I tell you, Jerry, at that moment, I was a marine biologist.” A solid laugh. “The sea was angry that day, my friends. Like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli.” An even bigger laugh. “I got about fifty feet out, and suddenly, the great beast appeared before me. I tell you, he was ten stories high if he was a foot. As if sensing my presence, he let out a great bellow. I said, ‘Easy, fella!’ . . . And then, from out of nowhere, a huge tidal wave lifted me, tossed me like a cork, and I found myself right on top of him, face-to-face with the blowhole. I could barely see from the waves crashing down upon me, but I knew something was there. So I reached my hand in, felt around, and pulled out the obstruction.”
He produces one of Kramer’s golf balls from his pocket to bring back the episode’s other story line. “Is that a Titleist?” Kramer asks. One of the show’s longest sustained laughs, and applause, follows.
The moment would become Seinfeld’s favorite of the entire series.
Another episode nailed, another long night. The cast and crew of Seinfeld could pull off such Olympic-level feats of television now—George’s speech not only saved
an episode, it made that episode into an oft-quoted classic—because of the tonnage of talent at work on each side of the camera.
Alexander’s George Costanza was growing into an autonomous being—separate from his creator, Larry David. By the show’s fourth season, Alexander thought of the character as George, not as Larry David in disguise. This George had his very own tendency to snort-laugh—or at least more of a tendency than David had—and to double-take in disbelief.
George couldn’t have been more different from the guy who played him. George was an avid baseball fan who went to work for the Yankees, while Alexander knew nothing about sports. He’d never followed a team in his life. But when Alexander played George, the baseball references flowed like they were straight from a kid who grew up at Yankee Stadium.
George found his own path to some level of personal success over the seasons, too. He’d started the series as a real-estate broker, then fallen into unemployment and lived with his parents, but then he got a great apartment, produced Jerry’s TV pilot, worked in the head office at the New York Yankees, and dated his share of beautiful women. Even Alexander’s own wife asked him at one point, “How are you getting all these girls?”
Maybe it was his charm—or at least his portrayer’s charm, which few of his costars were immune to. Director Andy Ackerman referred to “this little twinkle in his eye that you can’t help but love.” Even Alexander acknowledged that his own sensitivity “became an underpinning of George’s sensitivity.” In the sixth-season episode “The Kiss Hello,” writer Carol Leifer played a bit part as a physical therapist’s assistant. When George, a patient, writes a check to the therapist and hands it to the assistant, Alexander wrote profane messages to Leifer on the small slip of paper, a new one every take, just to get her to crack up. He did not fail.
LIKE SEINFELD, MICHAEL RICHARDS BEGAN his career as a stand-up, though he didn’t get started until after serving two years as an army draftee in the Vietnam War. He graduated with a bachelor’s in drama from Evergreen State College in 1975 after serving, and got his first major break as a stand-up with a spot on Billy Crystal’s first cable TV special in 1979. On Fridays, Richards gained a measure of fame as the cast member on-screen with guest host Andy Kaufman when Kaufman refused to deliver his lines on live TV. Richards brought the cue cards to Kaufman on camera, Kaufman threw a drink in Richards’s face, and a small melee erupted. Richards and other Fridays cast and crew later revealed he was in on the joke.
But Richards made his pre-Seinfeld name, at least around the industry, in his many, many guest spots on TV sitcoms and dramas—Cheers, Night Court, Miami Vice, St. Elsewhere—always stealing the spotlight with his physical performances. His wild, wiry dark hair, expressively lined face, and easy way with a cigar made Kramer into the kind of character who could become an icon.
Richards was sometimes compared to Jacques Tati, a French acrobatic satirist from the 1930s known for his music hall act in which he took mime to a new level. Novelist and performer Colette (known for her book Gigi) wrote of Tati’s Impressions Sportives at the ABC Théâtre in Paris: “His act is partly ballet and partly sport, partly satire and partly charade. He has devised a way of being the player, the ball and the tennis racquet, of being simultaneously the football and the goalkeeper, the boxer and the opponent, the bicycle and the cyclist. Without any props, he conjures up his accessories and his partners. . . . How gratifying it was to see the audience’s warm reaction! Tati’s success says a lot about the sophistication of the allegedly ‘uncouth’ public, about its taste for novelty and its appreciation of style.”
Kramer was idiosyncratic to the extreme. He refused to wear an AIDS ribbon at an AIDS walk. He often talked of a close friend named Bob Sacamano who never materialized. He prepared dinner for guests while in the shower. He authored a coffee-table book—a book that folded out into a coffee table. He watched surgery from the viewers’ gallery. He impersonated the Moviefone voice when his number was mixed up with the service. He told a woman she needed a nose job. He drank beer with a cigarette in his mouth.
For Richards, who was forty when Seinfeld started, Kramer was the role of a lifetime. Richards got audience applause every time he slid, stumbled, or fumbled through Jerry’s apartment door. David eventually requested a preshow announcement to get the audience to stop cheering Richards’s every appearance. The applause breaks were distracting.
When Richards didn’t nail his part, he took on a pained expression that his costars began to recognize. While Alexander, Louis-Dreyfus, and Seinfeld networked with industry types after a taping, Richards escaped to his dressing room, emerging only to do reshoots, which were often requested by him. Richards always thought he could do better, and berated himself if he couldn’t. He always found a way to give lines an extra hit with a gesture or sound effect, a technique he swiped from watching Gale Storm, the star of the 1950s sitcom My Little Margie, in which she played a twentysomething woman living with her widowed father in New York City.
Over the first sporadic months and seasons of working together, Alexander began to understand that Richards was executing a “subtle, powerful reinvention,” as Alexander later put it. “Michael, instead of playing the dumbest guy in the room, decided he’s the smartest guy in the room.” This way—changing a word or two in his lines as he went—Richards showed David and Seinfeld who Kramer could really be and created an evolution for the character, from a shut-in weirdo to a guy who was too cool for normalcy. Other times, these changes came from the comedy gods above. In one of the earliest episodes, Richards accidentally rammed into the doorjamb of Jerry’s apartment as he exited, which caused the studio audience to erupt in laughter. Thus his entrances and exits became one of his signature moves.
Even Richards’s own instincts and his forethought could contradict each other. In the episode in which Kramer had seizures every time he heard Entertainment Tonight anchor Mary Hart’s voice, Richards told Alexander—who was directing the episode—that he didn’t want “to be grotesque about it.” He’d tastefully shake and then fall behind the sofa. As soon as Richards got in front of the audience, however, he nearly destroyed the set with the intensity of his antics. As the audience reacted, he instinctively amped up his performance.
“Dude, now we’re screwed,” Jason Alexander said to Richards. “We’ve just lost the set. Why didn’t you tell me?” But he also understood: That was all part of working with Richards. Preparation and spontaneity in equal, heaping measures.
Richards went to a place of deep concentration where he rarely broke character or laughed while taping, but he was so good his costars couldn’t help cracking up. This caused a vicious cycle; he hated when costars’ laughter broke his momentum. When Alexander laughed during a scene when the three guys go to see an overly serious shaman, Richards begged, “You can’t, please, you don’t know how hard it is for me.” (Because the laughter meant they had to reshoot the scene.) Another time, during a hospital-room scene in “The Junior Mint” with a giggly Louis-Dreyfus and Seinfeld, Richards griped without cracking a smile, “I had a line, if I could just get to it.” Even an uncooperative rooster costar caused him to lash out. The rooster wandered all over the set instead of walking in a straight line down the sidewalk as intended. “Why don’t I just be carrying him?” Richards asked. “This is the dumbest bird I’ve seen.”
Richards’s costars didn’t feel like they knew him, even later, after years on the set together. He often sat in a back corner with his eyes closed, muttering lines, between takes. When he wasn’t doing that, he was walking around backstage, mumbling lines as he poked at the air. But others on the set knew him in strangely intimate ways: Charmaine Nash Simmons, the show’s costume designer, found him to be extraordinarily appreciative of her contributions. Richards worked on Kramer’s look with her, developing the idea that Kramer was wearing the clothing he still owned from the 1960s and ’70s. They chose fabric together for shirts she’d make for him; he needed a few “copies” of each in case one got
ruined in a particularly physical take. This paralleled the several sets of door hardware the crew kept on hand in case Richards took out a hinge during an entrance. Richards also came and got Kramer’s shoes to rehearse in every day on the set as a way of stepping, physically, into his character.
Alexander saw an “insanity” in Richards that allowed him to play Kramer but went beyond the boundaries even of the crazy character. Louis-Dreyfus did more than see this phenomenon; she felt it. Whenever Richards was about to perform one of his great physical comedy bits anywhere near her, she tensed, and for good reason. In one scene, he nailed her in the head with a golf club, leaving a welt just above her eye. Just before the scene, when she expressed her concerns about her own safety, he had told her, “Don’t worry, I’ve never hurt anybody.”
But others relished his methods. Estelle Harris, who played George’s mother, loved to work with Richards because he’d never do a scene the same way twice. Danny Woodburn, who played Kramer’s friend Mickey, enjoyed going off with Richards alone to rehearse the physical gags they often played together, contrasting Richards’s height with Woodburn’s short stature.
Richards faced some strange contradictions as his career took off. He found himself ambushed by paparazzi, but the shots they took were never published in the celebrity tabloids. He felt hurt that the photos didn’t seem to interest anyone, and yet he wore a disguise when he ventured outside his home. He was the least known of the Seinfeld stars as a personality, but he was the one whose classic comedy skills could translate to any audience, any language, time, or place. He also won the most accolades for his showy role: He got Seinfeld’s first acting Emmy, in 1993, and would go on to win two more, enjoying the rare company of Don Knotts, John Larroquette, Art Carney, and Ed Asner as a multiple-Emmy winner in comedy.
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