Seinfeldia

by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

  He came to the show after five years on staff for David Letterman’s late-night shows—first at NBC, then CBS. But he’d started his career in the office at Saturday Night Live. He had countless stories from two of New York’s TV institutions and the Midtown neighborhood where both were based.

  Among the ideas he pitched in his first season was one based on his time as a receptionist at Saturday Night Live. During his first year in show business, the legendary SNL creator Lorne Michaels was his boss. Feresten had idolized Michaels, and now he found himself down the hall from the man. Michaels needed only glance in Feresten’s direction, and Feresten would flush.

  Feresten found that aside from answering the main phone line in the office, another of his duties was to man the door at the Saturday Night Live after-parties. As he stood at the door late one Saturday, he spotted his boss dancing. What he saw, as he later told me, was Lorne Michaels dancing as if he’d never seen another human dance before. The man heaved and gyrated to a rhythm only he could feel. As Feresten recalls it, Michaels may have even been dancing with Sinéad O’Connor that night—if so, this would have likely been her first appearance on the show, in 1990, not her controversial 1992 performance in which she ripped up a picture of the pope on live television.

  At that moment, Feresten realized Michaels was just another nerdy guy. It endeared Feresten’s idol to him, and allowed him to look his boss in the eye with confidence.

  In Feresten’s eighth-season Seinfeld episode “The Little Kicks,” the dance has more disastrous effects for Elaine: Her staff at J. Peterman, after seeing her dance the same way, loses respect for her. When Jerry and Kramer tell her she “stinks” at dancing, she videotapes herself to see—and wrecks the bootlegged movie Jerry was working on. Feresten even got to give Louis-Dreyfus a little dance lesson during production, schooling her in the singular Michaels method.

  FERESTEN ALSO BROUGHT HIS FAVORITE Midtown lunch spot everlasting infamy via a Seinfeld script.

  The script wasn’t even fully formed when character actor Larry Thomas got a call for an audition to play a character known as “the Soup Nazi.” He got no pages, just a general description of the character and instruction that he’d be reading on the spot.

  It seemed worth a shot, given that it was a chance to be on Seinfeld, so he spent his prep time developing an idea of the character. He practiced imitating Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia. He considered wardrobe: Should he wear a T-shirt, jeans, and an apron, as he expected most of the actors would, or should he go with this crazy thought he had to wear an army uniform? He dug up some fatigues and a beret he had—actors have been known to have silly things in their closets—à la Saddam Hussein. When he and his wife looked at his reflection in the mirror, they both agreed: He had to go with this look. It wasn’t an easy decision, since the rule of thumb was to go in full costume only for commercial auditions. In fact, Thomas had once auditioned for a part on The X-Files as a rabbinical scholar, and even though he’d simply chosen to wear a yarmulke with his regular clothes, the casting director had cracked, “Coming in costume, huh?” But the army uniform was so oddly perfect, and not a “costume” per se; after all, he was auditioning to play a soup chef, not a military man. It would just give Thomas a unique vibe, make him stand out.

  He kept his regular mustache and the bit of extra stubble he’d developed over the weekend for the Tuesday-morning audition. He even wrote himself a line in case he had to improvise: “You, small fry, go to the end of my line or you get no soup.”

  When he arrived at the audition, he indeed saw a sea of T-shirts, jeans, and aprons among his fellow actors. The casting director handed him three scenes of Feresten’s script. He felt great when he saw that the character barked, “No soup for you!” That meant he was on the right page with this character. Maybe it was obvious from the Soup Nazi name, but it still came as a relief.

  Three weeks later, he was called back for a final audition in front of David and Seinfeld. He assumed he’d reprise the three scenes he’d seen at the first reading. He got there just as his audition time struck, and casting director Marc Hirschfeld rushed him into the room. There, Thomas found twenty people. Seinfeld, sitting at the end of the table, greeted him. Thomas stayed in character, as per advice he’d gotten in an acting class with Sheree North (who played Kramer’s mother, Babs). If you’re trying out for an evil character and you come in friendly, it’s hard, North taught him, for producers to make the sudden switch. Now, with his cold demeanor and maniacal army uniform, Thomas would convince the producers that he was either perfect or too crazy to work with.

  Thomas grunted in greeting, then turned to read his scenes with Hirschfeld. Seinfeld cackled in response to his line readings, even louder than Thomas talked. When Thomas reached the end of the third scene, he realized there was still a stack of paper in his hand. There was more given to him to read beyond what he’d already seen. With Seinfeld laughing so much, Thomas decided to ride the momentum and read it cold.

  When he finished, he was asked to wait outside. They brought him back in, and Seinfeld said, “That was funny, but I don’t get why the character is so mean and angry. Do you want to do it again where he has some good moments?” Seinfeld made a motion with his hand to indicate hills and valleys in a performance, a common shorthand in show business and a pet peeve of Thomas’s. The actor didn’t believe every character had to modulate. Some people were extreme. The Soup Nazi, of all people, would be mean all the time, he thought, at least in the moments portrayed on Seinfeld.

  Still, Thomas tried it again, softening on occasion. Seinfeld barely laughed at all this time. The producers asked Thomas to wait again, and Thomas was sure he’d blown it. After he waited for a while, he was sent home without further news. He’d seen other guest stars in the episode get their casting news that day. He knew they were reporting back to the set at 1:00 P.M. to start work, so he figured his shot on Seinfeld was through.

  Out on the street, he stopped at a pay phone and called his wife, an actress, to tell her how it had gone. He recounted how he’d gotten to meet Seinfeld, and how big a part it turned out to be. Even though he hadn’t landed it, they decided to go to lunch to celebrate his big-time audition. As he headed to meet her, his pager went off: his agent. He returned to the pay phone and called; he’d gotten the part after all. “Go to work,” his agent said.

  After he called to cancel lunch with his wife, Thomas headed back to the Seinfeld stage. When he met up with Seinfeld again, the star said, “By the way, forget about the direction I gave you. For some reason, the meaner the funnier for this guy.”

  It turned out Seinfeld had deferred to Feresten on the casting. It had been down to character actor Richard Libertini and Thomas. Seinfeld had worried about Thomas’s thinner résumé, which included only straight-to-video parts and a few tiny TV roles. When Seinfeld asked Feresten to make the call, Feresten chose the actor he called “the angry New York guy.”

  Thomas figured his gambit had worked—as an unknown quantity, he’d kept his edge over the better-known actors by committing to the character throughout the audition process. No one knew that Thomas was easygoing and gregarious outside the role.

  When Thomas reported for duty, director Andy Ackerman told him to keep the mustache and stubble. As rehearsals got under way, Ackerman and the producers weren’t sure the episode worked. David watched a run-through, nervous. Thomas hit his delivery softer, harder, somewhere in between. Finally, something clicked, and it felt right.

  After all that, even when they shot it, none of them realized they had created a national phenomenon. As with other memorable episodes, they just thought they’d gotten through another week and managed to be pretty funny.

  The morning after the episode aired, the phone started ringing at the production office with media requests pouring in from the East Coast: “The Soup Nazi” was a sensation. New York media had caught on to the fact that the show was sending up Soup Kitchen International on West Fifty-Fifth Street, where Ma
nhattanites lined up daily to suffer abuse from soup chef Al Yeganeh in the name of getting a cup of his heavenly broth. (It wasn’t the first time Yeganeh had broken into pop culture; in the 1993 film Sleepless in Seattle, Meg Ryan’s newspaper writer character pitches her editor a feature story on him, though she doesn’t give him a name: “This man sells the greatest soup you have ever eaten, and he is the meanest man in America. I feel very strongly about this, Becky; it’s not just about the soup.”) After America learned of the Soup Nazi, reporters flocked to interview Yeganeh, only to suffer more abuse—and capture him cursing Seinfeld for branding him a Nazi.

  ON THE OTHER SIDE OF the country, thousands of miles from the real New York filled with Soup Nazis and dancing Saturday Night Live producers, an earthquake struck Los Angeles in the early-morning hours of Monday, January 17, 1994. Windows broke, parking structures collapsed, and freeway support columns buckled, their metal skeletons bulging and breaking through their skin. Fifteen seconds later, with two aftershocks, the Northridge earthquake had caused fifty-seven deaths, five thousand injuries, and $20 billion in property damage—one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history.

  Seinfeld was hardly the biggest concern among the casualties, but its set sustained enough damage to shut the show down for two weeks. Instead of shooting an episode called “The Pie” as scheduled, director Tom Cherones drove from his home in Sherman Oaks, through the damaged streets, to the Studio City set. The walls at each end of the soundstage buckled outward, he later told me. The sets were scattered about the stage. The lights, thankfully, remained in place.

  The Seinfeld crew considered getting a stage on the Paramount lot seven miles south, but CBS Studio Center promised to get the lot up and running again within two weeks. Seinfeld stayed put and waited.

  As Studio Center rebuilt, the Seinfeld operation grew. It seemed like the perfect time to get a New York street set. Castle Rock would pay for it, so production designer Tom Azzari went to work designing it. Up until then, Seinfeld had borrowed “New York” streets on other lots, namely those of Warner Brothers and Paramount. Now, Seinfeld would have its very own $800,000 worth of “New York” storefronts.

  That set, combined with Cherones’s New York–based “second unit”—a team assigned to shoot exteriors of buildings and establishing shots in Manhattan—would come to represent Seinfeld’s unique version of New York City. (A Kramer body double was employed a few times to, say, run through the streets of New York or scale a wall.) It was full of real New York landmarks such as Tom’s Restaurant, endless loops of taxi footage, and a Los Angeles apartment building at 757 South New Hampshire Avenue, complete with earthquake reinforcements, that served, improbably, as Jerry’s apartment building.

  WITH SO MANY NEW YORK landmarks showing up on Seinfeld, the show became linked to the city it depicted, taking extraordinary amounts of credit and blame for Manhattan’s real-life fate. New York media embraced it, celebrated it, composed overwrought editorials in its honor, and—in the ultimate form of respect for New Yorkers—picked apart the show’s every misstep. The resulting media circus served to prove John Updike’s observation true: “I am struck by how seriously—religiously, indeed—New Yorkers watch television,” he once wrote. “In other parts of the country, television is taken as an escape from reality; in New York, all things being relative, it is considered a window into reality.”

  This television show did nothing less than play a “central role in the spectacular turnaround in the fortunes of New York City” after its crime-ridden, crack-epidemic-fueled low point in the 1980s, according to a New York Post op-ed. Famous New Yorkers responded accordingly. Rudy Giuliani recorded a cameo on Seinfeld at the height of his victorious run for mayor, taking time out from an intense real-life campaign in 1993—in which he was promising a serious overhaul of city life to combat “panhandlers” and “squeegee men”—to comment on a fictional fat-free-frozen-yogurt scandal brewing on Seinfeld. (The episode, which ran just two days after Giuliani won, reflected his victory. The crew had shot two endings, and if he’d lost, he would have been replaced with actor Phil Morris—who later played the recurring character of lawyer Jackie Chiles—as a campaign worker for Giuliani’s opponent, David Dinkins.) The Yankees welcomed the show’s send-up of its owner, George Steinbrenner, even as a fumpfering idiot. (So did Steinbrenner himself, who’d once shot a cameo on the show that got cut: “I’m impressed with the detail, even down to the names in the Yankees’ parking lot,” he told The New York Times. “I was prepared not to like the show, but I came away laughing my head off.”)

  Seinfeld’s popularity with New Yorkers lay in its ability to address the million tiny humiliations that are collectively called “living in Manhattan”—pleading with the Chinese-food delivery guy to cross his restaurant’s boundary by less than a block to bring you food or having a conversation about the Mets’ chances with a naked guy sitting across from you on the subway. But the love affair ran so deep because of the more fundamental New York–ness at Seinfeld’s core: As New York magazine later said, “All sarcasm, no politics, and, in a ground-rattling reverse, not a single character sought to ingratiate him- or herself to you. Instead, Seinfeld, that Cheez Doodle of urban fecklessness, turned the same face to the audience that New York turns to the country: So? What’s it to ya?”

  Not all New Yorkers embraced it: Locals thought Seinfeld so influential that some, like bohemian artist Penny Arcade, who came up in the city’s downtown scene of the ’70s and ’80s, eventually blamed the show for making the city seem attractive and accommodating to suburbanites who then moved in, gentrifying, chain-restaurantizing, and sanitizing the character right out of Manhattan.

  But this wasn’t the worst thing Seinfeld would be accused of as it reached the heights of its popularity.

  8

  The Seinfeld Nation

  IF YOU WANTED A COMPREHENSIVE list of all the fictional birthdays of Seinfeld’s main characters, Adam Rainbolt and Dave Antonoff could help you with that. Fictional phone numbers, job histories, movie titles, George’s answering machine message, all the foods mentioned on the show, who won “The Contest,” songs featured in episodes, even the sheet music for the bass line of the theme song—all of this was compiled on their “SeinFAQ” Internet page, another consequence of the special passion Seinfeld inspired in its now-massive fan base. They were among the first chroniclers of Seinfeldia, its self-appointed media.

  Rainbolt and Antonoff “met” on the alt.tv.seinfeld message board where fans would post their feelings after each episode, and decided to work together to compile everything anyone could want to know about Seinfeld. The FAQ page was hosted on GeoCities.com—a place where users could publish their own websites, categorized by region and subject. There, Antonoff and Rainbolt cataloged every bit of Seinfeld trivia possible.

  Antonoff was the more obsessive of the two, taping every single Seinfeld episode on VHS, a magnificent feat during the time of complex VCR programming. Rainbolt was a Seinfeld fan with a knack for computers that was rare in 1994, the year he entered college. He’d grown up in rural Arizona playing with computers occasionally, but he found his calling in the Northern Arizona University lab full of boxy gray Macintosh IIs. The first popularly accessible web browser, Mosaic, had been released the year before, allowing personal desktop computer users their first easy, intuitive way to get online. Rainbolt declared his major in management information systems and decided to ride this Internet thing wherever it led.

  When Netscape Navigator was released in 1994, it made surfing online—and, in particular, building online communities—even easier. As more users got online who weren’t strictly tech-heads, the Usenet system—a discussion network allowing anyone with Internet access to post messages for public viewing and debate—experienced an influx of “civilian” content. Within Usenet, there were several categories to denote content, including recreation (rec.), science (sci.), and computers (comp.). A catchall category known as alt. included an unorganized heap of
subjects, such as television. If you wanted to find Seinfeld discussions, for instance, you would know to go to alt.tv.seinfeld.

  Because Netscape had a built-in newsgroup reader, it made surfing these discussion threads that much easier for non-programmers. FAQs soon popped up as a way to simplify threads, tackling some topics that tended to come up over and over.

  Rainbolt liked screwing around online, and he liked Seinfeld, even though he “didn’t even know what Jewish people were,” as he later told me. He saw the show as a link to his grandmother, who had been a nursing student in New York City before she moved to Arizona. He’d started watching Seinfeld in its fourth season, like most fans, and then caught up on the rest when reruns started in syndication. He frequented both the Seinfeld and Mad About You forums. When Antonoff posted a message asking for help with an FAQ, Rainbolt volunteered. Why not? He was a college student with few responsibilities and lots of technical knowledge.

  Rainbolt’s tech knowledge and Antonoff’s compulsiveness about the details of Seinfeld resulted in a particularly robust FAQ page that gained more attention than most. But there were plenty of other Internet pages dedicated to the show as well; it turned out that the Internet and Seinfeld were made for each other. The show generated so much online attention that Yahoo! Internet Life magazine documented the phenomenon in a March 1995 cover story. The headline declared: “On the Web, It’s Seinfeld Forever!” Among the magazine’s top ten Seinfeld sites were S-Man’s Seinfeld Explosion, the creation of a fifteen-year-old superfan that included a weekly chat forum and, astoundingly for the time, a “sound collage” file of the best Seinfeld lines; a Scandinavian fan’s site with an excellent video clip collection; Entertainment Weekly’s reviews of every episode that had run so far; an “automatic Seinfeld plot generator”; and an online tribute to George Costanza. The Seinfeld writers began checking message boards and other sites regularly to gauge fan response to episodes.