An Oral History of ‘Seinfeld’

Ryan

Sep 17, 2016 · 14 min read

In 1989, former SNL writer Larry David and popular stand-up comedian Jerry Seinfeld collaborated over a short project called “The Seinfeld Chronicles.” When it aired on NBC in 1989, audiences loved it so much that the network hired David and Seinfeld to write and produce their own primetime sitcom. What they weren’t expecting was that the two comedians would produce one of the most original premises of all time.

Almost twenty years after the series finale, we gathered the writers, producers, and cast of ‘Seinfeld’ to discuss one of the greatest sitcoms in television history.

Chapter 1: The Origins

LARRY DAVID (creator): I wanted to make something even funnier than ‘Seinfeld Chronicles’ for the pilot, so I just thought about a man who spins in a circle all day and night with his arms out because he wants to leave his parents and become the world’s first human helicopter. This is the funniest thing in the world to me, and I have never laughed about anything else.

JERRY SEINFELD (creator, star): One night after I’d performed a set at the Comedy Cellar, Larry asked me to come with him to see something special. We got in a cab that took us to a military airfield, where we watched helicopters take off and land again. After a few hours of this, he turned to me and yelled over the roar of the propeller blades, “I WISH THE HELICOPTERS WERE MEN AND NOT HELICOPTERS.” That’s when I knew that the two of us had a very similar style of comedy.

LARRY DAVID: Every joke I write involves this man who wants to be a human helicopter. Sometimes the man gets sick from spinning so much, so he starts projectile vomiting around the room until he falls over and dies. Sometimes his disgusting parents come over and tie ropes to his feet to keep him from escaping our world to live in the sky. I wrote thousands of jokes like this for every Seinfeld episode, but not a single one of them ever made it to air.

PETER MEHLMAN (writer): When Jerry and Larry told me about their twisted idea for a TV show about an insane helicopter man who refused to stop spinning, I told them I wanted nothing to do with it. Then Jerry Seinfeld bought my entire apartment building and told me he would turn it into a marina if I didn’t help them write the pilot.

JERRY SEINFELD: Before the show I spent all my time in the brick place with bright lights where the jokes are told. It was nice to leave the brick place where the light is always in my eyes.

PETER MEHLMAN: A marina simply couldn’t have met my family’s needs at the time. My kids were still in elementary school and weren’t old enough to boat to school every morning, so I had no choice but to bring Jerry and Larry’s dark vision to life. Luckily, George Shapiro stepped in and kept that monstrosity of a pilot from ever being aired.

GEORGE SHAPIRO (producer, Jerry Seinfeld’s agent): As soon as Jerry showed me the script for ‘Helicopter/Man’ I locked him in a closet. Immediately I knew the American people wouldn’t have been able to take such a disturbing portrayal of madman who spurns his parents to live in the sky: this was only twenty years after Watergate, remember. It would have broken them.

JERRY SEINFELD: Larry wanted to name it ‘Helicopter Man’ with a space and I wanted to name it ‘HelicopterMan’ with no spaces. We compromised and called it ‘Helicopter/Man,’ or ‘Slash,’ for short.

LARRY DAVID: George worked tirelessly to stop Slash from ever hitting the airwaves, and he eventually succeeded by convincing the network that people would relate more to a New York comedian than a man with propeller arms. This displeased me greatly. New York comedians are not funny to me like professional male adults furiously twirling around the room are.

GEORGE SHAPIRO: In the dead of night, I wrote a new show about Jerry Seinfeld’s life as a comedian who lives in New York City, throwing away pizza and screaming at yellow cabs. We kept the Helicopter/Man character but got rid of all the parts about him wanting to leave this depraved world for a city among the clouds. We also changed his name to George Costanza.

PETER MEHLMAN: Even though I helped write their show, Jerry still turned my apartment building into a marina. One of my daughters became a gold medal-winning regatta sailor, but the other one drowned.

Chapter 2: The Right Cast

With the pilot ready to shoot, it was time for the producers and writers to find the right actors. Little did they know it, but Jerry Seinfeld, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jason Alexander, and Michael Richards would soon redefine the ensemble cast forever.

JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS (Elaine Benes): NBC told me about a new show about a New York comedian, and when I found out that the comedian was Jerry Seinfeld I declined immediately. But then Jerry bought all the food in my village and wouldn’t give it back unless I agreed to film nine seasons of his evil show. It was up to me save all the village people from starving to death, and I only had nine years to do it.

JERRY SEINFELD: Julia Louis-Dreyfus is the only woman in the whole world with brown hair, so she had to play Elaine Benes, friend of Jerry. Every day of shooting she would bring me dozens of photos of other brown-haired women she knew, but this was just a trick to get her village’s food back.

JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUSS: Several other women from my village have brown hair, but all of them are in hiding so that Jerry will never find out about them.

LARRY DAVID: I didn’t care about Elaine Benes, friend of Jerry the comedian who drops big slices of pepperoni pizza into the garbage like a rascal. The only thing I cared about was finding a way to make George Costanza spin so fast in a circle that he lifts into the air and escapes his terrifying parents.

JASON ALEXANDER (George Costanza): First I met with Larry and he gave me this script about a guy who’s trying to be a helicopter. So I say, “fine, great, I’ll play the helicopter guy.” But the night before the audition, the producer calls and gives me a completely different script! I’m George Costanza now, not this helicopter slash man thing. That really threw me off my game!

GEORGE SHAPIRO: You’re not supposed to give actors new scripts in the dead of night because it throws them off their game, but Jason Alexander was the best of the best. If there was one professional, capital-A Actor who could become such a soulless character without going utterly bonkers, it was him.

JASON ALEXANDER: At the audition George told me to just stick to the script, but Larry was standing there holding a big sign offstage that said “JASON ALEXANDER, START WHIRLING ABOUT LIKE A HELICOPTER OR I WILL STRAP YOU TO A TOBOGGAN AND THEN THROW THE TOBOGGAN INTO AN ACTIVE VOLCANO.” It was extremely distracting.

JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS: At all the table reads, Larry would write “BURNING HOT LAVA” on the back of all of Jason’s scripts. He started bringing the toboggan to rehearsals and growling every time Jason read his lines instead of gyrating and making motor sounds with his mouth.

GEORGE SHAPIRO: My original script only featured three main characters, but we quickly realized we would need a fourth character who was large enough to stop Larry from coming on set and strapping poor Jason into that little toboggan. I put out an ad in the New York Times looking for the biggest, scariest actor in the city. That’s how we found Michael.

MICHAEL RICHARDS (Cosmo Kramer): Because Jerry and Larry never wrote my character into any of the scripts, I had to improvise my own storyline in every episode. Every time Larry started creeping menacingly towards Jason with his toboggan, I would burst into the scene as loudly as possible while yelling something kooky and eccentric enough to scare Larry away. Whatever I yelled would be Kramer’s plotline for that episode.

JASON ALEXANDER: With Michael adlibbing new twists on the plot and Larry always trying to send me on a one way trip to Magma Town, Seinfeld was a very creative environment for me to work in as an actor.

JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS: It was horrifying to watch what was happening to Jason, but I had my own problems to worry about. It had already been three weeks since the people of my village had any bread or water, and they were starting to get pretty annoyed.

JERRY SEINFELD: I am in love with Elaine Benes, friend of Jerry. She is the woman with brown hair that I adore. I could not give the food back because Elaine Benes would turn back into Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who is not the friend of Jerry.

Chapter 3: The Show About Nothing

While Seinfeld struggled at first to build a substantial fan base, critical support for the show eventually powered it through this slow growth period to make it one of the most cherished sitcoms of all time. Fame and fortune had their perks, but the writers and actors quickly discovered that it all came at a price.

PETER MEHLMAN: The pace of writing the show was exhausting — every week, Larry would carve his latest script into a different lighthouse, and all the writers would have to locate that lighthouse, transcribe the episode, and remove every reference to “The Chopper Dude” or “Rotor Head.”

LARRY DAVID: It was not ideal to write on a different lighthouse every week, but by the time I finished an episode I had usually run out of walls and ceilings to write on, so I had no choice but to keep on moving on down the coast.

GEORGE SHAPIRO: The writers’ job was to turn Larry’s nightmare scribblings about Helicopter/Man into a family-friendly half hour comedy for primetime TV. When Larry’s character would mumble about his Philosophy of Constant Rotation, they changed it to a story about George getting a job with the New York Yankees. When Larry wrote a long monologue explaining how helicopters have sex, they wrote about George’s new girlfriend whose nose is too big.

PETER MEHLMAN: Several of our men went bonkers and dashed their bodies on the rocks. Others became obsessed with the Philosophy of Constant Rotation and decided to live in the lighthouses where they could spin forever, masters of the sea and sky.

LARRY DAVID: The Philosophy of Constant Rotation is not for the weak of mind.

GEORGE SHAPIRO: To make it easier on the writers, we tried to focus the episodes as much on Jerry’s character as possible. Writing stories for Jerry was simple: as long as he ended up screaming at a yellow taxi cab before the end of the episode, the crowd would eat it right up.

JASON ALEXANDER: People would sometimes recognize me on the street, but it was Jerry who became a real sensation. Everyone in the city used to drive their yellow cabs by Jerry’s house and beg Jerry to scream at it in front of their kids.

JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS: Jerry kept all of the grain and berries my people needed to grow strong locked away in his trailer, and he would sleep on the grain and berries so that he could be sure I wouldn’t steal it and return to the village.

JERRY SEINFELD: As long as I remembered to sleep on the berries, Elaine would be there in the morning to make a new show, and I would not have to return to the brick place where strangers laugh in the dark. I am in love with Elaine.

GEORGE SHAPIRO: NBC came back to me every week to tell us what a great job we were doing and how high our ratings were, and each time I wrote back a fiery letter demanding that they cancel this show for perverts. They never responded, which made me furious. It wasn’t until years later at a company Christmas party that I realized Jerry had bought every post office and converted them all into abandoned lighthouses.

JASON ALEXANDER: Despite the fact that I’m a top-dollar thespian with drama skills coming out of my wazoo, I never got the sense that I was living up to Larry David’s vision for the role because he was constantly trying to murder me on the set.

MICHAEL RICHARDS: When Larry tried to run Jason over with an old-fashioned motorcycle in the middle of filming, I stepped in the way. That episode became “The Motorcycle.” When Larry covered Jason in honey and threw a hive full of angry wasps onto the studio set, I put my mouth over the wasp hole and swallowed all the bugs. That episode became “The Wasp Hive.” I like to think I had a pretty big influence on the show’s direction.

LARRY DAVID: I did not expect that MIchael would be able to eat all those big angry wasps that quickly. He earned my respect on that day.

Chapter 4: The Time of Your Life

After a lot of laughter and even more hard work, the cast and crew were exhausted by the pressure to continue producing one of the most popular shows of the decade. In 1998, the cast and creators decided that Seinfeld’s ninth season would be its last.

JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS: The show was making billions of dollars a day, but we never saw a dime of it. Larry would arrive to work in a big helicopter every morning, and each time he deboarded he would take all of our paychecks out of his pocket and throw them up into the propellers, ripping them to shreds.

LARRY DAVID: Helicopters manage to make me laugh every single time I see them, and they don’t need a paycheck to do it. They’re that good.

MICHAEL RICHARDS: I didn’t mind not getting paid, but I was getting pretty tired of having my body destroyed by all the wild booby traps that Larry was setting for Jason.

GEORGE SHAPIRO: After nine seasons, Michael Richards had been crushed by a boulder, mauled by a bear, catapulted into a wall, kicked by a donkey in a sombrero, and punched by a boxing glove attached to a giant spring, all to protect Jason from Larry’s hare-brained schemes.

JASON ALEXANDER: In 1996 Larry David convinced a member of the Dallas Cowboys that I’d been flirting with his cheerleader girlfriend. Michael was the only one who stood up for me — he told that musclebound lummox to pick on someone his own size. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to take back what happened next.

MICHAEL RICHARDS: He grabbed me with his meaty hands and crunched my body up into the shape of a football. Then he punted me a hundred yards down a regulation-length field. It was the worst pain I’ve ever experienced in my life.

JASON ALEXANDER: I still get chills when I think about that day and what Michael went through. That football should’ve been me.

GEORGE SHAPIRO: Given all this carnage, it was obvious that the show had to end, but our ratings were so good that NBC refused to cancel us. We all agreed that the only way we could force their hand was if we let someone die on the show. We also all agreed that person should be Jason.

JASON ALEXANDER: Michael may be a weird guy, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t feel bad when he would fall off a cliff or have his face blown up by live TNT just to protect me. It was time to return the favor.

GEORGE SHAPIRO: It takes a real actor to do that, you know? A class act, like Bogart, or Brando. Only a guy like that is willing to be ritually killed by his show’s co-creator in what would amount to the biggest television event of the decade. Jason is a one-in-a-million superstar performer, that’s for sure.

LARRY DAVID: In the end, my ambition to kill Jason thwarted my ambition to keep Helicopter/Man alive.

GEORGE SHAPIRO: The last episode of Seinfeld was titled, “The Toboggan.” It was set in Sicily, where Jerry and the gang were taking a sledding trip down the side of Mt. Etna, the most active volcano in the world.

JASON ALEXANDER: George forgets to bring a sled, so he steals one from a kooky old Italian man, played by Larry David. George denies it when the old man accuses him of toboggan theft, and the two get in a real shouting match before bitterly parting ways.

MICHAEL RICHARDS: Later on, the ski lift breaks down, and Kramer and George find themselves having to walk all the way back up the slope of the volcano to retrieve a very expensive glove George left at the top. And what do you know, who’s there when George finally reaches the peak of Mt. Etna but the old man he tangled with earlier.

JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS: So this ancient Sicilian played by Larry David sees George carrying his toboggan, and in a fit of rage he straps him into the sleigh and throws him right into the chasm of melting rock that is the closest thing to hell that exists in real life. If you’d watched the show for a long time, it was an incredibly satisfying finale.

LARRY DAVID: Smothering Jason in a sea of liquid fire was my greatest artistic achievement. Of course, I was eventually able to create and star in a real show about being a human helicopter called Curb Your Enthusiasm, but now that I’ve done it all, murdering that little bald man is still my proudest moment.

JERRY: When Jason was thrown down the hole, the show went away, which meant that Elaine Benes, friend of Jerry, also went away. I was so ashamed after the beautiful brown haired lady disappeared that I made a vow to only live in different cars for the rest of my life. I am allowed to live in many different very cars, and the cars can be very expensive, but I am never allowed to live in a house.

JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUSS: Now that the show was over, I’d officially held my end of the bargain and was allowed to return to the village with a bounty of delicious figs and succulent berries, for which my people did not thank me because it had taken so goddamn long. They angrily scarfed down the ample feast I had provided without ever saying “thank you for working on Seinfeld for nine years” or, “you were Elaine Benes, friend of Jerry.”

MICHAEL RICHARDS: Jason told me he would be disappearing forever as a personal thank you to me, so when he suddenly came out of the volcano seventeen years later, I was very hurt. You don’t just do that to a friend.

JASON ALEXANDER: At some point last week I found myself climbing out of the volcano in the same clothes I was wearing in 1998. I hadn’t aged a day, but all my toenails were missing.

MICHAEL RICHARDS: How would you feel if your pal sacrificed himself to make you feel more appraeciated and then he just returned from the dead two decades later? How am I supposed to feel appreciated now that my friend is alive again?

JERRY SEINFELD: The short man returned, but he does not visit me because I do not have an address. I am in love with Elaine Benes. “Beep Beep” is the sound that my house makes.

 https://medium.com/@Integrity_Guy/an-oral-history-of-seinfeld-33ddc1d4459f