David Adds ‘Enthusiasm’ to Familiar Nothingness

During a break in shooting at Don Cuco, a Mexican restaurant in Glendale, Larry David could be found in a booth eating sushi, his nose buried in a copy of Philip Roth’s new novel, “The Human Stain.” David has never written a novel, but he did co-create and oversee “Seinfeld” for seven seasons, and in the course of this he grew into a kind of literary figure, a TV writer putting his own spin on some of Roth’s pet subjects--self-loathing, Jewish mothers, masturbation.

“I read one page of Philip Roth and I abandon any thoughts of even considering writing a novel,” David says later, over dinner in a nearby Chinese restaurant.

Setting oneself up for failure is another recurring David theme, which he hopes is not the case with “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” his first series since he left “Seinfeld” in 1996.

For HBO, which will premiere “Curb Your Enthusiasm” on Oct. 15 at 9:30 p.m., then run it Sunday nights at 10, a Larry David project fits nicely into the pay cable network’s self-image as the leading boutique for series television. David, true to form, left himself a bigger margin for doubt: Did he have enough stories left in him for another show? Would viewers take to its pseudo-documentary style? As the star this time, and not just a behind-the-scenes presence, would audiences find him a sympathetic character?

“If they don’t like me, we’re in a lot of trouble. We’re in big trouble. And I’m not guaranteeing that they will. . . . But I’ve seen some of the shows and I don’t mind me too much,” says David, whose previous acting credits include the ABC sketch comedy series “Fridays” and the Woody Allen film “Radio Days,” in which he played a communist neighbor.

Nevertheless, “Curb” constitutes the kind of semi-gamble David can live with--a modest, 10-episode order of a series that began life as a well-received special and will air on a network available in only about a quarter of the U.S.’ 100 million TV homes. Nor is David back to the grind of churning out scripts, exactly; all of the scenes in “Curb Your Enthusiasm” are improvised, with the actors working off of outlines, most of which David wrote before shooting even started.

As executive producer on “Seinfeld,” by contrast, David wrote about 60 episodes and rewrote countless others (two years after leaving, he returned to write the one-hour series finale). In addition to making him embarrassingly rich, (he’s much chagrined that the $100 million-plus he’s made so far from syndication sales of “Seinfeld” is public knowledge), the hard work also linked him inexorably to George Costanza, commitment-phobe and treasure trove of wonderfully antisocial behavior.

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This was, of course, a shadow self, as surely as Roth had his Nathan Zuckerman. David, 53, is married with children. He plays golf. Where Jason Alexander’s George was short and stocky, David is tall and lean, with good posture. But in a small notebook he keeps in his pocket at all times, David thinks the way George might think, painting himself into imagined dilemmas and conjuring the ridiculous lies he would tell to get himself out of them (the well-meaning lies that only pile on the grief).

In one episode of “Curb,” for instance, Larry is asked by an ex-girlfriend to accompany her to a meeting of an incest survivors group and, once there, is pressured into faking his own abuse story, telling the group he was molested by an uncle at age 12.

As much as anything, then, “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” which just finished shooting around Los Angeles, is a continuing outlet for David’s comedic counter-life. Only now the guy behind the curtain is in front of it, playing Larry David.

As a character, he is the same Larry David who co-created “Seinfeld” and who went on to write and direct the modest box-office flop “Sour Grapes” in 1998. He is the same Larry David who likes to layer himself as if it were a crisp fall day in New York and who has an aversion to short-sleeve shirts; recently, David discovered Tommy Bahama silk short-sleeve shirts and liked them so much a tailor took three and made them into one shirt with long sleeves, an extravagance he refuses to feel guilty about.

“I don’t feel bad for the cloth, do you? Tommy Bahama doesn’t care,” David says, arguing that the tailoring idea came from a costume designer on his show.

The “Curb Your Enthusiasm” special David did for HBO last year focused on his return to stand-up comedy after a decade away from the club scene. Despite that through-line, the special seemed to take root offstage, when Larry was interacting with his inner self and his inner circle--his wife, Cheryl (played by Cheryl Hines); his manager, Jeff Greene (played by Jeff Garlin); and various comedian friends.

The special ended with Larry wimping out on a concert date, but the series doesn’t resume the next day. Indeed, to ask David what “Curb Your Enthusiasm” is about is to ask him to summarize all 10 of the show’s episodes. Here, then, are some of the things that happen in Episode 1: Jeff phones from the car. Unbeknown to Larry, Jeff has him on speaker phone, and his parents are in the back seat. Larry casually refers to his wife as Hitler, which upsets Jeff’s parents, whose gay cousin escaped Nazi Germany. So now Larry has to apologize to Jeff’s parents while inventing some lie to keep the Hitler reference from his wife.

Meanwhile, Larry has an argument with a rude woman in a movie theater, who turns out to be his best friend Richard Lewis’ new girlfriend. There is also some business about how that bulge of cloth men get in the crotch area of their pants when seated can be misconstrued as an erection.

In other words, there is the same “about nothingness” in “Curb” that became “Seinfeld’s” celebrated tag line. But David liked the comedy verite feel of the special, the realistic view of the world through hand-held cameras. And while the absence of scripted dialogue can mean doing take after take of a scene, David feels the approach frees up the actors and brings other voices into the comedy.

“I like the fact that I don’t have to hear my voice throughout,” he says. “A lot of times, I’d be writing a scene on [‘Seinfeld’], and things were set up in such a way that I didn’t have to write anything. It was, you know, the old cliche, writing itself. Sometimes, if the scenes were set up properly, they did write themselves. So I always thought that with the right story structure, you don’t really need to write [dialogue]. You could just make it up.” He pauses. “That sound right?”

Robert Weide, a documentary filmmaker and the show’s principal director and supervising producer, says that the record number of takes for one scene during shooting hit 27. “Sometimes it just really flies and takes off, and other times we get in our cars and we go home at the end of the day, and I get a call from Larry and he’ll say, ‘I just figured out what that scene should have been,’ ” Weide says.

Today at 5 p.m., David will undergo what is for him the equivalent of a hostage crisis: He will face a roomful of television critics and reporters gathered at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Pasadena for the annual summer preview of the new television season. David will be there to talk about “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” but he will doubtless be asked, in some form or another, what “Seinfeld” meant.

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In the Chinese restaurant, the subject of “Seinfeld” temporarily undoes him; he stops his analysis and returns to his food. For all the weighty questions you can throw at him, David is more revealing around other topics, anyway, like Tommy Bahama shirts and his habit of stopping a conversation in midstream to record some observation or idea in his note pad.

“It’s obnoxious, isn’t it?” he says, during such a moment in the Chinese restaurant. “People always think that I’m writing down something that they said--people are so vain, it’s unbelievable!”--his voice hitting the notes he used to voice New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner on “Seinfeld.” “They’re so egotistical! Any time I take out that book in front of somebody else, they think that I’m taking their idea.

“Sometimes I’ll go to the men’s room, because it draws attention to yourself. ‘Oh, what are you doing? What are you writing down? Oh, did I say something?’ You know? Who wants to go through that? On the other hand, I’ll sit there for the entire meal, trying to come up with some mnemonic device or something to trigger the idea. I’ll have this idiotic image of [former New York Knick] Jerry Lucas eating custard or something. Crazy, crazy things to try to remember something.”