Larry David on the True Story of How the Seinfeld Pilot Was Written—and Rewritten: “They Just Kept Making It Worse”

In early March 1989, Larry David flew out to Los Angeles to write the pilot script with Jerry Seinfeld, and though he would inadvertently set into motion a cavalcade of events disrupting life as he knew it, there was one particular disruption in the short term that most concerned him: having a roommate for the first time in many, many years.

“It’s true,” David says. “I stayed at Jerry’s when we were writing the pilot. So, yeah, we were roommates.”

As a young man, having roommates was par for the course. But by 1989, Larry was no longer a young man. He was forty-one and used to living alone with his thoughts and quirks. So naturally, he had some concerns. Namely, what did the bathroom situation look like?

“It [turned out to be] a good situation,” David reveals. “I had my own room. My own bathroom. So that wasn’t an issue. Yeah, it was good. And Jerry had a very nice place.”

“I had this nice little two-bedroom condo in West Hollywood,” Seinfeld recalls. “And I had a very nice second bedroom. So, you know, it was easy and free. And we had fun.”

“We had a good time,” David echoes. “And I was on my neatest behavior.”

In general, Larry was a neat and tidy person, but Jerry took neat and tidy to another level. So Larry tried his best to be accommodating.

“You would never even know that I was [staying] there,” David proudly reports. “There was not a crumb; there was not a newspaper. Nothing! Every area I went to, it was cleaned up as if no one had been there.”

Thankfully, Larry and Jerry were a good match socially—but the real question now was whether they would be a good match creatively.

For fans of Seinfeld, it’s tempting to imagine that Larry and Jerry’s initial writing sessions (in Jerry’s West Hollywood condo) bore resemblance to George and Jerry’s initial writing sessions (in Jerry’s fictional Manhattan apartment).

JERRY

NBC Pilot. Seinfeld Project. Act 1. Scene A . . .

GEORGE

All right, here we go.

JERRY

Act 1, scene A . . .

GEORGE

(noticing Jerry’s pen)

Bics? What’d you get? Bics?

JERRY

What? You got a problem with the pen now?

GEORGE

I like a Rolling Writer. They’re very smooth.

In real life, starting the pilot script involved no procrastination.

“There wasn’t a lot of thinking and planning and putting things on board,” David says. “There was none of that.”

In the years to come, plotting out the dense and often convoluted storylines on a giant dry-erase board would become a staple of the Seinfeld writing process. But at this early stage, the show was much simpler and more focused on dialogue and comedic observation. And so, Larry and Jerry brought the pilot to life by riffing off each other and acting out proposed lines of dialogue.

JERRY

(re: George’s new shirt)

The second button literally makes or breaks the shirt.

Look at it: It’s too high! It’s in no-man’s-land! You look like ya live with your mother.

LARRY

(as George)

Are you through?

JERRY

You do, of course, try on when you buy?

LARRY

Yes. It was purple, I liked it. I don’t actually recall considering the buttons.

JERRY

Oh, you don’t recall?

LARRY

(as if on the witness stand) Uh, no. Not at this time.

Day by day, Larry and Jerry remained incredibly productive—pausing from their writing to allow only one indulgence: Bikram yoga.

“I was really into it,” Seinfeld says about Bikram yoga. “And I got Larry into it . . . so we’d write all day and then we’d go to these yoga classes.”

“I really got into yoga for a time,” David says. “And the writing was a pleasure.”

“It was never a struggle,” Seinfeld adds. “I don’t remember us ever really racking our brains too much in writing. We had a great chemistry.”

“The chemistry between the two of them really was incredible,” fellow comic (and Larry’s close friend) Bill Scheft notes. “But at that time, when Larry went out to LA, it was still perplexing to us [comics back in New York] that Larry was working with Jerry Seinfeld. Don’t get me wrong, we all thought Jerry was an incredible comic. But, you know, he was the guy we all made fun of.”

The thesis of this mockery was that Jerry —Mr. Mainstream Comic—had no edge.

“He was not a wiseass like the rest of us,” Scheft explains. “Just a tremendous, unflappable technician. Now, of course, we were probably just a little jealous of his success. But still . . . Larry and Jerry just seemed like an odd pair. I mean, you think about the two of them and you had one guy—the consummate pro [Jerry]—who never stormed offstage in his entire life, and another guy who did nothing but. So they were an odd pair. But that’s what made them valuable to each other. Larry gave Jerry an edge. And Jerry made Larry more easily accessible.”

In this respect, Larry and Jerry brought out the best in each other, which on the page resulted in a unique style of dialogue that sounded much more like real-life conversation than anything else on television at that time.

JERRY

Wait a second . . . I forgot to clean the bathroom.

GEORGE

So what? That’s good!

JERRY

Now how can that be good?

GEORGE

Because filth is good. Whaddaya think? Rock stars have sponges and ammonia lying around the bathroom? They have a woman coming over [saying] “I’ve gotta tidy up!” Yeah right.

“It just kind of came out very quickly,” David says about the pilot, which took only about a week to complete. “In part because I didn’t know what I was doing, frankly.”

Instead, Larry and Jerry wrote a show that they themselves would want to watch—rules and conventions be damned. And what they wrote felt like a funny, authentic peek into the everyday life of a comic, which they ended up calling Stand Up.

On March 11, the pilot script for Stand Up was delivered to the folks at Castle Rock.

“Castle Rock seemed to like it,” David says. “Glenn [Padnick] seemed to like it.”

That did indeed seem to be the case. However, behind the scenes, not all was what it seemed.

According to Glenn Padnick, reading the script for Stand Up was one of those special never-to-be-forgotten moments.

“I remember when the first draft of the pilot script came to my desk,” Padnick recalls. “I remember reading page one, [then] two, and saying, ‘Am I crazy or is this really good?’”

“Glenn is crazy if he remembers it that way,” Stand Up showrunner Gary Gilbert retorts. “Everyone at Castle Rock hated Larry and Jerry’s first draft.”

Regardless of how many people at Castle Rock actually hated Larry and Jerry’s first draft, it was enough that the company was concerned. Especially co-founder Alan Horn.

“Alan Horn came into my office,” Gary Gilbert continues, “and he said, ‘Did you read this?’ I remember laughing when he asked that. Because, you know, I was producing the show. So of course I read it.”

“Well,” Horn said, “what are we going to do?”

“They all wanted to throw [the script] out,” Gilbert explains. “Because while there was funny stuff in it, and funny characters, it didn’t hold together as a story. And you couldn’t tell which character was which—all the characters seemed to sound the same.”

“I know it has problems,” Gilbert told Horn at the time, “but there’s some really good stuff in there.”

“There was some really smart stuff,” Gilbert says. “And it was written in a different tone [than most sitcoms]. I remember reading the opening and George has a line like ‘Ya think?’ And I kept looking at that word: ‘Ya.’ And I remember thinking, ‘Wow, these characters are talking like real people.’ Which I guess you could say was the ‘problem.’ Because it was like Larry and Jerry didn’t know that they were supposed to be writing in sitcom language where people talk like sitcom characters.”

To transform Larry and Jerry’s script into something that he believed would satisfy NBC, Gilbert got to work.

“Rob Reiner had the only big office at Castle Rock,” Gilbert explains. “So I said, ‘Rob, I need your office.’ He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘I need your floor.’ Then I took the script and I laid it out [on the floor]—literally forty-two pages—and I started thinking about how to fix it. For example, there were jokes in the second and third acts that were very funny, but those jokes needed to be in the first act.”

“Need,” in this case, was clearly in the eye of the beholder. And unfortunately for Larry and Jerry, this beholder was their showrunner.

“I literally [took] a pair of scissors and I cut up their script,” Gilbert says. “Like, I moved this half of a scene over there, and I moved that dialogue to a different place. Then I put it all together with paper clips and [wrote down instructions] like ‘From here, go to page seven,’ and Rob’s secretary put it all together and retyped it. She stayed up all night and retyped it.”

In addition to this major restructure, Gilbert—along with Castle Rock co-founder Andy Scheinman—added in some of the more conventional “sitcom language” that the original draft had been lacking. For example, in a scene where Jerry and Kramer talk about what to expect from the woman who will be staying with Jerry, Larry and Jerry wrote a line for Kramer where he says, “Hey, it all depends on your definition of ‘stay.’” Essentially, Gilbert and Scheinman wanted to differentiate the character by imbuing him with a “unique philosophy,” so they prefaced Kramer’s musings with lines like “Let me tell you the way I look at things” and added in Kramer lines like “The bathroom is the window to the human condition” and “Whatever shape my bathroom is in when I’m alone is an accurate reflection of who I am.”

If these lines are unfamiliar to Seinfeld fans, it’s because they ended up getting cut. Nevertheless, they were part of Gilbert and Scheinman’s second draft—which they shared with their Castle Rock colleagues exactly one week after Larry and Jerry had turned in their draft. And shortly after that, Larry and Jerry were invited to Castle Rock and shown the updated version of the pilot.

“I was livid,” David recalls. “They had rewritten the script. They’d rewritten, I’d say, a third of the script. It wasn’t theirs to rewrite. It was ours. So yeah . . . I was livid.”

“Larry and Jerry didn’t like my second draft,” Gilbert remembers. “They wanted another crack at it. So they took my draft and wrote a third draft.”

Larry and Jerry worked quickly, turning in their revised draft a few days later.

“We read the third draft,” Gilbert explains, “and they’d gone back to make it more jokey in a way that I thought hurt the story. So then, again with Andy [Scheinman], we took their third draft and rewrote it. So that was the fourth draft.”

“They just kept making it worse,” David recalls.

Hoping to settle things once and for all, Gilbert suggested a compromise.

“I called [Larry and Jerry] in,” Gilbert recalls. “And I said, ‘Listen, we have two different views of how the script should go. And it’s not a question of right or wrong.’ I told them, ‘I don’t want you to lose your vision, but I also don’t think that your vision alone—which is too stand-up—is gonna make it in the sitcom world. So [even though] no one’s gonna be thrilled by this, let’s go page by page together.’ And the four of us sat in a room and went through it together.”

“I remember a lot of very animated conversations,” Seinfeld says about the attempted compromise. “And I do remember a point . . . [there] was a big fight. I think it was [Larry] and Andy, as it usually was. And Gilbert was there. And I could never figure out exactly what these guys were fighting about.”

“I was just determined to try and get as much of their stuff out that I could and as much of our stuff back in,” David explains. “And to that degree, I succeeded somewhat.”

Nonetheless, NBC still had concerns about the ensuing script.

“It certainly wasn’t a strong story drive,” Warren Littlefield says. “And it was kind of all over the place.”

But even with those concerns, the script did have one thing that made it too hard for NBC to ignore: It was really funny—in a fresh and exciting way.