Emperor of Nothing: The Making of Larry David is the first biography written with Larry David’s cooperation. Its author, Blake J. Harris, spent six years talking to him. These are the stories Harris told us about the book, plus a few that did not make it in.
Blake J. Harris told Larry David from the start that this would not be a typical biography. It would be a story about his work, with a whole cast around him: Jerry Seinfeld, Jeff Schaffer, Alan Zweibel, Max Pross, Tom Gammill, Alec Berg, Dave Mandel. Larry liked that, Harris says, because “it took the spotlight off of him a little bit.”
The result is 550 pages covering 75 years. When we sat down with Harris, we asked about the stories inside it. Here are 20 of them, in Harris’s words, from Larry’s teenage years to the Curb finale, and a few that did not make it into the book. For how the book was written, read our full interview with Blake J. Harris.
Jump to: Before Seinfeld · Making Seinfeld · Making Curb · Larry being Larry · Not in the book
Before Seinfeld
1. Larry was his own worst enemy
Harris did not try to make readers feel sorry for Larry. The early chapters are about a young man who keeps getting in his own way. “He’s definitely his own worst enemy throughout much of the book,” Harris says. “It’s almost hard to read some of those stories.” Fans, he says, will wish Larry had grabbed the show business chances he let slip.
2. The phone call to his mother
One scene stays with readers: a young Larry on the phone to his mother, Rose, telling her his life is going nowhere. “That was like a rare moment of vulnerability,” Harris says. He wrote it so readers would not know what happens next. “He was really a 25-year-old guy who was worried that his life wasn’t going anywhere.”
3. One insult ended his acting dream
As a teenager, Larry was cast in a play and was thrilled about it. Then someone called him a homophobic slur, and that was it. “As a teenage boy that was enough to deter him from pursuing this passion,” Harris says. “It’s a pretty sad thing that happened.” He kept it in because these small, ordinary moments show “the universal aspects of Larry’s life”.
4. Stand-up barely existed when Larry started
The book spends time on the 1960s and 1970s comedy scene, and it surprised Harris. Clubs devoted to stand-up did not really exist until the 1960s. When Larry first auditioned for open mic nights, he was up against singers and jugglers. “That’s how not popular stand-up comedy was that there wasn’t even a devoted night for just aspiring stand-ups,” Harris says.
5. The Improv’s piano player was Dustin Hoffman
The Improv opened about ten years before Catch a Rising Star, and in the early days it was mostly young Broadway hopefuls singing. Its temporary piano player was a guy everyone called Dusty. Later in the book you find out it was Dustin Hoffman. “Well I tried to slide that in,” Harris says. To him, it sums up the era: so much talent in one room, and “nobody knew who was going to succeed”.
6. Rose David appears before you need her
The book opens with Larry’s ancestors, which confused some readers until Rose David turned up. By then you already know who she is. Harris says he learned that from watching Seinfeld and Curb, where a small detail in the first scene pays off later. “It’s a form of storytelling that I feel like I learned from Larry.” The aim was never to stop the story and say “grandma please know that Rose David is Larry’s mother. You need to remember that later.”
7. Two chapters on a movie that never got made
Seinfeld fans know Prognosis Negative as the fictional movie Jerry and George pitch. It started as Larry’s own real spec script, and the book gives it two chapters. There are meetings with Rob Reiner and Richard Dreyfuss, then bad news, then good news, then bad news again. “It feels like a Curb episode,” Harris says, and along the way it shows how Hollywood works. There is also a 12-page chapter on Jerry Seinfeld that does not mention Larry once, which Harris says will “come to pay off”.
“Nobody knew who was going to succeed.”
Blake J. Harris on the early days of the Improv
Making Seinfeld
8. Larry gave the actors line readings
For Harris, this is one of the more important parts of the book. While shooting episodes two to five of Seinfeld, before Larry was officially running the show, he took control anyway. “He had the actors do line readings.” Actors usually hate that, especially from someone who is not the director. But for Larry, “the lines are not of equal value”. One line sets up the next, and the punchline has to land at exactly the right pace. More on why that matters in the science of comic timing.
9. His most important episode is the one fans rated worst
Ask fans for the key Seinfeld episodes and they will say The Contest or The Chinese Restaurant. For Larry, it is “The Busboy”, one of the lowest-rated episodes. At the end, the busboy George got fired fights Elaine’s boyfriend, who has overstayed his visit. Two separate stories crash into each other. “For Larry, a light bulb went off,” Harris says, and from then on he tried to make the stories in every episode collide. It was shot early but aired late because it was so disliked, so almost every episode after the first five came after it.
Love it when a story pays off? Read the anatomy of a powerful callback.
10. Going back felt like watching someone else raise his kids
Larry left Seinfeld after season seven, and Harris still cannot believe it. Some of his favourite parts of the book come from seasons eight and nine, when Larry wanted a clean break. He still had to come back to voice George Steinbrenner, and it hurt. Larry described it as “like watching someone else raise your children”.
11. The finale’s real flaw: all four agreed
Larry admitted to Harris that “in retrospect he thought they were too mean” in the Seinfeld finale. Harris added something Larry agreed with: in nine seasons, the four characters never all agreed on anything. Yet in the finale they all agree to mock a man being mugged. He also points out that NBC aired a long clip show just before it, so a finale that looks back on the whole series felt like a repeat.
Making Curb Your Enthusiasm
12. “I don’t think you clicked the right episode”
While writing the Curb finale, Larry and Jeff Schaffer sat down to rewatch the Seinfeld finale for the first time in 24 years. Ten minutes in, Larry was confused. Larry turned to Jeff: “I don’t think you clicked the right episode.” Both had forgotten about the 20 to 30 minutes of story before the trial even starts.
Schaffer’s plan for the Curb finale was to model it on Curb’s season four finale, The Producers: a big set piece with other stories still running around it. Harris loved the irony: an episode that fixed the mistakes of the Seinfeld finale, called “No Lessons Learned”, “is the lesson learned”.
“I don’t think you clicked the right episode.”
Larry David to Jeff Schaffer, as told by Blake J. Harris
13. He wrote The Producers season before asking Mel Brooks
Curb’s outlines take as long to write as Seinfeld scripts. Even so, for season four, “he writes all 10 episode scripts before he ever talks to Mel Brooks.” If Brooks had said no, the whole season was gone. When Harris asked why, Larry said: “I can’t do it that way. I have to write what is in my head.” Then he added, “besides I’m pretty good at convincing people of things.”
14. Same with the Seinfeld reunion
Larry did it again with the Seinfeld reunion in Curb’s season seven. His longtime assistant, later associate producer, Laura Streicher, kept urging him: “I think you should call Jerry.” His answer: “No, no, I’ll get to it later.”
“I have to write what is in my head.”
Larry David, as told by Blake J. Harris
15. Curb had no dialogue, but 14-page outlines
People think Curb was made up on the spot. Harris has the scripts, and by the final season an episode outline ran to 14 pages. They are very specific about what happens in each scene. The dialogue is the only part left out. Harris once asked Larry whether he would take the finished dialogue if someone handed it to him in advance. Larry said he would not do the show at all: “to him the fun is the discovery.”
16. Why Leon is the only one not playing himself
On Curb, Larry plays Larry, Susie plays Susie and Jeff plays Jeff, with their surnames changed. Harris traces the naming rule to a lawsuit from Mike Costanza, Jerry Seinfeld’s childhood friend, who claimed George Costanza was based on him. The case was thrown out, but it set the habit. JB Smoove was only meant to appear in a few episodes, so he became Leon. “He’s the one guy who didn’t get his own name,” Harris says. He was so good they kept him.
17. Bob Einstein kept trying to produce and tell jokes
“Super Dave was not so super on the show,” Harris jokes. Everyone loved Bob Einstein, and Susie Essman was especially close to him. But two things drove Larry mad. Einstein acted like a producer on set and second-guessed the other actors. “They’re doing exactly what I want,” Larry would tell him. And “Bob always wanted to tell jokes, like joke jokes”, the old guy-walks-into-a-bar kind. Larry and Susie kept shutting him down. Then Funkhouser’s most famous scene became the one where he tells a joke to Jerry Seinfeld. Einstein finally got one in.
“Super Dave was not so super on the show.”
Blake J. Harris
18. The arcs were the hard part
Most Curb seasons have a story arc running through six or seven episodes, with a few standalone episodes. Harris assumed the arc episodes were easier to write. Larry and Jeff Schaffer told him the opposite: “the episodes without the arc are much easier.” So why do them? Harris admits “I still never fully got an answer.” His best guess comes from LeBron James, who reportedly changes his look every season. Larry, Harris thinks, “liked that each season had its own unique feel to it.”
Larry being Larry
19. Every story ends with a cloud
Talking to Larry for six years felt like an episode of Curb, Harris says. Every story Larry tells about himself ends by undercutting itself, because “he can’t allow himself to win in his mind.” Even a good ending comes with a catch: “there’s still like a little cloud in the sunshine.”
“There’s still like a little cloud in the sunshine.”
Blake J. Harris on Larry David’s stories
20. He told Harris he could quit
Harris’s other subjects pushed him to finish their books. Larry was the opposite. “So many of my conversations with him he would say you know if you if you don’t want to finish the book that’s okay with me,” Harris says. He finished it anyway.
Not in the book
Some of the best things Harris told us are not in Emperor of Nothing.
The secret test screenings. “One thing I don’t mention in the book,” Harris says, is that for every Curb season and every Larry project for the past 20 years, a handful of friends and family watch the episodes first. Sports host Rich Eisen is one of them. Larry and Jeff Schaffer watch the room, because “you never are so sensitive to timing as when an audience is watching it.” Timing mattered less while filming Curb, but in the edit it is everything.
The Emmy speech he never gave. Larry won his Emmy for “The Contest” and used the speech to joke about being bald. Harris got hold of the speech Larry wrote for the following year, in case he won again. He did not win, but the speech was “playing off of the baldness thing again”. Harris would like to add it to the paperback.
Golf with Obama. Larry will not admit he is famous. Harris’s brother once texted him a tabloid story about Larry golfing with Barack Obama and Peyton Manning. When Harris brought it up, Larry was outraged that anyone knew. “People shouldn’t know that.”
After Curb. The book went to the publisher in October, before Larry’s new sketch show finished filming in December, so it only mentions the project briefly. Harris points out how different it is: Larry always trimmed scenes to the bone on Seinfeld and Curb, but the new sketches are long, single scenes. As Jeff Schaffer likes to say, “there’s only two things in life that Larry enjoys. One is playing golf and the other is writing comedy.” At 79, Larry is still doing both. Harris had dinner with him recently, and he is working on something new.
For more on the people behind Seinfeld, read our interview with Larry Charles, who wrote for the show and directed Curb.
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