In May, the New York Times reported that Prognosis: Negative, a long-lost script by Larry David had emerged on eBay. The story went viral, but what few knew at the time: author Blake J. Harris would be unveiling the full backstory in his biography Emperor of Nothing: The Making of Larry David (out on Oct. 20 from HarperCollins), which devotes two chapters to the tale.
These chapters began to take form when Harris came across a 2015 The Hollywood Reporter guest column by Marilyn Black, Davids’ former manager who wrote about Prognosis: Negative for THR. “It wasn’t just that she was his manager, but that she clearly was a good storyteller,” says Harris of connecting with Black. Black recalls one of her first calls when she started shopping the script was to Rob Reiner: “Rob flipped out over it, and he thought it was brilliant, and he said he wanted to direct it.”
Below is one of the Prognosis: Negative chapters, picking up after David was left unemployed after the end of Fridays, a Saturday Night Live knock-off that aired on ABC from 1980-82.
By the time Fridays ended, Larry had set aside enough money to survive for about eighteen months.
“I’m thirty-four years old and I have some savings for the first time in my life,” Larry explains, “so I start thinking, ‘Okay, maybe I should invest in a stock.’ And, at the time, it just so happened I knew a guy who had a tip.”
Truth be told, Larry didn’t actually know the “guy.” Well, not directly.
“I had a friend who had a friend,” Larry clarifies. “He had a tip, and I knew he had made money in the market.”
As soon as Larry put his savings into this stock, he should have real- ized it was a mistake. Not because he immediately started losing money but because he quickly lost himself. He went from Observant Larry to Obsessive Larry, a guy who had to know—at every moment—the value his stock had last traded at. Fortunately, though, the value was rising, and without lifting a finger, Larry was becoming a wealthier man.
“But then,” Larry recalls, “it started going down.”
Even worse, as the stock began to decline, Larry learned that his “guy” was in the hospital and had no way to contact him.
“I didn’t know what to do,” Larry laments. “And I stupidly held on to it.”
As a result, Larry quickly lost over half the money he had saved. And while years later, Larry’s financial misadventure would yield a silver lining—as it would be the inspiration for an early episode of Seinfeld— that eventual consolation provided no solace to him in the moment. Mainly because Larry was now unemployed and only had enough saved up for nine more months.
“So that wasn’t great,” Larry admits. “But then again, hey, at least I wasn’t broke. I mean . . . basically, after Fridays, I was back to where I was before doing the show. Where my life revolved around doing stand-up. The only real difference was that I was now doing it in LA. But with the show over, I had no reason to be there any longer. So I decided to move back to New York.”
IN THE TIDY TELLING OF LARRY DAVID’S LIFE STORY, Fridays ended, and Larry moved right back to New York. And it’s true that he eventually did. But before doing so, he remained in Los Angeles for another two years, where he returned to doing stand-up and gradually pivoted from being an onscreen performer to becoming a bona fide screenwriter.
This pivot happened slowly and—like most major changes in the arc of Larry’s life—it happened unintentionally. Because originally, after Fridays, Larry did what he was supposed to do: look for new jobs in film and television.
That was, after all, what his now-former Fridays castmates were doing. Mark Blankfield, for example, booked a guest spot on Taxi and a starring role in a made-for-TV spinoff of The Jerk. Likewise, Michael Richards scored guest spots on hit shows like Cheers, Night Court, and Miami Vice, and even a recurring role on St. Elsewhere.
Larry, however, had less luck, booking only a few seconds of screen time in a forgettable studio film, Second Thoughts, as well as an equally uncelebrated role in a low-budget indie film, Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?
“My character didn’t even have a name!” Larry says about his role in the latter, in which he’s credited as merely “Mort’s Friend at Café.” And, as Larry notes, “Mort wasn’t even one of the leads!”
Had Larry been hoping to become Hollywood’s next heartthrob, this post-Fridays period would have been concerning. But the lack of opportunities enabled Larry to focus on more important things.
“At that point,” Larry recalls, “I’m back to performing [stand-up] every night. Doing clubs in LA. And at the same time . . . I have my days back. So, I start working on a [movie] script that was called Prognosis: Negative.”
Prognosis: Negative was a dark comedy centered around a protagonist, Leo Black, who bore more than a little resemblance to 1970s Larry David. Like Larry, the character lived in New York City (an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen); like Larry, the character drove a limo (chauffeuring an old woman with failing vision); and like Larry, the character was a neurotic hypochondriac who was plagued so deeply by feelings of remorse that it made committing to anything all but impossible. Especially romantic relationships—which led to the underlying question that powered Prognosis: Negative: How can a man with deep-seated commitment issues survive in a world where he’s constantly pressured to settle down and live happily ever after?
For real-life commitment-phobes like Larry, there seemed no good answer to this question. But for the protagonist of his script, there is suddenly a glimmer of hope midway through the first act, when he over- hears a doctor discussing the declining health of a recent ex-girlfriend.
COLLEAGUE
So what is the prognosis?
DR. BURNELL
Not very good . . .Ten months . . . at the most.
Upon hearing this horrible news, Larry’s protagonist has an epiphany: If he were to win back his terminally ill ex-girlfriend, he could have a loving relationship without having to actually honor a lifelong commitment.
“It’s brilliant, right?” Richard Lewis says about Prognosis: Negative. “I remember when he told me the idea and I just thought, ‘That’s a great premise!’ And then I read it. Wow!”
In addition to a strong premise, Larry’s script featured many of his future trademarks: witty, natural-sounding banter and selfish-but- relatable behavior that spirals out of control. Moreover, for fans of Seinfeld and Curb, the script also included early incarnations of incidents that would resurface in one way or another in those shows, like getting banned from a fruit stand, pretending to hold an elevator door open, or lying about being a volunteer for the Big Brother program.
It really was a strong script. But without a literary agent or manager, Larry didn’t really know what to do with Prognosis: Negative. So naturally, Richard Lewis wanted to help.
“Look,” Lewis told Larry one night at the Improv, “if I knew a good manager for this sort of thing, I’d introduce you in a heartbeat.”
As luck would have it, Lewis did end up helping Larry in this instance. Because around this time, Lewis started dating a woman named Marilyn Black, who had the clout, connections, and know-how to get Larry’s screenwriting career off the ground.
“I was hanging out at the Improv a lot,” Marilyn explains. “And this was, I would say, the golden age of comedy. You had Jay Leno and Bill Maher and Roseanne [Barr] and my client, Rick Overton, and Robin Williams. It was just an incredible time. And at some point, I started dating Richie Lewis, which is how I ended up meeting Larry.”
Like many girlfriends throughout history, Marilyn wound up spending a lot of time with her boyfriend’s best friend.
“There was nothing more fun than hanging out with Richard Lewis and Larry David,” Marilyn recalls. “And eventually, Richie tells me, ‘Larry has just written a script called Prognosis: Negative and could use somebody who’s well connected and has chutzpah to help him sell it.’”
“It’s the greatest script I ever read!” Lewis assured Marilyn.
“Richie really went out of his way to talk up Larry’s script,” Marilyn notes. “Which wasn’t a surprise, he really cared about his friend. But the truth is I thought Larry was hilarious and I was happy to read anything he’d written.”
On January 26, 1983, Larry gave Marilyn a copy of Prognosis: Negative.
“I read it and flipped out!” Marilyn recalls. “I told him it was bril- liant. I mean, not only was it hilarious, but it had such a unique point of view. It was immediately clear to me that Larry was an original, you know? One of those rare writers whose voice can’t be replicated.”
Marilyn thought that Prognosis: Negative was a work of genius and its author was basically the love child of Mel Brooks and Woody Allen. “I became his manager,” Marilyn says. “Technically, I was his manager for writing and acting. But, you know, he wasn’t doing very much acting back then. Though I did send him out on some auditions! But really, the main thing, especially at the beginning, was for me to go out and sell Prognosis.”
“I didn’t really know how these things were supposed to go,” Larry says about the ensuing process. “But Marilyn seemed to know what she was doing.”
“Looking back,” Marilyn reflects, “I really am amazed at how many heavyweights I knew! I got that script to everyone. And I mean everyone.”
When shopping a script, there are two types of “everyone”s to approach: producers (who, ideally, will want to option the script) and “talent” (like actors or directors, who, ideally, will want to “attach” themselves to the script, thereby making the project more enticing for buyers). Since Hollywood is a place where nobody really cares about anything until someone else cares about it more, Marilyn wanted the widest net possible, so she simultaneously approached both talent and producers. Though, from the get-go, there was one name in mind who she believed would be the perfect fit for Prognosis—someone who was both talent and a producer: Rob Reiner.
Reiner, at that time, was at an interesting crossroads. As an actor, he was already world-famous for his breakout role as the do-gooder son-in- law Michael “Meathead” Stivic on CBS’s hit show All in the Family—a role that, over the course of nine seasons, earned him five Emmy nomina- tions (including two wins). One would imagine that after 180+ episodes as a top-tier supporting actor, Reiner’s next step would be to find a TV show of his own to star in. But he had something else in mind.
“After All in the Family went off the air,” Reiner says, “I wanted to make films. I wanted to direct . . . [but] at the time, people in television were looked down upon by movie people. You were second-class citizens if you did television.”
Given the then-difficult transition from television to film, not to mention the difficulty of jumping from actor to director, Reiner struggled to find the right project. And the project he wound up working on—his directorial debut—was a pretty risky venture: a fake documentary about a fictional rock band that Reiner co-wrote with three friends and then filmed over the course of only five weeks. Even riskier, the so-called script that Reiner and his friends had written didn’t actually contain any set-in-stone dialogue; rather, it was just a series of scene outlines that were then brought to life through improvisation. All this to say, there was a lot of uncertainty around Reiner’s upcoming mockumentary, This Is Spinal Tap.
“At the time,” Marilyn explains, “none of us knew what to expect with Spinal Tap. So I thought, ‘Hey, this is great timing! Because if it’s a flop, then Rob will want something new to get involved with, and if it’s a hit, then Prognosis would be the perfect follow-up!’”
Getting Prognosis to Reiner was easy, but getting him to read it required some finesse, since she’d recently slipped him a (not-very- good-in-retrospect) script of her own, which made him hesitant to read anything more from her. But Marilyn was insistent, making it clear that this script was written by a real writer: an incredibly talented, fresh new voice.
“How ’bout this,” Marilyn suggested. “Just read the first five pages. And if you don’t already love it, then don’t bother with the rest.”
This strategy paid off. Reiner called back the next morning. He loved the script, so much so that he was already open to the idea of at- taching himself to it. This felt like the best-case scenario, until Reiner then added, “I think I know the perfect person to direct this.”
“I remember thinking, ‘HUH?!’” Marilyn explains. “The whole point of getting it to Rob was so that he would direct!”
The problem, though, was that as much as Reiner loved Prognosis, he just wasn’t sure that this should be his follow-up film—kicking off an almost comical level of uncertainty from Reiner that would become a running theme over the next few months.
“He changed his mind many times!” Marilyn groans.
Although Reiner remained uncertain if he wanted to direct Prognosis, he was certain that he wanted to be involved as a producer. And, as he would often remind Larry and Marilyn, if he didn’t direct, then he knew the perfect guy: his mockumentary collaborator Christopher Guest.
Larry admired Reiner, so he was open to this possibility. Meetings were set, introductions were made, and various creative permutations were discussed—all while Larry and Marilyn continued meeting with other producers, including the Academy Award–winning actor-turned- producer Richard Dreyfuss, who had read (and loved) Prognosis: Negative. The meeting that ensued went perfectly fine, but it quickly became clear that Larry and Dreyfuss had different creative visions for the film. Whereas Larry imagined a dark comedy that prioritized laughs over drama, Dreyfuss saw it more as a coming-of-age story. In fact, at one point Dreyfuss even declared that Prognosis could be “the next Risky Business.” And though Dreyfuss repeatedly told Larry how much he loved the script, he also insisted that it needed a “big rewrite” (which, from Larry’s perspective, seemed like a conclusion that contradicted the compliment).
In the grand scheme of things, the meeting between Larry and Dreyfuss was not particularly significant. But it was somewhat indicative of how almost all of Larry’s other meetings would play out, which, over and over, went something like this:
PRODUCER: We love your script!
LARRY: Oh yeah?
PRODUCER: It’s one of the best things we’ve read in years!
LARRY: Why thank you!
PRODUCER: But, of course, we can’t make your movie.
Although each producer verbalized it differently, the reason they felt this way primarily boiled down to two concerns. One was Prognosis: Negative’s perceived lack of marketability. Because, as the thinking went, comedies were supposed to be about unlikely heroes who overcome long odds and learn valuable life lessons along the way. This was, after all, the tried-and-true formula that spawned box office hits like Stripes, Police Academy, and Mr. Mom.
“That was always something that I hated about movie scripts,” Larry says. “The idea that characters are supposed to go on some big ‘journey’ and learn all these ridiculous ‘lessons’ along the way. I mean, I don’t know anybody like that! Whose life is like that?”
In addition to Larry’s aversion to writing a cookie-cutter comedy, producers were also scared off by Larry’s “unusual demands.”
“Typically, when a script is purchased,” Marilyn explains, “the producer can basically do whatever they want with the script.”
Oftentimes, the process still involves the original writer—with the producer giving notes and the writer implementing those changes to the best of their ability. Sometimes, though, if the producer feels that the original writer is no longer a good match for the project, they’ll hire a new one to implement their vision. Most writers (understandably) hate the second scenario. Larry, however, hated both scenarios and wanted it contractually written that no one could change a word of his script except for him.
“But what if you die?” a producer once asked.
“Then you’re out of luck!” Larry cheerfully replied.
While most managers would have likely nudged Larry to ease up,
Marilyn believed that Larry was a true one-of-one and to try to change him would have been a betrayal of his talent.
The first serious, albeit unlikely, suitor for Prognosis: Negative was Barry & Enright Productions. For the first thirty-plus years of the company’s history, their focus had been making game shows like The Joker’s Wild and Tic Tac Dough. But in 1980, founders Jack Barry and Dan Enright felt like they had “mastered the game show business” and “[wanted] to branch out.”
Branching out involved taking a gamble on a risqué sex comedy, Private Lessons. And that gamble paid off handsomely when the movie quickly made back ten times its budget. So, feeling emboldened, Barry & Enright brought in a producer named Mike Wise to help the company expand their scripted business.
“Mike Wise was one of the first people I shared Prognosis with,” Marilyn explains. “And he flipped for it!”
Not only did he love it, but his new company’s newfound focus meant they were young and hungry in a way that made them willing to take a chance on Larry and his vision.
“So I told Mike [Wise], ‘That’s great! Make us an offer!’” Marilyn recalls. “And then, you know, he hemmed and hawed about not having a lot of money for development. Well, okay . . . then I suggest you get some money and come back to us with an offer!”
In the meantime, another serious suitor had entered the picture: David Susskind, a veteran producer with a reputation for making commercially viable higher-brow films like A Raisin in the Sun and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Given this mandate, it wasn’t a surprise that Prognosis resonated with him, but it was surprising that he was willing to pay $200,000 for the script.
In the world of screenwriting, $200,000 wasn’t going to break any records. But it was an unusually high amount to pay for someone’s first screenplay, and more than that, it would have been life-changing money for thirty-six-year-old Larry David.
“Of all the clients I ever had,” Marilyn says, “Larry was probably the one who cared the least about money. For him, it was always just about the creative. But when that two-hundred-thousand-dollar offer came in, even Larry was like, WHOA!”
“Is this for real?” Larry asked Marilyn.
“It is!” she celebratorily replied.
Throughout the 1980s, Marilyn kept a detailed diary of her daily activities. And her entry on this occasion was nothing but excitement:
8/31/1983 Closed Susskind deal! 9 mo option, 6 mo renewal! Larry Speechless!
Speechless Larry was a rare brand of Larry. And also, in this case, a short-lived Larry. Because when Susskind’s lawyer looked at the deal that had been negotiated, he was flabbergasted by the details.
9/26/1983 Lawyer not accepting deal. Doesn’t want Larry to have so much control.
9/28/1983 Deal’s off. Susskind lawyer says: “It’s too stacked in Larry’s favor. Robert Redford doesn’t get a deal like this!”
Although the Susskind deal wound up falling apart, it did manage to nudge Barry & Enright’s Mike Wise to finally come in with an offer.
“Barry & Enright was willing to pay twenty-five thousand dollars,” Marilyn recalls. “Which, obviously, was a lot less than what we had been talking about [with Susskind]. So you’d think, maybe, that Larry would be upset or that he’d feel slighted. But as I’m sure you’ve figured out by now, when it comes to Larry, it’s never about the money.”
Since it wasn’t about money, one of the things that Larry liked about Barry & Enright was that they really wanted to keep Rob Reiner involved in the project.
“They thought Prognosis would be the perfect follow-up film for Rob,” Marilyn recalls. “Perfect for him to direct after Spinal Tap.”
Reiner too remained open to this idea—until early screenings of This Is Spinal Tap went so well that Reiner started receiving bigger-budget offers. Nevertheless, Reiner still wanted to be a producer on Prognosis, and now, in light of the surging hype around him, his involvement, even as a producer, brought tremendous value.
And so, with the pieces falling into place, Barry & Enright optioned Prognosis: Negative in November 1983.
11/10/1983 We all celebrate Larry signing deal with B & E and Mike Wise at The Ivy. Gave us check for $35,000!
In a town where fortunes are notoriously fickle, and where the lowest common dominator so often wins the day, the sale of Prognosis: Negative felt like more than just the celebration of a script being optioned. It felt like validation of something bigger—almost like the real-life version of a comedy film’s premise, with an unlikely hero overcoming long odds (and lessons, at least in theory, being learned along the way).
Sadly though, the lesson that Larry would ultimately learn with Prognosis was hardly a new lesson at all. Rather, it would just be the latest twist on what he already knew to be true: Good things are never as good as they appear to be.
***
Excerpted with permission from Emperor of Nothing: The Making of Larry David by Blake J. Harris. Published Oct. 20 by HarperCollins Publishers.