Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, July 2, 1994 TAG: 9407020072
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-14 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By Janice Berman/Newsday
DATELINE: HOLLYWOOD LENGTH: Medium
"I had just worked in Boston and had a particularly horrible experience," she says. "It's Friday, second show, which is typically the worst show of the week, because people have been working all week.
"So, by 11:30 Friday night, they're very drunk or very tired or both, and I had people yelling out and being obnoxious, and people were drunk, and there was no one from the club in the room watching the room, and so much of stand-up in clubs became like being a substitute teacher. So I'd had enough," said Leifer, a trim, cordial and yes, funny woman whose eyes retain that substitute-teacher wariness.
Right after the Boston massacre, "Seinfeld" co-creators Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld - the latter an ex-beau - asked her to write for NBC's most popular show last season. She'd never written for sitcoms before, but she was tired of the road. "I just wanted to give it a try."
So here she is, this thirtysomething child of Long Island, in a sparsely furnished office near the "Seinfeld" soundstage, behind a desk instead of a mike, the show's only female writer. On her left is a wall full of pastel index cards, each bearing a story idea.
Leifer had been a stand-up kind of gal for 18 years, as familiar on the late-night talk shows as in the comedy clubs she calls "chuckle huts." Her stand-up material, like Seinfeld's own, charted the low-key angst of single, everyday life, filtered through an urban, northeastern sensibility. The type of material, in fact, that is "Seinfeld's" signature.
"It's kind of good not to have had a sitcom background for this job," Leifer said. "A big way that Larry David turns down ideas is he'll say, `I can see that on another show.' And that's a really bad thing here. Nothing's typical about the show, especially the ideas."
Leifer debunks the notion that "Seinfeld" is a show where nothing happens. Rather, in each episode, "a small event can trigger a lot of big things."
Like one episode's subplot, devised by Leifer, in which George (Jason Alexander) gets a deaf woman (played by Marlee Matlin) to show up at a party to read his ex-girlfriend's lips so he can find out why she broke up with him. "He never found out," says Leifer. "But that's the beauty of this show - that the characters create their own miserable moments."
Sometimes, the real-life experiences of the writers (11 in all) create the moments, miserable and otherwise. Take the time Leifer went to a Bette Midler concert: "Like most of these shows, the line for the bathroom was incredibly long," she relates. "So, I went in with a couple of friends to the men's room. I just told that over lunch as what I did over the weekend, and Larry David said, `You've got to use that on the show.' "
Although one or two writers script each episode, there are story conferences where all the writers work on fitting together the plot lines for the characters - "like a jigsaw puzzle" and bat ideas around. "They really welcome anybody's input into things, if you think something could be funnier or work better. It's a very open atmosphere," she said. It's a lot more collegial than the stand-up's solitary world.
"Stand-up is a good way to make money. It's very lucrative, but it's lonely. People always think, `Oh, you go out with your road manager.' It's just you! You don't go with anybody. I'll never go back to the road." However, she will still do corporate dates and some colleges. This summer, she'll open for Seinfeld, whom she met in 1977, and dated for a while.
She can't remember, or professes not to, why they broke up. "We went out so long ago," she says, "that it's kind of like another lifetime, and we've been friends so much longer. But I think it's a great way to have a friendship, because if you've already been out and taken care of that, any curiosity or whatever, you've gotten out of your system."
Still, the inevitable question arises: Is the real Seinfeld like the "Seinfeld" Seinfeld?
"I don't think there's that much of a drastic difference," she says. "Regular Jerry drives a lot of Porsches and dates young girls," she said, laughing. "TV Jerry doesn't drive a Porsche, but he's pretty much the same."
by CNB