Seinfeld Cast Interview Compilation (Charlie Rose 1993-2008)

what can you say about jerry seinfeld that hasn't already poked fun at that he hasn't been talked about he is a stand-up comedian that skewers modern life and modern problems with the dead-on accuracy of a swiss watch he comes to us each week in a hit nbc series that examines his work and his life like the classic jack benny and even burns and allen programs seinfeld the television show reveals seinfeld the comedian as he starts and stumbles through friendships and bad career moves and love affairs and the annoying feeling that adulthood itself is somewhat overrated he gives us a superb you like this so far a superb ensemble cast welcome why is the show so successful do you think i think it's um it's handmade this is a sitcom that is not is not processed through a network through a large studio system it's a it's a few people working on this thing and we're just doing what we think is funny and the cast is is amazing it's an amazing uh group of talent i mean each one of the people in our cast is could easily easily hold their own hold down their own show what holds it together what's the glue of this show um we there's the egos are in check yeah frankly and i think we're all happy to be doing good work and we all have a lot of respect for each other but the the the glue is is uh as larry david and myself uh working on every single line every week of every show and it's not delegated and no one interferes the creation of seinfeld the creation of it yeah is that a question yeah it's a question how did this how did larry come to you or did you go to i came i i didn't go to him as much as i kind of turned in the bar and catch a rising star and said hey i had a meeting the other day with the nbc they were interested in me doing some kind of show he says what kind of show i go i don't know i don't know which is what i have no ideas i never have any ideas i don't know how i do these i have no ideas did you actually say that i had no ideas i don't know what i just want me to do because they think i'm attractive on tv that was a good stand up and they like an hour goes by yeah he says uh you want to get something to eat i go yeah so we go across the street to the korean deli on first avenue is 78. and we're wandering around the deli you know those delis but they've got all kinds of stuff in there you know when we go up to the cash register and a lot of stuff on the street too a lot of stuff on the street and there's all sometimes there's weird stuff you know there's like no labels just big newtons right wrapped up in cellophane with nothing no identification you know where it came from you just go yeah i'll take a shot on that right so we start making fun of the products and he says to me this is what the show should be i go what is just two comedians talking because this is what comedians do yeah they wander around during the day with nothing to do and make fun of everything that they say he said we should do a show with just two comedians walking down the street making fun of everything and that was the genesis was he gonna be one of the comedians no it was never he was always gonna be the creator writer yeah along with you yeah and david would be him i mean i mean uh george would be here i mean no well jordan george was originally a comedian right in the beginning and then we thought well then if george is a comedian then you got to see his act or you're going to want to see it let's just make him a regular guy so i'll be a community he'll be a regular he's not david though david um what we did is what we came up with story ideas we would figure which character could do this idea and a lot of times larry's ideas fit george very well but we never tried to make george into an alter ego of larry some say this was the perfect marriage you and larry david a magical relationship it was different sensibilities but not different comedic sensibilities uh different kind of guys but he it was one of those perfect partnerships where he saw a lot of big picture stories he knew exactly what would be a great story for the show he created tons of stories for the show and i had a great sense of mechanics of comedy and detail of lines and you know um you know so we and we always um if any idea could pass through both of our filters it would work if i thought it's funny and he thought it was funny it almost always was funny and what if he thought it was funny and you didn't you didn't go with it um it would depend you know in a partnership you give and take but um we had a great some kind of filtering system because that's what a sitcom is you sit in an office and writers come in all day and pitch you stories and you have to say let's do that let's not do that and if you're there by yourself one person's instinct is really not good enough to churn out that amount of material but the test was you will never put anything on that's not funny well as best you can there's no comedy is like hitting a baseball you know if you you're just trying to improve your average nobody hits a thousand what do they hit 300 um a good hitter could hit 500 700 what did you hit on this show on this show the tv show yeah that's the 700. maybe most of them are good there's very few clickers out of the 180 shows they're people who say this is the best that come ever i love those people where are those people are there any of them here do you believe are you one of those yes of course i don't know do you believe it no i don't know i don't think things like that you can't i don't think you can't because you're my favorite don't i ever want to see it in print that you said this is the greatest thing oh that was absurd mirza my favorite one is bigger than this better than this for me the honeymoon makes me laugh more that's it really that well i'm laughing at that i'm sitting here watching you yeah laugh out loud yes but let's see if it's funny in 50 years like the honeymooners that's true let's see okay but tell me how you and larry are different in terms of writing in terms is he more absurd are you more absurd uh i think we would take different positions here here's where we're the same we both love to kill it we will work any amount of hours our our desire to avoid humiliation is so great in both of us we so desperately did not want to be embarrassed by each episode coming out this week and as the show becomes became more popular the danger of that became greater and greater we kept saying oh my god this thing is getting popular now we have to maintain this ridiculous standard so it became more and more terrorizing to run in front of this train and but he has tremendous energy tremendous fertility comedic fertility i mean tons of ideas there are people in this world that funny things happen to and he's one he is one of them are you one of them no i'm not i am the kind of person who when something funny happens to you i know just how to tell it did you study comedy i i yeah that's what i do i mean no you can't study formally well no no i don't mean you go to school and say i want to be a comedian how do i get a phd in comedy but in a sense i mean you looked at it through an analytical eye saying why does that work and what do i have to do yes and where is my timing and where do i need to take it yes a young comedian comes to you and says you know tell me what i need to know to be a comedian what do you tell him just work just work just work there's nothing you have a theory about logic and all that in the absurd and you got to figure out a precise way to prove something that's unprovable oh yeah well comedic one of the things that a good comedian can do is take an absurd absurd premise and prove it with rigorous logic right that sounds very logical and you take something completely fatuous and then but did you learn that somewhere or did it just sort of you know i look at a lot of good jokes and i realized that they have that in common but as a kid yes i would write down jokes that i saw on tv and i would try and figure out why they were funny and i mean i i never get tired of why is that funny i never get tired of talking about it or analyzing it and i i'm very scientific about it when you decided to end seinfeld yes you decided because larry had already left two years two years earlier how is it different when he left um it was very different i mean i uh i didn't know if i could continue the show i really was pretty scared about it but i didn't feel the timing was right for the show to end i felt the audience you know it uh wasn't ready and i wasn't ready so um i just kind of took over the script writing work twice as hard i worked twice as hard and i i i would work with very i would rotate groups with other writers i would take three guys and they would be larry we can't imagine how hard it was for you to do that well i would it was fun i was having fun charlie what's you know because jack but jack wells told me a story once jack welch was in ceo of general electric that he i think he wrote about this too but i'm not sure but that he wanted you to continue for another season yes and there's great fanfare about how much he offered you per episode i've seen a figure like five million dollars but i think he told me a story where he said you went to you and said you got to do this we want you to do this and you said look i just can't imagine myself on christmas eve writing and that's where i've been too many times i think he had called me one time to talk about it as i was making the decision and he was in some fabulous schemes yeah it was a sunday and i'm in the office working you know and i said what are you doing right now jack he says well i'm at uh you know mount snow or something yeah i'm an aspen i say i said you know where i am i'm in my office working you know but the work was never an issue with me the work was all out of love and fun and uh my real reason for ending the show was i i just felt the kind of a stage instinct of knowing when to say good night and have the audience go oh i wish it was just a little more that's and then they leave the theater and they go that was great but if you go just to ten minutes too long it's it's amazing how it depresses that good feeling and and that was and even though we're talking about years i could just feel that moment and i go you know what if we leave now the audience is going to be you know there's a thing that makes audiences jump up and that's what it is he surprised him a little bit people have said it by you it was a perfect instinct by you really they have i i hope they're right no they're they're clearly right because it's somehow i mean someone said it'll serve him the rest of his life i mean he made the right choice johnny carson made the right choice he left it just the right time it was about i did it i did it for the audience i thought if i leave now they'll have this thing that they'll never have to say it was good but then it started to kind of run out of gas police told me that they stopped after like two years really three years he said i couldn't create it as well as i used to and before i got there i could feel it but i hadn't gotten there but i knew if we tried to do it one more time it might not be as good i felt it was time to go i felt that also and so what did you think you would do when you left oh i didn't care care what i do we initially were pitching a show about how a comedian gets his material so we would follow a comedian around in his daily life we'd go from the grocery store to the dry cleaner maybe on it he'd go on a date he'd hang out with his friends and then at the end of the show he would do a monologue uh and incorporate it into the monologue would be some of the things that we saw happen on the show uh that and that's ostensibly where the comedian got the material and that's that's what that's what was pitched to nbc yeah and nbc believed in the show so they said they said we're committing to four episodes yes yeah right four episodes normally it's 13 or eight or something yes at least yeah so we didn't really think that they had too much confidence in the show was it a hit did you feel good about it from the beginning i felt good just the fact that the four episodes were produced because i had never produced four episodes before and frankly i didn't know that i was capable of doing that so just the fact that we had four shows on the air made me very excited i didn't think about the future i thought phew i got by i did the four okay let's go back to new york let's get on with our lives this is the reason i like you so much now you the story goes that you said when they wanted more you said more i can't do more i've given you everything i have in these four episodes well you know i didn't say it out loud but i i said it to uh my close personal friends like like jerry yeah yeah you know i ran i said look i gave you the four things that happened to me in my life what what else could i possibly do so then i had to actually come up with ideas like like a regular writer and uh i that was yeah then we were doing 13 episodes i had to do 13 episodes i almost started crying from the from the fear the masturbation sequence which we're going to see how dare you who do you think you're talking to you know my parents are probably going to be watching this i would certainly hope so yeah they probably are all right did you create this was this your idea yeah yeah from where well it uh it's actually based on you know all right i might as well say it it is based on something that that happened yes you got caught did you no i didn't get caught no i i was in a contest i was in fact in the context yes emerged victorious i'm proud to say yeah this is one of the most famous episodes of seinfeld ever yeah yeah definitely it got uh tremendous word of mouth i guess and uh i think it's one of the turning points in the history of the show that and moving to thursday night that's what really got us over the top why did you leave well charlie i knew i knew you were gonna you see i was feeling that i needed to no you know i had been there for seven years and that's a long time to to suffer the way i do in uh in my daily life and seven years is a long time for somebody to executive produce a show like that uh burn out no it wasn't burnout i had i had plenty of ideas it wasn't that it was oh yeah i was learning how to how to do it um it wasn't that i just thought that uh i felt like i was ready to do so i thought i had done that and now i i wanted to try something else um and that's that's pretty much it tell me about jerry and the the jury that you know and what it is there's more i thought this thing i i really thought you were wrapping up that's not done so far no tell me about it i mean you know this guy as well as anybody who worked with him you created with him as you say you were on the same wavelength yeah did you watch the show scientology yes i do there you go that's it that's all i need to know that's all you need to know you want you watch it though seinfeld yes just watch george yes there you go that's all you need to know about me is that right yeah so it's you're like a painter who says picasso used to say look everything you need to know about me is right here in this painting every music i've had composers come here everything you need to know about me is in that music i'm very much like picasso in many ways my proclivity for sex certainly my my output [Laughter] we have a lot in common me and picky picky picasso um no jerry's a uh you say he's a tremendous guy i'll give i'll give you the citronella's gotta give us a question i'll give you the quintessential i'll give you the quintessential seinfeld story okay and there we're going somewhere yeah when i uh it was about our third or fourth season on the show i was in a room talking to a few of the writers and uh i looked at one of the writers shirts and there was just something a little off about the shirt it was it was sort of it was in a bit of a diagonal going down and i said has jerry seen that shirt you know and he and he said no and i said i'll bet you he comments on that shirt within 10 seconds after he sees you you know and he said you got to bet we bet uh we bet ten dollars may even be 20 i said okay all right and i'm just about to leave the room and here he comes he comes walking in and i hang out at the doorway and he didn't even make eye contact with the guy and he's talking to somebody else and all of a sudden he turns and he he says something to me and goes what's the story with that shirt you know you're a guy yeah and you think of like so you and he knows the same thing about you yeah have you two ever talked about this notion of it is said that jer for jerry the show was fun for you doing the show was suffering you know i also had a lot of fun too the most fun i had was actually the actual writing of it the the writing that we did together those those were uh those were great times august has been asked this a thousand times what's this how do you explain it that one show captured the ethos of its time you know if we could explain it we probably would have screwed it up yeah exactly if you knew it was happening it would have screwed it up it was i i actually did bet money against it jerry and i had a little wager after the pilot he said what do you think and i said no way be he said uh why i said well the show i mean i love the show and the audience for the show is me but i don't watch tv so who's coming you know this is this is a a slightly more sophisticated level of comedy and it's not what television is used to and i just i don't think we're going to get anybody and it started by attracting exactly me you know college boys young men in their mid to late 20s that was our key core audience but then all of a sudden children were watching eight nine ten years old and and my mother's generation people in their sixties and seventies and eighties were well and and and we started going international and people from other countries were and we just said what what are they getting what were they getting i i imagine that the children i assume were laughing at michael's antics you know falling down bumping into things um i guess our parents saw us uh in the characters and and you know what they consider their crazy kids and and i guess to some degree in in trying to examine the minutia of a very specific human experience of urban living at a certain age and at this period of time somehow we tapped into something universal somehow the little disturbances of daily life are more universal than we know and because the show was dedicated entirely to the laugh and nothing else there was no attempt at learning growth or messages it was just we would do anything and everything and sacrifice anything to achieve the laugh i guess what we built with the audience was a confidence exactly there was a confidence that if they tuned it on whether it was good bad stupid broad small whatever it was going to be they were going to laugh where is it larry david's vision and where is it jerry seinfeld's vision and where is it something else it's hard to say i think it was a unanimous collaboration as far as the idea of of doing a show about the daily life of a comedian which was essentially very small things i mean there were no great events in jerry seinfeld's daily life i think that the cynicism of the show uh the darkness of the show particularly in its first four or five years let me guess it is much more larry david than jerry jerry has a much lighter heart and a much younger heart and larry is you know is full of darkness and little twists and turns um but it was a beautiful collaboration and i think there was no way the darkest larry and the light is jerry and a lot of the inspiration i mean larry lived across the hall from kenny kramer so kramer is an experience in larry's life george has certainly become a model of larry david in many respects um elaine was sort of modeled on carol leifer who was an ex-girlfriend of jerry's and a pal um so you know it's all kind of there but i i think the stuff that people remember us for particularly early on came out of the notebooks of larry david i remember when we did the masturbation show we shared a clip of that when larry and i said larry this is nuts this is nuts and he said i was in this contest this is a real thing yeah you know maybe nuts to you it was my life yeah and everything that i thought oh come on this is pushing credibility he went what's happened to me this is i wrote this down because this is what happened to me so i think a lot of a lot of this more specific inspiration week to week in the beginning was possible what's the darkness of larry then well larry is larry walks around with a cloud that basically the world's going to rain it will rain on him and that no one likes him and that really it's futile to get through the day because no good can come of it and yet he's too he's still filled with fear and phobia to actually kill himself so so he struggles on after every episode he would say this is it this is it he did the pilot he went i can't do any more unless this is i did the show i think that's it i can't wait wait more four more you know we got our first season order was 40. that's it i have nothing more staggered him so when 22 came up he was just over i can't do it yeah and so finally he left finally he left yeah yeah did the show change when he left how so um uh i think in some way well a lot of things happened when when he left um again that that sort of darker element that had been established now instead of being written by a staff of guys who were in their 30s and 40s and had a little bit of that the staff became a lot younger the staff became the writing staff was in their 20s and they weren't particularly dark people so instead of no nothing but living in and expressing it they were kind of writing a semblance of it so i think the reality of the experience was one step removed the other thing is that jerry really felt his his uh he spread his wings and what jerry jerry's one of jerry's favorite television shows was the old album costello show and i think we started to go that way for the most part i think we started to look less and less at the small minutia of things our intrinsic storylines got broader in their scope a little wackier a little a little more in a good sense juvenile and another thing that larry tried to do often was around the third or fourth season he he started playing with the instead of one story in a b story he would have four distinct stories one storyline for each character that would brilliantly dovetail at the end the dovetailing seemed to stop for me one or two would dovetail but not necessarily all four um all good story lines but not necessarily with that same polish at the end that makes it go you had to have that in order to get that or to get that to get that um but just as much fun and even though there were many critics who said you know it's not it's not the same show you know the audience for the for the most part seemed to keep saying to certainly to me when i would speak to them that they were laughing so you heard the criticism over the last year did you say they've got a point or did you say they the audience did you say the critics are out of touch with the audience i think the critics had a point to a certain degree in that they noticed the change in the show and they were articulating the change in the show when they went on to say therefore it is a a worse show i don't know that i agreed i i can tell you there's not an episode we did whether i thought it was a great episode or not where i don't think we had some tremendous funny moments and so when people say favorite episode of favorite season i go you know i really don't know because in every one of them there was something really spectacular what can you tell me about the final episode uh not much it's uh it's 30 minutes it's it's actually an hour i think it's brilliant in its idea and in its structure and uh i can tell you that it brought back a lot of folks that had really been a part of our extended family over the years but it's brilliant i you're a postmortem on it having lived through it without being able to tell us is that it's a home run i think it's it's it's as big a home run as you can hit which is to say no one's going to be satisfied larry is absolutely right in his paranoia about this one because he worked his guts out and you can't you know there's such expectations about this thing that no one will feel satisfied but i think what they did considering all the the options that they had talked about and one of the options by the way was not doing a finale episode just doing an episode right um considering the scrutiny that's going through and the expectations and what had to be achieved i i think it's just a brilliant job close to 80 million people going to watch this they think okay what's it going to do i mean are you guys going to all say to each other it's been one hell of a ride i'm off for the rest of my life see you later to each other or to each other to each other i i hope not you know we um we do have kind of different lives and we are four very different people and it's been an amazing relationship between the four of us i i'd say defining event in one's life yes we have been through something a huge success something amazing jerry before we went out to tape the final uh stuff in front of the audience for the last show we we always got together backstage behind the apartment set and we would have a little huddle and kind of just connect with each other and you know we're as reflected in our show it's not a terribly sentimental group and we never kind of took the show very seriously to its credit um but we got into the little huddle and and jerry started to missed up and cry and it's it's not that it's you know out of character but it's just unusual and he said you know the four of us are inexorably tied to each other no one from this day on will think of one of us without thinking of the other three and he said i i can't think of three people i would rather be linked to for the rest of my life and he's right i mean we will be you know the musketeers until the end of our lives and it was an amazing relationship and i can't think of a working relationship with that much attention that would could go for that long that could be that much fun we even under the worst of circumstances when all the negotiations were happening and and there was a lot of tension a lot of pressure and it really got hot under the collar for a while we still laughed every day that we went to work um and i i can't imagine not having those people in my life yeah it may very well be that this is seinfeld is as good it's ever going to get for you and you have to come to this idea that okay i got enough out of it so if that's the price i paid i'm prepared to do that right absolutely i had a fascinating conversation with william shatner a couple of years ago who was an idol of mine by the way um and he we were talking about exactly that about how after star trek the series ended he was very bitter that as a man in his early 30s it seemed like the thing that was going to have the greatest impact on people in his career was done right and he was bitter about it and he tried to distance himself from it and his career suffered for it and his his reputation suffered a little bit for it until finally it wasn't until 20 years later that he went i have had an opportunity to create something that will live so far beyond me how many actors have that how many actors have that moment even for a moment regardless of when it comes and he really embraced it and he said you know you might want to think about embracing that and not letting yourself bracing it rather than making it your enemy i have i have no illusions that anything that i'm involved with from this day on will have the the impact or the mass acceptance or the profitability or whatever the upside of a seinfeld what seinfeld has given me is the ability to now do the things that move me that i care about um even if they're just silly funny things seinfeld is not um [Music] it's not my sense of humor necessarily my sense of humor actually has more hugging and growing i think humor is one of the great teachers now seinfeld did teach but in a sort of abstract bizarre way [Music] it now gives me the ability to go i don't care if it's successful to that degree and i don't care if they can't afford to pay me that's not a factor for me anymore what i care about now is do i want my name attached to it and do i care about it that was yes yes yeah that was the greatest gift that jerry could give me is there any downside to this for you any not the ending of it the doing of it the doing of science yeah does it have any downside no no no other than the fact that i'm i'm not the world's most comfortable celebrity it would not be my choice to really not be able to be anonymous um and i'm uh the four of us are actually intensely private and i think that's been seen over the years you don't see us out at the premieres and at the parties and at the spots um but i have found that people have been really wonderful and kind and and respectful to me and my family you know i go to the market i go to the movies i live my life uh but i get all the perks i i get you know all the wonderful treatment that comes with doing something that knows who you are you're making good money we made a wonderful living yeah my children's lives are secure my family's like how tough did it get i mean the story is conventional wisdom is that that it was you who said at the beginning we ought to be getting more and and made the argument for a million dollars an episode which i guess if you believe the press ended up as 600 thousand dollars an episode give or take hood might be whatever it is whatever the truth is it's somewhere in between there did you begin that was that your idea i did not i didn't get again the million dollar idea the million dollar figure actually first came out of julia's mouth but it was not it was not a why not a million right well it was not a wild well i wish i got a million dollars there had been actual research done um we knew that for the network alone every episode of seinfeld generated 14 million dollars of profit of sheer profit for the network alone let alone castle rock and the syndication participants we had argued that after five years of being in seinfeld there was no upside in the long run for the three of us to continue doing the show it had made us celebrities it had made us some money but if we were going to be actors with careers that extended where we needed to play different roles continuing to put out the image of george elaine and kramer was actually detrimental to our long-run careers so why was there any incentive for us to be in this for the long run unless those shows were extremely profitable to us so we argued that we needed to be cut in on syndication we needed syndication points and we were told in in those small terms to go take a hike when we got into the bargaining chair and nbc so desperately wanted to have another season or another two seasons we said again syndication our salaries are fine but you're making such massive profits in syndication profits of three to four million dollars per show and in in you know in to infinity and you don't want to give us any of that okay in order for us to feel good about doing this show i want to leave the most successful half hour in the history of television knowing that i never have to work again that is what i require or you can't have my services so knowing what all the revenues were what we would have made had they given us this indication what everybody was making up front we said we tried to figure out what percentage of the success formula of the show were the three of us and we came up with jerry larry the writers us and everything else the the wonderful guest players you know all the other stuff well there's one fifth of that formula we said here's the number a million an episode and when you uttered that number what did they say they did what they should have done which is laughed at us i and i also knew that it was detrimental to television if they made the deal with us and it has proven to be detrimental it is outrageous upfront money outrageous it is bad for television 13 million dollars an episode for er a million dollars each to paul reiser and helen hunt for a show that's number 25 to 30 in the ratings these are bad prices you ask for that kind of money when you are producing the kind of profit revenue that we are producing but we couldn't ask for it on that side they wouldn't give it to us so we had to take it out up front and i personally feel that we damaged the economics of television and that nbc was foolish to give us what they gave us but there was no way we were going to come back for anything less than the six the six was my bottom line so i guess i'm guilty of that i knew that at six hundred thousand an episode we would gross a certain amount i would net him a certain amount and that would pay for the rest of my life but um i i thought they were foolish to make the deal i thought they were foolish in the way they handled us i thought that it it ruined relationships we did i think so between whom um i felt that we were part of a real family with nbc and i never had any problem if they didn't want to make a deal with us i thought that was a perfectly legitimate just said they shouldn't have done it right but we began in december and they didn't talk to us talk to us really until three weeks before it had to be a deadline so we went through the rest of our season with our crew with our writers with everyone going are we coming back because our lives depend on this and the three of us going we're serious and they're not dealing with us we were the bad guys these people couldn't make decisions about their lives or know what their lives were going to be because the three of us were playing a game of chicken with nbc because nbc wouldn't talk to us they thought if they didn't talk to us until may 1st that we would crumble that we would get scared that we're actors and we know we may never work again and you know if they offered us 250 we would take it because we're going to crumble and that's not the way you deal with people that are in your family and that have been working with you for nine years where was jerry and all this between a rock and a hard place as the producer of the show it is his mandate to bring the show in as inexpensively as he possibly can that is his job to maximize profits as the producer of that show by keeping the costs as low as he can on the other side of the coin he'll be the first one to say they deserve a million and then some he's our pal he's our collaborator he's one of the ensemble and he believed in us and he believed in our request i really think because he was between a rock and a hard place he really stayed out of it and and i think we could have had a smoother ride had he not stayed out of it but he would have had to choose one hat to wear and i think that's a very very difficult decision to make so i don't i don't i don't blame him for staying out of it and ultimately he did jump in at the end and say god finish this to the network and that's the day we closed the deal when he said finish it he said you you guys better stop the shenanigans and give them what they want today or or i'm going to pull and so that was the final incentive to at least get it done the entrance came from where this famous entrance of you coming into i know when it came in i can't tell you exactly what the episode was but i know that i came in to catch up with the scene something was happening very quickly in a scene and i come balding in and it got a laugh as well as it felt right it was just and of course it took a few shows to get to this point but um i felt that that represented kramer that was the essence of the character because i felt that's how the character steps into life he just he comes into things also the pace of the show it's moving very fast the patter between jerry and george uh so um i like to get in quick and and get right to um to the scene so that's that's another way of looking at it it really is a combination the success of this sitcom first jury but then the perfect combination of ensemble actors and good writing absolutely oh indeed this is my third television show i know about that one it's a chemistry but it's it's difficult to still tell you why it works it's like trying to say why we're really really really here on this planet i mean it's a mystery to me no one no one thought that the show would become this successful i mean it tested badly it was picked up only for four shows in the first year right the second show let's just give them 13. let's not give them the full vote i don't know about that seinfeld show okay what's next on the schedule yeah we're giving you and then it started to catch on uh we all we did we we always had a decent following in the second year we still had us we had a share of the audience that stayed consistent so nbc started to note take note of that what a friendship they have that i can come in grab some ice cream and take the whole carton with me as i go out and take more than your share on one tablespoon you know but it says it all right there i mean there's the energy there's this sort of jerry's take on kramer there's kramers right you know all right i mean you could see the character they were interesting there was all of it and you just got to do that scene after scene after scene but it seems different that's what makes it so so inspiring it's got to deliver the same way doesn't it i mean well yeah sometimes i can come in i can be i can be in a real funky mood too in there he's out he's getting tickets he's on his way he's gonna have a good time he's got a date too that episode as it involves jerry seinfeld's biggest talent is what recognizing true genius and others well i'll tell you he's a heck of a writer because he writes a lot of these shows yeah does he really oh yeah yeah with the writers i mean he's right in there he knows these characters very very well they were conceived uh by he and larry david um i i would say his biggest talent is uh he knows he knows what's funny and i've never been held down by jerry seinfeld and i'll go way over okay sometimes and i'll look at him go you want to put that in he goes yeah it seems like only yesterday this time vote left air doesn't it or not no we did a long time and we i guess we finished that thing about three years ago three and a half years ago so it's um but it sure was a heck of a lot of fun to do there's no doubt about that sure made a difference in your life a huge difference in my life a huge difference in my life yeah a very happy difference i mean because it was so satisfying creatively yeah why what made it that satisfying was that the fact that you let me let me offer possibilities yes correct b a wonderful ensemble group of actors three it just had the x factor something makes a magical show and that had it abc abc i guess all three but i would i'm not sure i i i mean i think it was extraordinary that we all were lucky enough to come together but once we came together it was sort of there i mean i don't think there was sort of i don't think there was magic beyond that i mean it was just a a great group of people at the right place at the right time and uh uh and we had a lot of fun we enjoyed the process and i think that translated do you define yourself as a comedian um or an actor an actor an actor i've never done stand-up or anything like that but why because it's the thought of doing stand-up just send chills through you yes it does yeah it's a very different way of performing very different and yet probably jerry today today even yeah would define himself as a stand-up comedian more than he would as an actor or a sitcom create or anything like that they're i'm sure of that yeah that's what he loves most he wants yeah and i mean he always said on the set he wasn't an actor and we would always tease him about what we'd give him tips on how to act walk over there be funny yeah sure yeah i mean he's the first one to admit it yeah what's his genius you think um [Music] i think it's stand-up comedy i actually i think that he uh enjoys what he does and that comes through absolutely you know you may have heard me say that in a conversation will smith talk to me about that the idea that if you are having a wonderful time it translates infectious it is yeah it's completely true it's like you know yeah that's what was so great about uh doing seinfeld actually is that we were having so much fun and then other people were digging in it was like wow this is so cool that can be better yeah was saturday night live like that no [Laughter] it was awful in a word no no no why not well um well it was a big break for me yeah for sure and it was a definitely a great training ground for me there's no doubt and in the fact that it was extremely difficult to do um i was very young and i was unbelievably naive now you're old and now that i'm an old hag but um i i didn't know how the business worked and i didn't know how that show worked and there's a lot of politics about getting your material on the air and you know i came from doing uh sort of ensemble work and uh improvisation we're a team and stuff like that and stuff doesn't change you were a graduate of northwestern yeah exactly or you attended northwest i attended yeah i actually left northwestern to do s yes i know but at any rate that um that was hard and it was hard to be a woman there and there wasn't a woman there oh yeah well it means that they weren't writing material for women writers were much more inclined to write for the men how was that i don't know i guess because it's today they've got lots of female characters don't they yeah they do today but this was not it's not today yeah this was when what would you when this was 1983 to 86. was that a good year 1983 yeah i no 84 no not 85. there were there were things on the show that were good but you know but you don't have great memories about not really no i don't i mean is that terrible to say i don't really know it was it was it was fine i'm not kidding i really did learn a lot about how the business worked yeah but it wasn't creatively satisfying and but i will tell you one thing i came out of that show and i said to myself i'm not going to do anything again unless it's fun and fun right and so then you when you got to seinfeld you said jesus this is fun and what what also was good came out of sight well i knew larry david larry david was a writer on snl and that's how come he sent me these seinfeld scripts because he knew me and uh so that's something good that came out of it so he gets the credit for elaine doesn't he yeah sure i mean he yeah he he wrote it he wrote it and not only that he thought you'd be perfect yeah yeah i mean you walked in and they just said bingo i mean they it was not a whole lot of maybe maybe maybe no it was walk in bingo all right we found our elaine yeah that was nice it was great and when we were doing sign and when i read those scripts of larry's and i thought god are we going to be able to get away with this because that show was not written like most television shows the conversations were not particularly meaningful they were small conversations that were funny yeah funny and um and that appealed to me [Music] tremendously [Music] you

Channel: AD Vids

Views: 173,166

Rating: 4.8857703 out of 5

Keywords: seinfeld, seinfeld cast charlie rose, seinfeld cast charlie, seinfeld cast interview, charlie rose interviews, jerry seinfeld interview, larry david interview, julia louis-dreyfus interview, jason alexander interview, michael richards interviews, charlie rose seinfeld, charlie rose seinfeld cast, charlie rose seinfeld characters, seinfeld charlie rose, jerry seinfeld charlie rose, seinfeld roundtable, larry david charlie rose, julia louis-dreyfus charlie rose, best seinfeld

Id: L0TE_xXjp-0

Length: 46min 36sec (2796 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 23 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/mekkanik]

Elaine … ❤️❤️❤️

[u/fellbound]

I'm in no way related with this YouTube channel, just stumbled across this and thought I'd share!

[u/McBeamSteely]

It's so uncanny to watch Michael as himself. Jason too, because his voice and bearing are totally different than George. What amazing actors and performances.

[u/OrangeSunB1nks]

Bro. Elaine in that hair style is an absolute babe. Giddy up.