Larry Charles: Anarchy in the USA
- Published: 30 July 2008 16:48
- Author: Robin Parker
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- Last Updated: 31 July 2008 10:40
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From Seinfeld to Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry Charles has broken the mould in US TV comedy. With his first doc Religulous soon to be released, Robin Parker asks him what it takes to excite his interest.
[Click here to watch a video interview with Larry Charles]
Larry Charles likes surprises. The third TV script he got to air killed off Jerry Seinfeld, Bonnie and Clyde-style, in his studio-set apartment before revealing it was a dream. His later Seinfeld storylines introduced sitcom viewers to a stalker dressed as an opera-obsessed clown, a library detective spouting Dragnet monologues and the neurotic George inadvertently posing as a neo-Nazi. Readers with strong stomachs might also recall a naked man-on-man wrestling scene in the Borat movie which made that moment in Women in Love look like a mere handshake between friends.
His freewheeling Seinfeld episodes broke the three-act structure with anything up to 30 short scenes - and many more on the cutting room floor - and he has approached his first documentary feature, Religulous, with the same gonzo spirit. Armed only with two cameras and a sound operator, Charles and US comic Bill Maher take their scalpel to Western religious beliefs on a journey that takes in the Wailing Wall, the Vatican and a biblical theme park in Florida.
Guerrilla approach
As a child, Charles tried to upstage his liberal Jewish parents by announcing he would become a rabbi. Today, talking at the Britdoc Festival where he is presenting clips from the film, he questions any attempt to take what he terms "irrational" beliefs literally. He hopes Religulous will reach out to people who call themselves religious without thinking why.
Charles rarely let the camera stop rolling, amassing almost 500 hours of film for the 90-minute movie. "I don't want to know what's going to happen, or to impose artificial control over a real situation if I can avoid that," he says. "We're showing up, getting out of the van, getting the cameras together. There's not a lot of pre-planning - I don't know whether the interview's going to go well or where we're going to do it. And I think that the audience responds to that kind of spontaneity and reality."
The result? Let's just say that in one scene, Charles films a Catholic priest at the Vatican denouncing the bulk of Christian teachings as out-of-date dogma.
The ground for his guerrilla approach was laid with Borat and the mostly improvised Curb Your Enthusiasm. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Charles hasn't worked in network TV for over a decade and it doesn't look like he'll return there soon. A two-year development deal with ABC, signed last year, was scrapped when the writers' strike hit, but looked to be on shaky ground anyway. "They came to me and said: 'We're interested in doing bold ideas,'" he recalls. "I came in and gave them a few bold ideas, and they said: 'Oh, that's a little too bold.'"
For Charles, the strike came as a blessing, freeing him to take his ideas to the likes of HBO, Comedy Central and Showtime, the kind of channels happy to accommodate the "aberrant personalities" Charles is drawn to. People like long-time collaborator Larry David, Bob Dylan and maverick Hollywood actor Gary Busey, with whom he worked on a memorable episode of HBO comedy Entourage.
Like Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, it's unlikely Charles needs the work: Seinfeld's unexpected runaway success made rich men of all three. With no need to slave away on the American comedy production line, Charles is free to pursue the projects that excite his more curious instincts. His rule of thumb, he says, is simple. "A lot of what I choose to do is based on asking: 'Does this need to be done?' Do we need to introduce another piece of shit into the morass of the marketplace? Is it important that it be made for some reason?'"
A conversation with Charles resembles one of his more anarchic Seinfeld scripts: we overrun our slot by 20 minutes, his patter spilling out at lightning speed with frequent digressions, and he's clearly unfazed by the brain-deadening repetition of the press junket. He skirts close to pretension, dropping in allusions to Thomas Pynchon and Jean-Luc Godard before bringing it back to Bugs Bunny. Always hungry for a startling and untried way of presenting something, he believes great art comes from mixing highbrow and lowbrow, the broad and the subtle.
"The best shows have that element of being multilayered, so that anyone can connect to it," he says. "Take The Simpsons: little children can watch it and get something out of it and so can sophisticated adults. There are only a few people who can really pull that off with Žlan, like [Borat star] Sacha [Baron Cohen]."
Seinfeld ushered in a new era of sitcoms, paving the way for the likes of Friends and Will and Grace. These smart, savvy shows attracted upmarket young viewers and took the earlier hit's irreverence, gave it a glossy spin and ran with it into the mainstream with a little more "hugging and learning".
But Charles is dispirited that few of today's comedy commissioners have used the traditional 30-minute studio format to take even a fraction of the risks that NBC took when it ordered a bunch of unknowns to make what was famously described as "a show about nothing". Paradoxically, it seems, Seinfeld's runaway success painted the networks into a corner.
"It deconstructed the sitcom for all time," he reflects. "I don't think you can do a sitcom now without acknowledging that Seinfeld was there. Sitcoms have been rendered quaint and antiquated. If the form doesn't get reinvented, it'll die. Ironically, Larry David probably reinvented the form with Curb, which then had a big influence on things like Arrested Development. But the limitations of the studio sitcom are not taken advantage of."
As long as the networks remain locked into the commercial model, he sees little hope of this changing. Fox axed the aforementioned Arrested Development after its third truncated season, despite critical acclaim, because it didn't deliver the audience. Arguably, says Charles, it would have been a massive hit on HBO. "It's harder to create controversial shows on network TV, whereas on HBO, you are trying to create the provocative things in order to attract subscribers. And that makes wider boundaries for your subject matter."
The writers' strike has ushered in a period of reflection among US comedy writers, but the reality shows that have spread their tentacles across the networks' schedules cast a heavy shadow over the genre's future. "Reality shows are cheap and deliver gigantic audiences, and the writer's role has been compromised," he says. "Then you have shows like Curb where rather than having 15 writers on staff, you don't have any! So Curb, creatively, has changed things and American Idol, economically, has changed things. I think writers are scrambling to figure out what their place in the firmament is."
The British invasion
To compound this, the writers face an unprecedented appetite for US remakes of tried and trusted British shows from Gavin and Stacey to Worst Week of My Life, despite the bumpy track record of past attempts to import the likes of Men Behaving Badly. Charles, a lifelong British comedy connoisseur, welcomes the influx of UK talent such as Baron Cohen, Matt Lucas, David Walliams and Ricky Gervais, who have all found a home on HBO. "It seems to me, as an outsider, that there's a purer path to your own TV show in Britain and I think creative people in America admire and respond to that, and envy it," he says.
"English humour is embraced in America, especially by comedy aficionados." He adds a word of caution to those who've tried to make a go of it Stateside: "Comic talent is nurtured and cultivated in the English TV environment but I wonder how they'll fare in the more corporate American television environment. Even US comedians are thwarted by the system."
Charles remains wedded to Curb and is pleased with its cult success in the UK, despite seeing it passed between digital channels and bouncing around the schedules - a common pattern for his shows. Larry David has yet to confirm a seventh season but storylines are being drawn up.
Elsewhere, Charles plans, for once, to make use of his penchant for overwriting and overshooting and to test his theory that no piece of art is ever finished. If Religulous proves a hit, he hopes to persuade the studio, Lion's Gate, to turn it into a TV series. "I have great stuff that fell by the wayside because I could not make the premise or the idea work within the context and the structure of the movie," he says. "It could be a fun journey and like the way Michael Palin or Terry Jones have done on their travel shows, we'd be able to show more of the characters we met."
His next film has already been shot but he won't divulge details because he knows the real story won't emerge until he goes back to his favourite place: the edit suite.
Watch Larry Charles in conversation with Jamie Campbell at Britdoc
Larry Charles on...
Curb Your Enthusiasm
"Actors will come in and go 'what am I supposed to do?'. I say: 'Well, we're not going to talk about it. Just get in front of the camera and see what happens', and then slowly we will continue rewriting the scene as we are shooting it, even stepping into the middle of the scene to adjust things. The shooting becomes part of the writing. I look for the surprise, the moment when someone says something you could never have scripted. It's a laboratory where you get to experiment - a little of this, a little of that - and hopefully there's an explosion."
Larry David
"He's worked out a very good system for himself. If he doesn't feel like doing it, he won't do it, and if he feels like doing it, he'll do it when he feels like. He won't do something unless he feels he has an inspiring idea. He was always ready to walk away from Seinfeld, which was a tremendous strategy. He'd go 'I don't care, cancel it!' or 'Well, I quit! I'll go home - can I go home now?', which would scare the network, who'd go 'Okay, fine, do it your way."
US sitcoms
"The network sitcoms that are popular now seem pretty tame - lame, even. They're retro, and they've gone back to the older formats. It's almost like the religious fundamentalism I tackle in my movie: people feel comfortable with the form, but it's a last gasp of a form. There's a lot of good writing and acting, but no boldness at all and it feels false to me."
British comedy
"Shows such as I'm Alan Partridge and The Royle Family have a singular vision. There's no fear of appearing condescending to the audience. Because you usually do six episodes, you can really hone each one until it's fantastic. Everyone I know was always in love with Monty Python, The Office and Fawlty Towers. And now you have Little Britain - Matt Lucas is another comic genius."
Documentary inspirations
"I'm a big fan of Frederick Wiseman. He often makes five-hour movies - he makes really pure cinema and doesn't use narration: he just shoots the footage and lets it speak for itself. I'm also a gigantic fan of Errol Morris and The Thin Blue Line is fascinating. But Michael Moore has changed the face of documentaries and expanded the genre's definition. He's made something that's welcoming and fun even when it's about dark and serious subjects."
