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Friday, Jan 9, 2009
Veteran "Curb Your Enthusiasm" director Bob Weide talks about bringing his prickly brand of humor to the big screen with "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People."
By Adam Baer
Read more: Humor, Comedy, HBO, Movies, Arts & Entertainment, Adam Baer
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Robert Weide, left, and Simon Pegg.
Oct. 1, 2008 | The former "Curb Your Enthusiasm" director and executive producer Robert B. Weide was casually flipping through his Buster Keaton and Little Rascals laserdiscs, kept in the hallway closet of his English cottage-style home. "I just bought a new laserdisc player on eBay," Weide announced, charmingly unfazed by the extinction of the medium. In his home office, beyond a living room lined with comedian biographies and signed lithographs made by author Kurt Vonnegut, a large video-editing workstation sits below a Japanese Woody Allen poster, a photo of Weide with Vonnegut and a one-sheet for Weide's 1998 Oscar-nominated Lenny Bruce documentary, "Swear to Tell The Truth."
Weide, 49, is a thin man with closely cropped dark hair, a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, and a focused set of brown eyes, protected behind black rectangular glasses. He grew up in Southern California, watching comedy from the Marx Brothers through "Annie Hall," which may account for his somewhat New Yorkerish vibe. "People are shocked when I tell them I grew up out here," he said. "There's a Lenny Bruce bit -- 'If you're from New York you're Jewish, even if you're not Jewish. And if you're from the Midwest you're not Jewish, even if you're Jewish.'" Weide is the kind of genuine man, less common in Hollywood by the second, who lacks slickness, excessive amounts of aggression, the desire to show off, cut corners and name-drop -- all issues broached in his feature directing debut, out this week, called "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People."
The comedy stars "Shaun of the Dead" sensation Simon Pegg in a loose interpretation of former Vanity Fair writer Toby Young, who published a now-infamous 2001 roman à clef with the same title about screwing up in the celebrity-filled world of glossy magazine journalism. It's Weide's first major project since leaving "Curb" after its fifth season, and as a cringe-inducing tale of a smart but abrasive misfit bumbling his way through the glamorous media high life, it's perhaps not an unusual choice after Weide spent years framing a fictionalized Larry David's misadventures in a post-"Seinfeld" Los Angeles.
Ten years ago this month, Larry David asked Weide to direct the first "Curb" mockumentary, which spurred along the hit series. Weide met David in 1983, while working as the director of development for Charles Joffe, the comedy impresario, who first encouraged Woody Allen to write and direct his films and, with partner Jack Rollins, steered the careers of historic comedians from Lenny Bruce to David Letterman.
In the eary '80s, within three months of leaving the University of Southern California, where Weide had been rejected by the film school three times (a fact he proudly announced in his first Emmy acceptance speech, in 1986), the 20-year-old director was working as a runner for Joffe and producing a Marx Brothers documentary. "The Marx Brothers in a Nutshell," narrated by Gene Kelly and including footage wrangled with Joffe's help, soon became one of PBS's highest-rated programs. Throughout the following years, Weide made more comedian documentaries -- including films about Mort Sahl, W.C. Fields and, of course, Lenny Bruce, whose mother Weide eulogized at her 1997 funeral. He was soon known in the industry for his comedy scholarship and his love for telling truthful stories of inconoclasts' lives.
Still, it wasn't his documentary work but Weide's job with Rollins-Joffe -- to say nothing of spending evenings in comedy clubs, getting to know performers -- that initially brought Weide and David together, pre-"Seinfeld." "Larry had written a script called 'Prognosis Negative' that I loved," Weide said. "That's how Larry and I met. This was when Larry was unhirable; no one knew how he was going to keep a roof over his head, and he was the first to think that he was going to be homeless. In those days, few people considered Larry funny, except me and half a dozen other people. I would always be in the clubs watching him, thinking that if this country ever caught up with this guy's sense of humor, there would be riots in the streets."
Weide gravitated to David's organic contrarianism: "In those early script development meetings at Rollins-Joffe they'd say to him, 'The script is so funny, it's so fresh, so original. But this character is pretty unsympathetic. Do you think there's anything we can do to make him a little bit more likable?' And Larry would go, 'No, I don't think so.' And I said, 'I love this guy.'"
When David left "Seinfeld," in the late 1990s, the two men began socializing more frequently, which led to a call from David in October 1998 offering Weide the chance to direct a "little HBO special" about David returning to stand-up. "Larry asked me because I directed documentaries," Weide said. "He didn't really know yet how much was going to be real documentary and how much would be fabricated. It was his idea to improvise the dialogue, because he didn't want to memorize lines. He also rightly thought that if it wasn't scripted, the dialogue would sound more real -- the rhythms, the overlaps, the pauses."
For comedy fans, "Curb" became an unexpected but logical progression to the multicamera sitcom about nothing: a documentary style meta-show about a writer/comic that questioned reality and shined a much brighter light on the dark, comfort-challenging humor with which "Seinfeld" had more subtly flirted. "It was always very divisive: People either loved or hated it," Weide said. "There were married couples that probably had big fights over it. Hopefully it even led to a few divorces."
But "Curb" was also a substrate for Weide's synergistic interests. It allowed him to finally transition into crafting innovative comedy, informed by his masterly understanding of the canon. "If you're injected with the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields and Laurel and Hardy, it absolutely becomes part of your system," Weide said. "I remember some 'Curb' things where Larry and Jeff would get in trouble with their wives and always try to get away with schemes. That's completely Laurel and Hardy. Occasionally in "Curb," Larry would do battle with some little kid -- that's W.C. Fields. Simon Pegg's character in 'How to Lose Friends' also has some Groucho in him; he says outrageous things you're not supposed to utter. There are also numerous moments in the show and 'How to Lose Friends' where I was thinking Mel Brooks."
"Whenever you're doing comedy, it's good to have someone who understands the art of creating it," Simon Pegg recently told me from his London home. "But Bob doesn't just have a classical understanding. He's responsible for some of the best modern comedy around, and he's on top of emergent stuff."
Pegg noted the brief story of how, when the British star met the actress Gillian Anderson during the casting for "How to Lose Friends," Weide made sure Anderson heard about Pegg's reality-based masturbatory references to the "X Files" actress on Pegg's British TV show "Spaced." "He broke the code!" Pegg said, jokingly. "There is a line you shouldn't cross but that Bob does. And that made me realize how much creative input he had on 'Curb.' He frequently shows that Larry David lack of restraint; he's always the man who ends the joke."
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