Live From New York - James H. Miller [145]
It was frustrating, yes, not getting pieces on the air. One Saturday night, five minutes before air, after getting probably six or seven sketches cut from the show, I went up to Dick right before we were going to go on and I said, “That’s it. I’m done. I’ve had it. I quit. It’s over.” And I walked out and started walking home, and it was freezing out and I was in the middle of walking home going, “Oh my God, what did I just do? I just cost myself like sixty thousand dollars!” I’m adding up the money from the reruns and all this. At that time I needed every penny I could get my hands on. So yes, I went back the next week and pretended I hadn’t quit — which I also used later in a Seinfeld episode. I went in on Monday morning and just pretended the whole thing never happened. And Dick never mentioned it. I think maybe he said, “Is that Larry David down at the end of the table?” But that was it. The writers were looking at me, that’s for sure. I was getting some very strange looks from the writers — like, “What the hell are you doing here?”
ANDREW KURTZMAN:
Whether or not you were getting stuff on the air affected your life, but I don’t think anyone ever thought Larry David was anything but sensational — and comically, a bad fit with Ebersol. Neither us nor Julia Louis-Dreyfus ever figured out really what to do with her on TV, but Larry did. We were all there. She was the same person. But what Larry saw was that peculiar force of hers.
ANDY BRECKMAN:
Larry didn’t even want the typists in the typing pool — it used to be all typewriters — to type his scripts up. He would type them himself. He was always finicky — George Costanza finicky, you know.
JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS:
Larry was just miserable there. And he almost came to blows with Dick Ebersol. I forget what, I’m sure it had to do with a sketch. I think Dick told him that something he’d written wasn’t funny, and Larry went berserk. There was a lot of tension on that floor, and people were always sort of threatening each other. Brad got mad once too. He went crazy. That’s one of the reasons I liked Larry so much — because he lost his temper. Somebody threw a chair through a wall too. I think that was Jim Belushi.
LARRY DAVID:
I did meet Julia there. Yes I did. And obviously that had some impact. I didn’t really write for her then. I didn’t really write for anyone in particular. I would cast after I wrote. But I remember thinking that she was terrific — and underused.
JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS:
I did a couple of things that for some reason are still played in gay bars around the country — like “Spit-Take Talk Show.” A bunch of my friends who’ve been in gay bars say they’ve seen that played a lot. Mary and I once did a parody of The Rink, a Broadway show with Liza Minnelli. Our parody was called “The Womb,” and it’s also playing in gay bars. I have no idea why. I guess it has a certain campiness to it.
BRAD HALL:
It was particularly frustrating as a writer. We’d have these massive read-throughs of thirty sketches or something. That everybody had just sort of vomited up all these sketches, with no real focus as to what the show was going to be about that week. And there was a lot of news going on, Reagan era. There was stuff we could’ve been parodying. I don’t think Ebersol wanted that. And I don’t think NBC did. Some-one’s taste did not run toward satire. And so the very thing that originally made the show popular was really resisted. We had people that could do good impressions of all the right people. You look back, it’s kind of bizarre, the election in 1984, there’s almost no political humor during an entire political election. Nothing. And for me, doing the news, it was really frustrating. My brilliant