Kit Boss, "Creatures Comforts" "King of the Hill" "Carpoolers" producer-writer: Mr. Media Interview, Part 2

(RETURN TO PART 1)

BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I want to come back to animation in a minute, but I absolutely have to ask you about your experience on “Seinfeld.” Spike Feresten was your contact there, right?

KIT BOSS: I was introduced to Spike by a friend we have in common, and Spike was one of the writers on the show from very early on, and he rose to become one of the co-executive producers or executive producers of the show. At some point, I just got in touch with Spike and was interested in being part of that show, because it was such a great show. He suggested that I just pitch story ideas, that I just write down, make a list of one-liners for the different characters. What might happen in a show, as a way to maybe get Jerry and Larry interested enough to interview me for a job. The job never happened, and I kind of forgot about it at a certain point because I got the job on “King of the Hill.”

During the last season of “Seinfeld,” just out of the blue, I got a call from Spike, just a message on my machine saying “We used one of your story ideas, and we’re shooting it this Friday, and so if you want to come and watch the taping, be our guest, come on down.” So I went there to watch this story that I had completely forgotten I’d even pitched be shot.

It’s not that exciting a “Seinfeld” story, because I didn’t get that close to it, but I got my name among many others on one of the episodes in the final season, so that was pretty cool. I’m not surprising anybody by saying that’s one of the best shows ever.

ANDELMAN: Now the episode was called “The Maid,” I believe.

BOSS: It was “The Maid,” yeah. The main story -- not my idea -- was where Jerry starts going out with his maid.

ANDELMAN: Right. And she starts doing less and less work.

BOSS: Right. Right. But he keeps paying her, so that’s a little bit of a questionable, you are sort of wondering, okay, this looks a lot like what you might call a prostitute. And the story I pitched was of George where he just gets it in his head that one of the things standing in his way of being a happy, successful person is that he just needs a nickname. He needs a cool nickname and that the name will sort of transform him. If people didn’t think of him as “George,” but in this case, he decided that the name he wanted, the nickname was “T-bone,” that he would suddenly have this cachet, that women would melt, and he’d get promoted. And of course, it goes horribly wrong. The name he winds up getting is the name of a monkey, and hilarity ensued, but pretty much my pitch was that he decides that the name is key and that he tries to get people to call him T-bone and it doesn’t work out, and….

ANDELMAN: Do you remember any of the ideas that you suggested that didn’t fly?

BOSS: No, I don’t. I’m sure I have a list of them somewhere, but it would be painful and embarrassing.

ANDELMAN: Now, it’s interesting to me that you pitched an idea that they went for that was for George, and I hope you’ll forgive me, but thinking back, I would say that you years ago looked a little more like Kramer, although you had Seinfeld’s wit without a doubt.

BOSS: Yeah, what was the word you used, gangly?

ANDELMAN: Did I say that?

BOSS: Yeah. You’re right. I was a gangly individual.

ANDELMAN: Yeah, I mean, you’re a grown-up adult now, but….

BOSS: No, I’m not ashamed to admit it. I’ve got a bit of a protruding Adam’s apple and a face a bit like a hatchet.

ANDELMAN: Now, I didn’t, don’t put words in my mouth.

BOSS: You said I was self-effacing, so here’s….

ANDELMAN: Well, that’s true.

BOSS: But yeah, I am tall and kind of lanky, and I don’t have this sort of physical comedy gift that Kramer has, that Michael Richards has, but I’m sorry, I interrupted you. Were you going somewhere with that?

ANDELMAN: No, I just wanted to listen to you talk some more.

BOSS: The point is that I’m not an attractive man.

ANDELMAN: No, no, no. I think the point was that it was interesting that they bought an idea that you had for George, although I physically connected you to Kramer but intellectually connected you to Seinfeld. I think was the point.

BOSS: How interesting, because I feel like there’s more George in me than any of those. I mean, George is just a prisoner of his own neuroses, and I don’t know, I think my interior life is very George-like.

ANDELMAN: Really?

BOSS: Yeah, and I think, I mean, Seinfeld has such swagger, you know, and such confidence as a character. He has his neuroses, but they aren’t debilitating, and George, I think, I tend much more toward the George.

ANDELMAN: Well, now, see, that leads to the final area that I want to talk with you about, “King of the Hill,” because this other mutual acquaintance of ours, when he found that you worked on “King of the Hill” was like, “I couldn’t imagine anyone less likely to be writing for a show based in Texas than Kit,” and like I said, I associate your wit, I could make the connection to Seinfeld easily. George seems a stretch to me, but Hank Hill. Tell me about Hank Hill.

BOSS: Well, I immediately connected with Hank Hill and his kind of obsessive nerdiness… He loves propane. He’s a propane dealer. He works at a propane business, sells propane and propane accessories.

ANDELMAN: Right.

BOSS: He loves nothing more than to think and talk about propane. He has a very small, obsessive world that he lives in, and there’s a lot of that in me. I just connected to that. The Texas thing to me -- it was more a show about suburbia or about those kinds of in-between parts of the country that aren’t really the countryside and aren’t really a big city. You know, they are not the outskirts of a big city, they’re just the kind of mini-mall land in between. Up to that point, I don’t think any TV show had really captured that part of life, and that was the other thing. I mean,

Hank doesn’t just love propane, he loves his lawn, and he loves his Dallas Cowboys, and I grew up in a place where lawn care was a really big part of life and where I spent most weekends on a riding mower. There were a lot of things about Hank that I could really relate to.

And even if they weren’t things that were part of me, they were things that were very clearly drawn. As a comedy writer, what you’re really looking for are just strong character traits that really give you a guidepost to where the humor is going to be in a character, and King of the Hill was filled with those kinds of characters, so I found it really fun, really rewarding as a writer to work on that show.

ANDELMAN: Now, anyone could look at IMDB and see which episodes you are particularly credited with, but what I’m curious about is, are there any particular characteristics or threads that you added, having been there for so long and started so early that you added to the Hill legacy?

BOSS: Well, Hank doesn’t change a lot. He’s still at Strickland Propane where he started, and he hasn’t gone through any real big life changes. Hank hasn’t really evolved as a character -- to his credit, because I think he’s such a great character that doesn’t need to change. Peggy kind of flits around a little. I mean, I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but I think one of the episodes that I wrote was where Peggy goes to get the job at the Arlen Bystander.

ANDELMAN: Oh, right.

BOSS: The little paper there.

ANDELMAN: Where they re-write the press releases.

BOSS: Right. And she ends up, she gets a column. She does like a home advice kind of column and winds up telling her readers that a great cleaning tip is to combine bleach and ammonia because you get the cleaning power of bleach and the clean smell of ammonia, not realizing that she’s just given a recipe for nerve gas, a very simple form of nerve gas. So I don’t know, I may be responsible for, I don’t think there were any accidental deaths that came out of that. I think there was a “don’t try this at home” kind of disclaimer somewhere, or at least we didn’t hear about anybody trying it.

ANDELMAN: Not yet, but now people can associate a name with that advice.

BOSS: Now we can definitely say, “Do not mix those two things together. It’s a very bad idea.” Otherwise, I don’t know, I’m not one of these people -- I don’t have a great catalogue of my own pitches or … There are a lot of writers who can tell you the first joke that they pitched that ever got in a show, or they’ll be watching a show and can point out, “Oh yeah, that was my joke, that was my joke.” And I can’t remember those things. Maybe it’s like a survival mechanism to not… Keeping score like that seems like a terrible way to go through your life as a comedy writer unless you’re the best comedy writer in the world.

ANDELMAN: You make a great point, though, about the show in that it really, once it was established, it hasn’t really changed. There are different story lines, but the essence of the characters and who they are and what they are, you could watch, and of course, it’s in repeats all over, you could watch any episode on any day, and it would feel consecutive with the last one you saw.

BOSS: Yeah, and I think that’s a credit to Mike Judge and Greg Daniels, who created these characters. There is such a richness to them that you can keep… Now they’re back in production. They are doing season 11, or is it 12? And there is no sign of it slowing down.

ANDELMAN: But is it easier or harder to write for a show that is that fit? You can’t do “a very special episode of ‘King of the Hill,’” for example.

BOSS: Right. I wouldn’t want to. I don’t know. I guess you reach a certain point where, I always watch “The Simpsons” and wonder, well, how do you write for “The Simpsons” and come up with an idea that hasn’t been done without it going to just Crazy Town? You know, I guess I do go to Crazy Town a lot. That show always had the types of stories that they dealt with after the first several seasons, it’s a cartoonier cartoon than “King of the Hill” ever was, and I think that must be really hard when you’ve done 400 episodes. What story is there left to tell that they haven’t lived?

ANDELMAN: Mike Judge, obviously, created the show and also voices Hank Hill. Does that make it kind of tough on writers who are putting words in his mouth?

BOSS: He’s a great writer, for one thing, and one of the hardest things at “King of the Hill” as a writer was, if you’ve written an episode, you help in the post-production of the episode, so you help edit the episode, and you help direct the episode. You’re at the recording session where the actors are doing the lines, and they do each line three or four or five times, and you’re there to kind of direct them. Mike spends most of the year in Austin and has his own recording studio, and after the script is locked, he’ll go into the studio and just run through the lines and do two or three takes of each line.

The most frightening, terrifying, awful experience that I had as a “King of the Hill” writer is when you listen to the tape of Mike’s takes and you’re picking the takes, and occasionally he’ll come to a line, and you’ll hear him kind of go, “(Mutter, mutter), I’m not doing that.” Or he’ll under his breath kind of mutter about how he doesn’t understand what that line is for or what the point is or why it’s funny, and he’s always right, you know, because nobody knows his character better than him, and he’s the voice of the show. It’s his sensibility, so it really is a cringeful moment when Mike does one of those where he won’t do the line or he just kind of does it in a way that makes it clear that you better come up with something else to replace it.

ANDELMAN: Kit, we’ve got to wrap up, but I’ve got one more question for you. You wrote episodes of King of the Hill that featured cameo voices by two of pop culture’s most famous TV newspaper editors, Lane Smith, who played Perry White in “Lois & Clark, the New Adventures of Superman,” and Ed Asner, who played Lou Grant for nearly twenty years on “Lou Grant” and, of course, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” Now, drawing on your vast years of newspaper experience, Bob and Joe and the guys here that you worked with and all the other guys….

BOSS: I have named some characters after my old editors at the St. Pete Times….

ANDELMAN: Oh, let’s come back to that, but I need to know: Lane Smith as Perry White, or Ed Asner as Lou Grant, who was tougher?

BOSS: I think Ed Asner. I mean, in a knock-down, drag-out fight, yeah, Ed Asner for sure. Ed Asner could kick both our asses with one hand tied behind his back.

ANDELMAN: All right. We’ll have to add this. You’ve named characters after real people.

BOSS: Yeah.

ANDELMAN: Tell me about that.

BOSS: Well, I think there was, now my memory is going to fail me, but my two editors in the Clearwater bureau of the St. Petersburg Times, Bob Jenkins and Joe Childs, I think both of them wound up in that episode where Peggy goes to work at the Bystander.

ANDELMAN: You know what? I was thinking that I remembered Bob Jenkins as a character, but I couldn’t remember Joe. I’ll take your word for that. That’s got to be a little dicey.

BOSS: Well, you hope in the end that the character is funny without making them feel like… It’s almost never the case that you tie a specific trait from that person to the name. It’s just you’re always looking for names that are realistic and drawn from your own experience, and also, it’s a way just to kind of do a little tip of the hat to somebody that maybe you haven’t talked to for 20 years but is still part of who you are.

ANDELMAN: And Kit, while you’re waiting to see how things turn out with “Creature Comforts” this summer, is there animation in your future at this point?

BOSS: Not at the moment. I’m thinking about some other ideas that aren’t animated, but I don’t rule out, even aside from “Creature Comforts,” doing more animation just because it’s been so much fun. So I could see doing more for sure.

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Larry Thomas, "Seinfeld" "Postal" actor/Soup Nazi: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 1

Not many people have managed to land the words Nazi and funny in the same sentence.

Charlie Chaplin did it in The Great Dictator. Mel Brooks did it in The Producers with the song and dance number "Springtime for Hitler."

And my guest today, the Emmy-nominated Larry Thomas, did it, too. He’s been an actor for 25 years and is a veteran of dozens of films, TV shows, and hundreds of theater performances. Larry recently finished shooting the film Postal and was seen on “Arrested Development,” “Hot Properties," “Threshold,” “Scrubs,” and a Lexus commercial as a crazed pre-Bugsy visionary selling the idea of Vegas. Last year, Larry completed a 3- city, 140-show production of Neil Simon’s “The Odd Couple,” the female version, starring Barbara Eden.

Who the hell is Larry Thomas? No answers for you, not yet anyway. Be patient, my friends. You’re not going to want to miss this interview.


BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Larry, I’m sure a few people recognized your name but most probably won’t. Could you end the suspense and tell Mr. Media listeners and readers the role for which you’re most famous?

LARRY THOMAS: Well, I guess I could end it by saying, "No soup for you, Mr. Media!" I played the Soup Nazi on "Seinfeld."

ANDELMAN: I think people now know exactly who you are.

THOMAS: It seems to be a phrase that most of the world knows. I actually have been told by many people who I’ve met that they use the phrase constantly in their lives, and they’ve never actually seen the episode. They’ve actually gotten it secondhand from somebody else, but they love the way it sounds, so they use it.

ANDELMAN: Isn’t that amazing? Now, do you remember getting the call to audition for that?

THOMAS: I remember it really, really well. It was at a time in my life when I was actually under the threat of being thrown out of my acting class if I didn’t get a job, a paying acting job. I had a certain amount of weeks to get it. I’d worked and worked and worked, done interviews, tried to meet people, dropped off photographs, what they call pounding the pavement.

One night I was actually having dinner with a guy that wanted me to work as a bail bondsman for his company because I was a bail bondsman, and I was trying to be more of an actor. I got paged, and I went to a pay phone, and my agent said, “There’s a call from ‘Seinfeld.’ They want to see you on this guest spot. The character’s called the ‘Soup Nazi,’ and I think they want you to work up a Middle Eastern accent. Other than that, there’s no scene available on paper or anything so you’ll just have to go in tomorrow morning and see what they have.” So it was kind of mysterious actually.







ANDELMAN: How do you prepare for something like that?

THOMAS: Well, you prepare for every audition differently anyway, but the way you prepare is based on what you see on paper mostly. You want to read the scene and go okay, this is a comedy, whatever. I need to think this way or wow, this is very serious, I need to do a little work on this. In order to get the Middle Eastern accent, the first thing I did was I went home and took the videotape for Lawrence of Arabia, and I put it in, and I just worked up an impression of Omar Sharif. He has such a beautiful accent, and I thought, “They can’t fault me on that one.”

I was a big fan of “Seinfeld” since season three, and my episode was in season seven, so I had four years, at that point, of watching “Seinfeld.” I knew the characters. I knew how Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer would probably affect a guy called the Soup Nazi. It was so descriptive, the name, so I just worked on that. I was almost completely right on most of it except I thought Kramer would be like his worst nightmare, whereas instead, in the brilliant script by Spike Feresten, he actually had Kramer his only friend which I thought, in the end, was hilarious. So I just worked on it.

I called a friend of mine who’s a stand-up comedian, a guy named Tom Ayers, and I just was saying “Wow, I’ve got this audition for ‘Seinfeld’.” He said, “If they don’t have anything on paper tomorrow, what are you gonna do, what are you gonna say?” I just started ad-libbing things. I said, in dealing with George, I’d probably have some kind of a cart or something maybe on the street in New York, and George would probably come up, and he’d probably try to get something for nothing. I would probably say something to him like, “You, small fry, get to the end of my line or no soup!” And Tom said, “That’s great, man, that’s great, I love that no soup thing. It actually has a ring to it. If they do have something written, throw that in anyway.”

I didn’t need to because when I got there the next morning, three of the six total scenes waiting there for me, and no soup for you was the third line in. So we had actually both thought of the same line, although Spike didn’t so much dream it up as much as heard it because that’s what the real guy that he based the character on in New York, Al Yeganeh, would say to people.

ANDELMAN: I’ll come back to Al in a moment. So obviously you got the job, you auditioned, you got the job. What do you recall about being on the set and playing the character? Was it all laid out? Was it like a Neil Simon moment where every word, everything was laid out, or did it happen a little more improvisationally?

THOMAS: Well, no. I stuck with whatever was written in the script, almost. I did ad-lib one word which has become a little bit famous actually, but it was almost accidental. But the script would change a little bit every day, anyway, because that’s how sitcoms work. No matter how funny you are around the table-read on the first day, and I’ve never understood this, but then again I’m not a sitcom writer or producer. The next day, it’s changed. And even the stuff you thought was really funny is different.

On “Seinfeld,” if you’ve watched any of those special features about Larry David, and Jerry, even though they didn’t write the original script, they did a lot of the rewrites to make it fit more and more into “Seinfeld” and to Jerry’s mind -- or mostly Larry’s mind -- because this is before he took a break. But I pretty well stuck to the script.

Larry Thomas as "The Soup Nazi":
Video Clip #1
Video Clip #2

I was actually very nervous, to tell you the truth, because it wasn’t until after I went to the callback for the audition, which was yet another audition, that I found out that there weren’t just three scenes, there were six. And when a guest character has six scenes, he’s pretty much the guest character of the episode, which I didn’t expect. And it was really interesting because in the callback, I walked in, and the first time I just read for a casting associate named Brian Myers, but when I went back, I went to read for Jerry and Larry David, and Andy Ackerman, and Spike, who wrote it, and some of the other writers were there like Peter Mehlman because they were now producers and so forth. And I think George Shapiro, who is Jerry’s manager and also one of the executive producers of the show, I think he was there. He was Andy Kaufman’s manager. Danny DeVito plays him in that movie Man on the Moon.

ANDELMAN: Right.







THOMAS: So he was there. There were a lot of guys there, and I went in, and it was a little late, so I actually just barely cleared the top of the stairs when the casting director grabbed me, Marc Hirschfeld, and dragged me into the room and just handed me this stack of paper. We went through the first three scenes that I had already read, which had changed a little bit. But Jerry Seinfeld was laughing his head off so loudly that that’s all I could hear. I had to actually compete vocally to override his incessant laughter, which was great, but then when I got to the end of the third scene, I realized that I still had an equally thick stack of paper in my hand, which were the next three scenes which I had never seen.

Rather than say, “Oh I’m sorry, I haven’t seen these yet, may I take a moment and take a look at these,” I just felt like you’ve got Jerry Seinfeld cracking up! Another great thing that happened which you hope for in auditions for characters like that is I never spoke in my own voice. So at this moment, nobody in the room even knows I don’t speak like that, and I recalled advice from a great, great old actress who is deceased now, Sheree North. She told me “When you go into an audition and you’re playing a character, don’t ever let them know who you really are. Let them believe you are that character, because they don’t have the imagination to make the adjustment once you’ve come in and go, ‘Hi, how ya doin’,’ and then launch into the evil killer. So it was going so well, and I hadn’t said a word. Nobody knew that I didn’t really talk like this, so I just launched into the next three scenes absolutely stone-cold, picking the words up off the paper as I went. I just made that decision.

Anyway, cut back to the set. The part turned out to be a lot bigger than I thought it was, and I was nervous. There were some really good character actors in that week who had smaller parts than I did. Yul Vazquez, who played the gay armoire thief with the Cuban accent, and John Paragon, who played the other armoire thief, who was Paul Reubens’ writing partner for a really long time -- and he was in “Pee Wee’s Playhouse” and did specials with Paul Reubens on TV and stuff -- so I knew these guys, and I was going “Wow.” Not to mention all the Seinfeld people themselves. So I tried to stick really verbatim to the script, not make any mistakes, be Mister Perfect, except for one line that Spike had written where Elaine does the Al Pacino impression, and I answer her with, “No soup for you! Come back.” The way he had written it was, “Come back in one year!” but I’m just flying with this accent. I’d been told when I do accents that, one producer said, “You really play the accent, and it becomes a character of itself.” It’s music to me, doing different accents. So I’m flying through this accent, and somehow, “Come back in one year!” just didn’t fit. So I said, “Come back, one year!” and everybody on the set just fell and started laughing. It was the first rehearsal. I don’t know whether it was Andy Ackerman or Larry David or someone who said, “Keep that.” So it became part of the lexicon because half the time when I sign autographs and stuff, people ask me if I’ll write, “Come back, one year!” So it’s almost hard to write grammatically.

ANDELMAN: Your ears and your eyes see it differently, hear it differently.

THOMAS: That was my single ad-lib. Other than that, everything was exactly how Spike wrote it. And then Larry David had a couple of adjustments to my scenes after the audience left the night we shot it. The mind of Larry David, it never turned off. He was always adjusting.

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© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Larry Thomas, "Seinfeld" "Postal" actor/Soup Nazi: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 2

(Return to Part 1)

ANDELMAN: Now, as funny as Seinfeld and David and the producers thought it was, there was someone there who didn’t think this was one of their better episodes, right?

THOMAS: Right. Oh, my God! Who later came back to haunt me again, actually. Michael Richards hated this script so much that he spent the entire working week, it’s usually four days of rehearsal or actually kind of five days of rehearsal, and on the fifth day, you shoot it that night before the audience, but they cut off a day this week because it was in October during the Jewish holidays. And so we only did four days and shot it on the fourth night, but all four days, he was just bending anyone’s ear that would hear him on how terrible a script this was.






I don’t know who I felt more sorry for, me or Spike. Not only was I on “Seinfeld” for the first time, but it was my first really major television guest spot after 15, 18 years of trying to get one. And so I had to listen to it. Spike, of course, went with his first script for “Seinfeld,” so he had to listen to it. It was just basically Andy Ackerman and Larry David and Jerry trying to assuage Michael Richards all week, “Don’t worry about it, don’t worry about it.” Every time he had to do a scene, whether it was like the scene where he gets the armoire stolen and then Elaine doesn’t get his soup and he gets really upset about it, he kept stopping in the middle of the rehearsal going, “This doesn’t make any sense to me. Why am I so upset? I lost a major piece of furniture here, and I didn’t get a cup of soup, why am I so upset?” Andy Ackerman would have to keep saying, “But that’s the joke, Michael, the soup is that good.” And Michael said, “See, that’s what’s wrong with this episode. It’s an episode that doesn’t make any sense. It’s not based in reality.” He was really actually very careful about his reality even though he watched the show through all the nine seasons. He had the most non-sensical reality of all. But I guess from what I’ve heard, he used to have to be talked into a lot of it. And, in this particular one, he just really had to be talked into it, and then he actually came up to me a few times and would say, “Why is your character so mean? I don’t understand it.” I would be going like I got cast, alright? I’ve already done that part of this job.

ANDELMAN: It’s a job, Michael. It’s keeping me in acting class a little longer.

THOMAS: Yeah. My audition explained the way I’m playing it. I don’t need to change it, and I don’t really need to explain it to anybody.







ANDELMAN: Now, you said that you had contact with him again later? There was another issue?

THOMAS: Well, not really. I never met him again. I did during the finale briefly. I had him sign my Soup Nazi script, and he was very nice. But what I meant was in November 2006, when season seven came out, Sony had a major publicity tour planned for me in New York and Toronto to make appearances and do radio interviews and television shows to promote season seven. That’s the same day that the news broke about the problem he had at the Laugh Factory in L.A.

ANDELMAN: Right.

THOMAS: So, bit by bit, everywhere I went, every interview got cancelled because nobody wanted to promote “Seinfeld” that day. That was the day that it actually came out in the stores. The story that I just told you about Michael, I really don’t tell very often because I don’t want to put him in a bad light. He is an artist, and what he did with Kramer was pure genius. I still am amazed to this day, if you look at the development of the character through the show, it was comic genius. And so I don’t have anything against him at all, but I’m afraid people will take that story out of context and think he was a bad guy. I don’t think he was. I think it was just part of his genius that he questioned everything.

ANDELMAN: Larry, did you do a commentary for the season seven DVD?

THOMAS: Yeah. There’s a little bit of it on there. We sat there for two hours. They used a little bit of it, but I really love the bit they used. Out of everything we talked about, I love the bit they used because I had told a story about sitting in the bleachers watching the Jerry living room scene develop. The most rehearsal time is always spent in Jerry’s living room because, if you watch any episode, those are really the longest scenes. Everything sort of develops and is rehashed and talked about there, and then they go out and flashback or show it to you. But I would sit there in the bleachers, and we didn’t rehearse the Soup Nazi stuff until the last day anyway because they had to build the soup kitchen, but I would just sit there watching. A wonderful actor named Thom Barry who was Elaine’s building superintendent, sat there with me, and we would just watch these guys rehearse and, as actors, say, “Is this Eden, or what? This is like paradise.” These four incredibly talented funny people take a really good script, have a really great director like Andy Ackerman, and they just get to spend each day hashing through it, working on it, and it was just so fabulous to watch.

One particular day, they were in Jerry’s living room. It was a scene in this episode where George and Elaine had decided to confront Jerry about how obnoxious his relationship was with Schmoopie, who was played by Ali Wentworth, who is now married to George Stephanopoulos, oddly enough, just to throw that in there. But they were about to confront him, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, just off the cuff, just said, “You know what, Andy, wouldn’t it be funny if just as George is sort of preparing to confront Jerry, I sort of got up and walked around the back of the couch and went to the front door, and just as George is about to go, “Isn’t that right Elaine?” the door slams, and I’m gone.” And Andy just, he was so relaxed, he’s just such a great director, he goes, “Yeah, try it.” And for me, I’ve done so much theater, and this is very much like theater, and I’m just going, “Oh my, wow,” and she does it, she just tries it, and Andy goes yeah, “That works. Let’s work it up, and we’ll do it for Larry,” because Larry David would have the last word on everything. And so they did. Tom and I just got to sit there and watch with our jaws open, what paradise that was, and they did it, and it’s in the episode. It’s one of the really funny moments.

ANDELMAN: Now, Larry, after the episode aired, what’s the first sign you had that your life has changed forever?

THOMAS: Um, I think later that night, I got a couple of calls from the East Coast, because I live on the West Coast, and I got a couple of calls from the East Coast saying, “Are you watching the news?” And I said, “Why?” They said, “They keep airing scenes of you or a scene of you from the ‘Seinfeld’ that aired tonight, and they’re comparing you to some real soup vendor in New York!”

I didn’t even know, at that point, there was a guy. I think I had been told on the set that it was based on somebody, but I didn’t know to what extent. I’d never seen him or heard of him, and so I turned on the news, and sure enough, in every news report, every late news report, they would be airing this comparison between me and this guy. There was a still of me from the show and a still of him, and then they would show my scene, and that continued for the rest of the weekend, all through the weekend. So I had had a feeling at that point that this wasn’t just any episode of “Seinfeld,” but I don’t think I realized till years later just what place it would take in the sort of lexicon of what “Seinfeld” did to our society. At Christmas, when I hear people talking about re-gifting, and you go to a party, and they’re talking about double-dipping, and you have to stop and say, wow, that show had such an effect. So, yeah, I kind of began to realize that having played this character was going to change my career.







ANDELMAN: You actually met Al Yeganeh, the inspiration for the Soup Nazi, right?

THOMAS: Yeah. The funny thing is I never got to meet Al before any time I played the character. I played him the first time without ever having seen or heard Al, and then I did the second time as well, which was in the finale, which was in 1998. Mine was in 1995. In 1999, I was in New York, and I got contacted by “Extra” and “Inside Edition,” and they wanted to have me go with them to his stand, and they were gonna interview him and introduce him to me and see how he’d react. So I did, and he was a very interesting character, Al. He really does get to raving and ranting quite a bit, especially if you bring up Jerry Seinfeld.

Al Yeganeh News Reports:
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ANDELMAN: Which, of course, no one did.

THOMAS: He hates Jerry. He equates the name Jerry Seinfeld with being called the Soup Nazi and every bad thing about it where he really doesn’t equate anybody else with it. He doesn’t know the entertainment business, so he doesn’t realize that long before that episode, that was his nickname by the Letterman writers, was the Soup Nazi, and he was already called that. So Jerry’s to blame for everything. So he ranted and raved about Jerry a little bit, and then when they said, “This is the actor that played the character that was supposed to be you on the TV show, what do you have to say to him?” He said something like, “He’s an actor” or “He’s a good actor maybe, but he’s not a chef. He does not make soup. He does not make soup like I do,” or something like that. They said, “Would you shake hands with him?” and he said, “Yeah, of course,” and stuck out his hand, and I shook his hand, which I thought was really interesting.

But unfortunately, the two shows never aired any of that because they felt like it wasn’t newsworthy that we shook hands. They felt like it only would have been newsworthy if we started screaming at each other. You’re a journalist, and you gotta cringe when you realize that journalism has come to that.

Years later, we were doing “The Odd Couple” in New York in 2002, and I went up to his place again and stuck my head into his little kitchen and re-introduced myself, and we actually had a conversation that time, and he, once again, complimented me on my work. He said he had seen one of the scenes on the “Oprah” show or something, and he thought I was funny. So we talked, and he actually gave me soup, which was delicious, by the way. I have to say that his seafood bisque was knee-buckling. It was really good. So yeah, I haven’t seen him since then, but I may be one of the few people in the world that has had a really good experience with Al Yeganeh.

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© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Larry Thomas, "Seinfeld" "Postal" actor/Soup Nazi: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 3

(Return to Part 1)
(Return to Part 2)

ANDELMAN: Larry, actors on long-running TV series often fear, and rightly so, being forever labeled by a character. You achieved video immortality in just one episode. And I might add that most people think you’re actually on more than one episode, the finale aside. Is it a pro or a con that you did this?

THOMAS: I’d have to say it’s a pro for me, but the con part of it is not what you’d think. The pro part of it is that, number one, at that point in my career, after 15 or 18 years of trying to get acting work and not being able to interest anybody in the world of big-time, what we call big-time film, TV, after that, everyone wanted to see me. Mike Myers wanted me to do a cameo in the first Austin Powers movie. It was a little bit limiting what they wanted me to audition for, mostly guys with dialects and kind of crazy, funny guys.

But to be honest, I was suddenly auditioning for major television and built up quite a resume of guest spots on major TV shows, so I can’t assume that I would have gotten there anyway without that because it launched me like a shot in the arm from that one episode.







I guess the con part of it, and I still get this to this day, is that if you’re Jason or you’re Julia or Michael, then yes, your career is seriously affected by nine seasons of playing this character. The problem with them is that the public doesn’t want to accept them as any other character since they loved them so much as that character. But at least they had the benefit of nine years of really good pay to put money in the bank and to buy nice houses. They’re major stars, so if they want to command a TV movie or lend their name to a good script or a low-budget movie or whatever, they’ve got carte blanche in those areas. There’s a lot they have going for them even though you want to feel sorry for them that their careers are kind of halted.

But I don’t have that benefit. I only did one episode. The pay was $2,600, and of course, after taxes and commissions and what have you, I was $50 shy of paying my mortgage that month with that check. People think the residuals must be amazing, but what they don’t realize is residuals are salary-contingent, which means whoever was making the most money in that episode gets most of the residuals, and it wasn’t me. So my residuals, even for the DVD sales, has always been like not even gas money.

In the end, I guess the con part of it is people treat me like I spent my career on that one part sometimes. I’ve actually gotten nasty letters from fans. I get a lot of autograph requests, and I have to say to people sometimes, “I can’t afford the postage so send me a self-addressed stamped envelope, and I’ll sign one of my headshots and send it to you.” Also, I make part of my living, other than new acting work, selling a Soup Nazi photo that I sign that Castle Rock and I agreed that I could take this one picture to be mine, because they wouldn’t let me use anything that they owned that was taken during the show. So I had this one photo commissioned of me in character, they okayed it, and on my Web site and eBay and at autograph shows, I sell that photo that I sign and autograph soup ladles that people can really get a kick out of. And so, sometimes I will say to a fan that’s saying, “Hey, can I have a free picture of you as the Soup Nazi?” “Well, I sell those.” And sometimes I’ll get a really nasty letter back that says, “What did you do with your millions of dollars? I can’t believe you’re a millionaire, and you want…” Of course, I was never a millionaire. I got less for doing that episode than most of the people that are yelling at me get once a month for their job.






ANDELMAN: You did an episode of “Scrubs” that kind of plays into this. That was an accidental appearance. Can you tell us a little about that?

THOMAS: I met the “Scrubs” writers. I met Bill Lawrence in the hallway of where their writers’ conference room was, and he said, “Come in and meet the writers,” and he’s dragging me into the writers’ room and introduced me. And one of the writers said, “Say the soup thing!” and I just yelled, “No soup for you!” And all the writers were stopped in the tracks of whatever they were doing, and one of the guys said, “You don’t mind that?” And I said, “I say it twenty times a day on the lean days. Everyone wants to hear that, and I’m yelling it into the phone all the time and into people’s cell phones that stop me on the street.” They said, “Oh, wow.”

The next day, they called my manager and said, “We wrote a scene for Larry where J.D. is trying to get him to say, ‘No soup for you!’ and he won’t” and all that stuff. So I got to shoot this great scene on “Scrubs” with Tara Reid and Zach Braff, and it was just all based on that.

ANDELMAN: And Tara Reid thought this was just going to remake your whole career, right?

THOMAS: Yeah. If anyone’s ever seen the episode, basically, what happens is J.D. says, “Aren’t you the Soup Nazi from ‘Seinfeld’?” And I say, “No.” And he goes, “Come on, say the soup thing!” And I say, “No.” Originally, what we shot was different. Originally, he said, “Aren’t you the Soup Nazi from ‘Seinfeld’?” And I say, “No, I’m actually a classically-trained actor who has played many other roles, and it’s a little shallow to pigeonhole a guy in one TV guest spot he did over eight years ago, don’t ya think?” And then J.D. says, “Come on, say the soup thing! I go, “No.” Actually, there was this speech saying, “Yes, I’m the actor but whatever.” And all through that day after we shot that, like over lunch and whatever, Tara Reid kept saying to me, “I think this is gonna totally change your career. I think once this episode airs, and they see you saying that speech, they’re gonna realize that you are a better actor than that” and whatever.

But, unfortunately for me -- and this is the life of an actor -- somewhere in editing, they decided to change the meaning of the scene from, “No, I’m not only the Soup Nazi,” to “No, I’m not him.” And so they had to cut that speech in order to get that meaning which is, “Aren’t you the Soup Nazi from ‘Seinfeld’?” “No.” “Say the soup thing!” “No.” And then later in the scene, J.D. says, “Oh, he is so the Soup Nazi,” and he tricks me into saying it. And you have to live with that stuff. You just have to.

I remember when I went to the screening of Austin Powers, and Jay Roach, who directed it, came up to me. My scene wasn’t very long, but I had one really funny line that we both loved, which was when Robert Wagner and his X-ray eye patch had 17, and he wants to hit, and I’m the blackjack dealer. I say, “You have 17, sir.” And he’s already looked through the deck, and he sees that the next card is a four, but I don’t know that, so I say, “You have 17, sir,” and then I had this line where I said, “The book says not to.” And Jay and I both really liked that line that Mike Myers wrote, and I guess somewhere in editing, once again, Jay had to decide that the dealer shouldn’t have any ridiculous dialogue. But what’s funny about the scene is that this dealer is like a real solid Las Vegas dealer, and Austin Powers is absolutely ridiculous. So he came up to me before the screening, and he put his arm around me, and he took me into a corner, and he goes, “Listen man, I gotta warn ya about something.” And I said, “What?” And he goes, “I had to cut our favorite line because it made you funny, as well. I needed a straight man in that scene because Austin Powers is this ridiculous thing in reality, and I had to make you reality.” I said, “Oh, well, whatever.”







ANDELMAN: Now, it’s interesting that as sort of typecast as the Soup Nazi made you, your new movie coming out, Postal, which I think comes out in September, you play another character that people will equate to immediately. Can you tell us a little about that?

THOMAS: Another notorious character? I am hoping, really hoping, that this one doesn’t typecast me. I wouldn’t mind being remembered for my performance in Postal, but I don’t want to be typecast as this guy. I, actually, in Postal, I play Osama bin Laden. But I have to qualify that by saying Postal is an extreme political and social comedy. And my Osama in this is very different from what your image of Osama bin Laden is, which is part of the comedy of Postal. It flips on its ear every idea we have of what we see politically and socially in both mostly the United States and the world. So my Osama is comedically different from the scary Osama that we know. But yeah, it’s interesting that I didn’t go through one day of shooting in four weeks on this movie and not have somebody, whether it was a driver or my make-up person or the costumer or somebody, say to me, “Aren’t you worried that your life is going to be in danger when this movie gets released?” And it’s like, “Yeah, now that you mention it, yes I am.”

ANDELMAN: How many actors can say that they played a Nazi and the leader of Al Qaeda in one career?

THOMAS: I know -- and a Jewish actor.

ANDELMAN: Oh, I didn’t realize that. Are you Jewish?

THOMAS: Yeah. I’m a Brooklyn Jew from Borough Park, Brooklyn. And my mother laughed her head off. You mentioned something about “Arrested Development” earlier. Not only have I played a Nazi, Osama, not a real Nazi but a person called a Nazi, Osama, but in “Arrested Development,” I was a Saddam Hussein look-a-like in Iraq. So I’ve hit ‘em all, really. I don’t think there’s anything much left that you can hit being Jewish.

Watch the Trailer for Postal!

ANDELMAN: Now, who else is in Postal? There’s a lot of familiar faces in this movie.

THOMAS: It’s really gonna be character-driven. Dave Foley plays one of the lead characters in it. J.K. Simmons, who was J. Jonah Jameson in the Spider-Man movies, he’s in it. Verne Troyer, who was Mini-Me in the Austin Powers movies, he’s in it. David Huddleston, who has a really rich career from all the Mel Brooks movies like Blazing Saddles and many, many movies, he’s in it. Seymour Cassel has had a great career, he’s in it. A lot of well-known character faces you’ll see in Postal. The lead is played by an actor named Zack Ward who, although you might not recognize him as a grown-up, but Zack was in the movie A Christmas Story which is everybody’s favorite Christmas movie these days. He was the bully "Scut Farkus" who had yellow eyes, that was Zack when he was a kid, and he’s the young leading man in the movie.although what I hear from Zack, his career is taking off like a shotgun right now, so you might be seeing Zack in other things even before Postal, at this point.

ANDELMAN: I think he also did a couple episodes of “Deadwood.”

THOMAS: Yeah. I first met Zack about two years ago just sort of coincidentally. Actually, when I got cast in Postal and shot in Canada, when I went up there, waiting for me in my hotel room was a script, and in the script was a cast list, and I opened it up, and the first thing I see is “Dude,” Zack Ward. And I thought, oh, that’s funny. How odd is that that I know Zack. So I called him, and I just said, “Hey, man, we’re in the same movie!” And so yeah, things have been really cooking for him, which is great.

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

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Kit Boss, "Creature Comforts," "King of the Hill," "Carpoolers" executive producer, writer: Mr. Media Interview, Part 1

The confounding thing about seeing your friends become successful is that while you’re obviously happy for the good things that come their way, a tinge of jealousy and envy is not unusual, and that certainly captures my feelings about today’s guest.

Most of you won’t know this man by name, but when you hear his credits, I think you’ll agree with me that he’s accomplished an awful lot, and you will probably understand why I greet him with a touch of envy, at the very least.

Kit Boss was a gangly young kid when I met him more than twenty years ago in the Clearwater Bureau of the St. Petersburg Times. He arrived as this year’s intern, joining the staff for a time in search of real-life newspaper experience. Kit was an instant hit with the staff, funny, self-effacing, and extremely talented at capturing life’s special moments in a way that the best journalists do.

When he later joined the Seattle Times as a TV beat writer, Kit participated in a few critics’ press tours in Los Angeles. He met several men and women who wrote for TV and started thinking, “Hey, maybe I could do that.” And eventually, he did.

So where, you’re wondering, have you seen Kit’s work? Well, his first job was writing a season for “Bill Nye, the Science Guy,” and he won a couple of Emmys for it. His next noteworthy gig was a big one, getting a story credit on the final season of “Seinfeld.” That led to a staff writing job on “King of the Hill,” which was then in its third season. Over the next seven years, he rose to executive producer on that show.

When “King” was briefly cancelled, Kit moved on, eventually landing a job on HBO’s sitcom “Lucky Louie,” starring comedian Louis C. K. When it ended after just after one season, he was asked to adapt the British series, “Creature Comforts,” for CBS. And “Creature Comforts” begins a limited run on CBS on Monday, June 4th, at 8:00 PM, which is why Kit – the show’s executive producer – is here today.


BOB ANDELMAN: Kit, welcome to Mr. Media.

KIT BOSS: Thank you, Bob. Thank you. Your voice is just dripping with jealousy. It’s such a pleasure.

ANDELMAN: Well, and unfortunately, Kit, that introduction was so long, we’re out of time.

BOSS: Oh. You failed to mention my hot wife, Bob.

ANDELMAN: Well, you’ll send me a picture, and we’ll post it and share with everyone.

BOSS: It’s really good to be here.

ANDELMAN: Well, that’s great. I’ve been doing Mr. Media now for a couple of months, and no one has ever mentioned a hot wife before, so I’m going to be completely distracted for the rest of the interview.

BOSS: They’ve got them. I’ve Googled those guys, and they’ve all got hot wives.

ANDELMAN: Well, Kit, tell everybody about “Creature Comforts” and explain, if you would, why our mutual friends, Tim and Bridget, are really squeamish about its debut.

BOSS: Oh, gosh. Well, it’s such a cool idea, and I can say that because it wasn’t mine. It’s easy for me to say that. It’s sort of a hybrid between animation and a reality TV show but more like an old style documentary kind of show where we start with documentary audio that we gather from interviews conducted with just ordinary Americans all around the country, and then we take the audio, and we animate it coming out of the mouths of plastocene animals that are done in stop-motion animation, like “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer” or “Gumby” or more germane to this discussion, Wallace & Gromit. The same studio that does the Wallace & Gromit movies is the studio behind this show. They’re the ones who first did it, Nick Park, the guy who’s won a few Oscars. He was the one who came up with the idea and did the Academy Award-winning short in I believe it was, God, no, I’m blanking, I think it was in the late 1990s that he won an Oscar for that, and that led to a British series of the same name, “Creature Comforts,” and now it’s crossing the pond, and we’re trying to do our version of it for CBS.





ANDELMAN: I need to point out in the interest of total disclosure that if it wasn’t for “Creature Comforts,” there probably wouldn’t be a Mr. Media today, because Kit actually hired me as a field interviewer for the show more than a year ago, and that forced me to invest in a digital audio recorder, and when that assignment ended, I started thinking of other uses for it, which led to this interview series.

BOSS: Wow, I had no idea.

ANDELMAN: Yeah, so it all comes back to you, Kit. Everything comes back to you.

BOSS: Well, that’s a weight off my shoulders. I hope your listeners or listener, whatever the case may be, appreciate that.

ANDELMAN: I hope so. Well, you know, journalism, you gotta disclose everything these days.

BOSS: What was that experience like for you doing those interviews?

ANDELMAN: It was hysterical. This is a little inside, but I wound up interviewing friends of ours from the newspaper business, Tim and Bridget, and they were perfect for it. Of course, now you are interviewing me.

BOSS: That’s true. It’s the old newspaper reporter in me. I just don’t like answering questions. I’d much rather be the one asking them.

ANDELMAN: Well, it was great, because I know that there was a whole platoon of interviewers….

BOSS: More than 40 across the country.

ANDELMAN: Was it that many?

BOSS: Yeah.

ANDELMAN: You guys were great in that you gave us a Web site to look at or some discs to get familiar with the style and the way to do it, and I knew having watched that when I sat down with Tim and Bridget, for example, that they were going to be gold, because they have interesting voices, and they interact with each other, and I would be interviewing them, and I could be picturing in my mind that these two could be animals. In a nice way. We love them, but….

BOSS: Well, it was a really interesting, kind of slippery process, because they have great voices, and that’s kind of where it starts.

We want voices that are filled with the kind of character that an animator can listen to them and just kind of imagine what a creature might be doing, because we never see, none of us ever sees the people doing the interview. Everything that comes after that is sort of invented. We invent what animal they are, we invent the situation that they are in, we invent their body language.

And if you start with a great voice that has a lot of character, and I can quite honestly say, it’s pretty rare, it’s a hard thing to find someone who has a voice like that. I certainly don’t have it. Most announcers, most journalists don’t have it, because they’re trained to kind of take the edges off, but Tim has this great, kind of southern Indiana drawl and a ton of attitude. You know, he had opinions about things, and Bridget, too, and despite that, the really interesting thing is, we only used one clip of their voices in the entire series. That’s how much good stuff we had to choose from.

ANDELMAN: Oh, that’s great. That’ll put them at ease, too.

BOSS: Yeah. They’ll only have to worry about that one. That one’s really, really embarrassing. Fifteen seconds.

ANDELMAN: Well, it was a great concept. My daughter, who is now ten, would have been nine, I guess, at the time, watched over my shoulder as I was watching sort of the training videos for how to do it and the kind of thing we were looking at, and she and my wife just thought it looked like it would be hysterical.

SAMPLE MORE OF CBS-TV'S "CREATURE COMFORTS:
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BOSS: The original show, the series, not just the Oscar-winning short, which was ’89 was actually when Nick Park did that. That’s when he won the Oscar for the short film, the series was just hilarious. One of the biggest challenges for the British show was getting across the idea to the viewers that these are real people. They are not scripted responses. They are not actors in a sound booth somewhere recording lines like every other animated show. It’s just people who are spontaneously answering questions, and it’s hard when you see the show to imagine that none of this stuff was invented. It was just people kind of speaking from the heart.

ANDELMAN: And God bless each and every one of them. It’s funny.

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© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

"Creature Comforts" art and video © Aardman Studios.