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Josh Levine, "Pretty, Pretty, Pretty Good: Larry David and the Making of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, Fully Revised and Updated" (ECW Press, 2025)
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- [00:00]
Marshall Poe
This episode is brought to you by Avid tv. Where do savvy minds go to find masterful documentaries and hard to find films from across the globe? Try a free month long trial at Ovid and go beyond the mainstream. Indiewire says Ovid is unafraid to program films that matter and the New York Times calls Ovid a terrific streamer for independent film fans. A boutique hand curated streaming service. Yet now with over 2,400 titles, Ovid is the home to films by auteurs from Chantal Akerman to Chris Marker to Wang Bing and has the richest collection of probing, avant garde and provocative films anywhere. Ovid offers many things except conformity. Try Ovid today and get your first month free. Use promo code N B N O V I D. That's Ovid TV Promo code N B N O V I D hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this podcast on the New Books Network, I bet you like to read. I know that I do that why I founded the New Books Network so as readers we need to know what to read and I have a podcast to recommend for you. That being the Proofread podcast, do you have a goal to read more this year? How about a goal to read more of what you love and less of what you don't? The Proofread podcast is here to help you. Hosted by Casey and Tyler, two English professors and avid readers with busy lives, Proofread helps you decide what books are worth spending your precious time on and and what books aren't. They have 15 minute episodes that give you everything you need to know about a book to decide if you should read it or skip it. They offer a brief synopsis, there's fun and witty commentary and there are no spoilers and no sponsored reviews. Life's too short to read a bad book, so subscribe to the Proofread podcast today. And by the way, there's a new season coming soon.
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Marshall Poe
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Rebecca Buchanan
Hi, this is Rebecca Buchanan, host of New Books Network. New books and popular culture. And today I'm here with Josh Levine, who is the author of Pretty, Pretty, Pretty Good, Larry David and the Making of Seinfeld and Curb youb Enthusiasm. Josh, thanks for being here with me today.
- [02:36]
Josh Levine
Oh, my great pleasure.
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Rebecca Buchanan
Could you talk a little bit about how this book came to be, why you decided to write about Larry David and put this together?
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Josh Levine
Sure. It has a certain amount to do with my publisher, ECW Press. I did a book on Jerry Seinfeld quite early in the history of the show. Seinfeld, probably third season or fourth season, something like that, was a small book, and my publisher asked me if I would write it, and I thought that sounded like fun. And so I did. And then I wrote some other books. I've written a book on David E. Kelly, who's gone on to, I think, write about 500 other television shows since my book. And the Coen brothers so. So got more experience writing these books. And then Curb came along, and having written a Seinfeld book, it seemed like a very natural progression to work on it. And so we did that book. And that was, I think, maybe season six or seven. That book came out and the show kept going. I mean, of course, Larry has taken some long breaks, one of six years long, but it finally came to an end after the 12th season, and it seemed like a good idea to just tell the rest of the story, watch all the other episodes, and. Complete the book, really. So that's what we've done. And that was a really fun thing for me to do, frankly.
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Rebecca Buchanan
And the book is part. I mean, the majority of it is sort of about Larry David. It's about Seinfeld, it's about Curb. And then you have the sort of back half of the book, maybe I should say, is an episode guide. Right. For folks. And can you talk maybe a little bit about that choice in adding that or putting that into the book?
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Josh Levine
Sure. I think it's the last third or the last quarter. And I think part of the point is because ultimately it's about the show and being able to create a guide, which both is a very brief commentary on the development of the show episode by episode, and what the sort of the major moments are and the most notable in each episode. And also just a guide that people can read for the pleasure of kind of re experiencing the episodes. But on the page saying, oh, yeah, I remember that one. I love that one. Or being Curb, I hated that one is possible too. So. And in the original edition, they were quite a bit longer, but we did Cut them down. And the biographical part, the part about the making of the show has been expanded.
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Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah, I will say, and I think in your intro you might talk about this or maybe the first chapter about how some people watch the show and they love it and some people watch it and hate it. And about how I love this show so much because it is like so, like it's so hard to watch that I love it. Right. And you kind of get at that. So I appreciate having that, you know what you're talking about, having the episode guides where you're like, yes, I remember that. I was like, yeah, so it's great.
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Josh Levine
Yeah. I mean, there are definitely aspects of the show that probably make 90% of humanity cringe at some point or other. Depends, you know, I think it's a very personal response. There are. I mean, it's part of Larry's genius to confront these very real aspects of life and prejudices and selfishness and make comic hay out of it. But at the same time, there are moments where, I mean, if you were a devout Christian, I could see you being rather upset to watch an episode where Larry accidentally urinates on a photograph of the Virgin Mary. I mean, that would probably upset me if I was a believing Christian. And, you know, and so we all have our trigger points. But for the most part, I think one of the things that the show does well is show us how it's Larry. It's not really criticizing Christianity or Judaism or Islam specifically or being handicapped or deaf or whatever. It's really Larry's response to all these things. His sometimes small mindedness, his eagerness to take advantage sometimes of these issues if it works for him. And it makes us maybe think a little bit about our own responses even as we laugh at the extremity. Because I think most of us are not like TV Larry. I mean, Larry David talks about TV Larry and the real Larry and how much he wishes he were like the TV Larry. Because of course, he still has to be polite. Generally speaking, he's probably not as polite as the average person, but he still can't cross the lines that he can on television. So I think that watching that can be very cringy, but also can be exhilarating and liberating in a way. And then sometimes infuriating for sure.
- [08:17]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah. I just did an interview a couple weeks ago about sort of joke farming and it was interesting to read your book because that Persona, right, the Persona that Larry Davids created was something that comes up and someone who is a good comedian creates a Persona. On stage. Right. And really thinks about that. And so I think that's a great. An important thing to think about because I think sometimes people think of Larry David as this character. He is the character he plays on Curb, but it's a Persona that he's created for comedy, right?
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Josh Levine
Yeah, for sure. Now, it reflects some aspects of him. I mean, I think he's a curmudgeonly guy. And I think he does follow in a long history of Jewish comics, which is a comedy of complaint and aggression and humiliation and failure. And I think that he identifies with it a degree. But yeah, it's also an act. I mean, when you watch Larry chatting on a talk show or something and he's making his cynical comments, he's usually smiling to beat the band. The interesting thing is, I think he's a very exuberant personality, despite the negativity of some of what comes out of the Larry David character, that he actually is someone who probably loves life, even though he always talks about trying to avoid social interaction and going to parties and everything else. I think not only does he love it, I think he's really embraced becoming famous because he really was largely the genius behind Seinfeld. But people didn't know. I mean, maybe you'd read an article and it would mention Larry David, but he wasn't on the show except his voice on occasion. And he wrote 60 of the scripts. He really had a great deal to do with the whole idea behind the show. And at the same time, all the other act, the actors, are the ones who really became famous. And I think Curb made it Larry's turn. And I think because it came fairly late, he was in his 50s when he started the show and then in his 70s, later 70s when he finished it. That kind of public fame came later to him. I think he's been able to really enjoy it.
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Rebecca Buchanan
So you start out by giving a little bit of a sort of background biography of Larry, Larry growing up. And so can you kind of tell us a little bit about Larry before sort of Seinfeld, Larry's beginnings and start. Yeah, sure.
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Josh Levine
And I find that particularly interesting for any largely successful person in the arts, because I think when you see them, they're so successful, you guys kind of almost imagine that or assume that they were destined to be successful. And it's not necessarily true. And for Larry, it really wasn't true. Larry grew up in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, in a lower middle class family. He wasn't particularly good at school. He wasn't funny as a kid or so he says his parents didn't think he had a lot going for him. His mother kept bugging him to take the civil service exams. Was hoping he'd get into the post office or something. Can you imagine Larry trying to get stamps out of that man? But anyway. And he really himself didn't. He went to university, but he kind of didn't know what he wanted to do. And then he took an acting class, which he didn't love. But then he took an improv class, which he did, and he started doing standup. So very typically, he started going to the clubs and doing standup. But Larry was not a terribly successful standup comedian. The other comics really thought he was funny and they liked him, but audiences didn't quite know what to make of him, of his odd humor, his aggression. He did not. So he certainly didn't ingratiate himself in any way to the audience. Like, if you look at Jerry, especially the early Jerry, he's very funny, but he's very likable, too, as an early comic. And I don't think Larry came across that way at all. He famously would stomp off the stage if he didn't like the way the audience was reacting. So things weren't looking that great for him before Jerry approached him about creating the TV show. On the other hand, he had some things that Jerry Seinfeld did not have, which is he actually had TV experience. He'd been a writer for a year on Saturday Night Live, where I think he'd gotten either nothing or, if I remember correctly, one sketch on, like, it had not been very successful. He was on a sketch show called Fridays, which was an imitation of Saturday Night Live, where he wrote a lot of sketches and acted in them. You can see some of them sketches on YouTube. He's not very good in them. They're not really that funny. But he's learning. And he wrote some film scripts, which did not get produced. He wrote a pilot for Gilbert Gottfried, the comedian, which I think shares some elements of Seinfeld in. Wasn't his idea, but he was asked to write it. A pilot actually got made and shown, but it didn't get picked up. So he had some experience actually writing screen. I mean, Seinfeld had zero. And so he didn't really know. How do you make a narrative arc? How do you make a show that's just not a bunch of jokes? And I think that's one of the reasons that he went to talk to Larry, that even though all of these things hadn't added up to much he did have experience. And also they had a very similar sensibility, a similar comic feel. Larry's older than Jerry, but I think they both. And I think Jerry grew up in a more middle class family with a little bit more advantage, kind of a half generation difference maybe, but they still laughed at the same things, which obviously was really important. And so that's how Jerry, who wasn't. They weren't best friends or anything, they just knew each other from the circuit. And by that time, Jerry was famous. He'd been on, you know, the Tonight show many times and was making a lot of money, filling large halls at that point and touring all the time. So Jerry, if he was going to do a show, he didn't want to just do your average show where a comedian, you know, gets a role in a TV show and has to water everything down. He wanted it either to be good or not to do it at all, because he didn't feel he had to. And I think he looked at Larry as someone who could because Larry was such a stubborn guy and uncompromising comic that maybe Larry would be the person to help make a show that wasn't just cookie cutter.
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Rebecca Buchanan
And Larry really used his life, his experiences, and you talk about this throughout the show for both Seinfeld and Curb. And so Seinfeld sort of was a place for him to sort of start. It seems to play with some of those ideas of, of using people and using situations in his own life and seeing how that sort of landed on television. So can you talk a little bit about that and sort of Larry writing how Larry kind of wrote himself or wrote his experiences into his script?
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Josh Levine
Yeah, for sure. He did use himself a lot, even in the creation of the show. Of course, George was a character based on Larry himself, an exaggeration. And then, you know, Jason Alexander made that character very much his own. So he brought himself into it. But at the same time, that's the character that really reflects who Larry was. And then Kramer was Larry's real next door neighbor in the apartment that he lived in on the west side. And, and his name even is Kramer. And so he brought that in. And a lot of just very small incidents too, like so many that one could name that were things from real life that he brought in. But at the same time, Seinfeld was groundbreaking. But it's still slightly more traditional show than Curb. I mean, he took another step for sure with Curb. So it has more, I think, traditional arcs and more dating and girlfriends and that kind of thing. Although of course the characters are all so selfish and self interested that it doesn't. It's not like watching Friends, you know, it works out very differently. But I still think that it was and had a laugh track. It's still more in the realm probably of television that had gone before than Curb, where he makes a far bigger leap. And one of the things he does is of course create the character of Larry very much based on him and on the show. Larry is this very wealthy guy who helped create Seinfeld. And I find that in itself remarkable because movie stars, you know, they're not like us and they do not live like us. And I think probably we don't really realize how different their lives are and they don't really want us to know, I think. And they love playing, you know, characters who come from poverty or struggling to survive, boxers or, you know, they just love those roles. And you think, oh gosh, this is like nothing like their life. But Larry actually had the courage to say, no, I'm a man of leisure, I'm rich, I can do whatever I want. That's my character. And, and in spite of that, I'm small minded and spiteful and I don't like to spend money that I don't have to. And so that was, I think a really interesting premise for him to draw on. And then he used like real people to some degree in his life, like Richard Lewis, who was a child, well, kind of a childhood frenemy of his. But he met him as a child and then became very close friends with him and yeah, others as well that are from his real life. And then when his own marriage ended in divorce, he and Cheryl on the show ended up getting divorced. I think he couldn't imagine continuing married on the show if he wasn't in real life. So he did bring. And then again, a lot of it is really the charm of the. Just the small, the little arguments and the noticing of things and noticing, for example, I've always loved Larry's rules about going to a buffet in a restaurant and how when you go up the second time, you shouldn't have to line up. You know, you have to, you get a pass to the front because you've already lined up the first time. That's, you know, these are. Larry actually has rules of etiquette, I think that are actually quite firm in his mind, if not necessarily in all the rest of us. And I think those things and the incidents that happen around them often come from real life. So good, so good, so good.
- [20:11]
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- [21:36]
Marshall Poe
This is a real good story about Bronx and his dad Ryan. Real United Airlines customers.
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Josh Levine
We were returning home and one of the flight attendants asked Bronx if he.
- [21:45]
Rebecca Buchanan
Wanted to see the flight deck and meet Captain Andrew. I got to sit in the driver's seat.
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Josh Levine
I grew up in an aviation family and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age.
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Commercial Announcer
That's Andrew, a real United pilot.
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Josh Levine
These small interactions can shape a kid's future. It felt like I was the captain.
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Rebecca Buchanan
Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever.
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Josh Levine
That's how good leads the way.
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Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah. And you talk, you mentioned Richard Lewis. You talk a bit about throughout this, some of the major actors who were on the show and give a little background and talk about how they sort of impacted or were important to Curb. So can you talk a little bit? And I appreciate too that you also have been able to because. Because this is a new version, Right. Because this is an updated version. Sort of comment on some of the things that have happened since Curb youb enthusias more recently with some of the people who are on the show. So can you talk a little bit about sort of who Larry surrounded himself with on Curb to put the. Yeah. To fill out the cast.
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Josh Levine
Yeah, for sure. One of the things that's interesting is that Seinfeld was really an ensemble show and Jerry was the purse, the glue. But it was as much about George and Elaine and to a lesser extent Kramer. But Kerb is, is about Larry. Everyone else is very secondary to him, but extremely important. Cheryl Hines first Of all, for sure. And as we know, Sherrod Hines is married to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. And so she got, in a way, Hollywood, as we know, is a Democratic country. So I think it's been since the show, you know, with Robert Kennedy running for the head of the Republican Party and then becoming part of Trump's team, has been difficult for her because most Hollywood people, not exclusively, of course, tend to be Democrats. And I think that's been socially difficult for her. Jeff Garland got accused of inappropriate behavior on a television show. It hasn't been, I don't think, destroyed his career, you know, as it wasn't as bad as that, but it was a little bit harmful to him. Richard Lewis, of course, died, and I think it's really, really touching just to actually see how loyal Larry is as a person to his friends and acquaintances. And Richard was on the show to the very last episode, and he looks deathly ill. I mean, it's almost hard to look at him because he looks so ill by the end of the show, but he's still very funny. And after the show wrapped, he talked about just, like, how important the show had been to him and how much he loved Larry and, like. And I think it was, in a way, the highlight of his career, being on that show and being able to. And he actually died before the season, after it was filmed, but before it was all shown. So that may brought a lot of meaning to the end of his life. And I'm not sure everybody would have kept an actor like that on who was not looking well. So, yeah, that's some of the things that have happened. Of course, also, there are a lot of great guest stars on the show. Richard Kind and Tracy Allman, Wanda Sykes, Michael J. Fox. And some of them were his friends, and some of them were people he didn't necessarily know. And he had a lot of fun with them, too.
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Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah, so one of the things you kind of talk about, and you alluded to this earlier and you talk about it throughout, is that this show did not happen like a traditional television show did. Right. Even how they sort of filmed the pilot, filmed the first season, and sort of like. And picked it up, and then how he took long breaks in between. So can you talk a little bit about that? Because throughout the chapters where you talk about Curb, this is something that I think is you. Is somewhat unique to this series and important for the. Like, the longevity of it.
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Josh Levine
Yes, for sure. And again, you know, you see Curb youb Enthusiasm, and it just looks like something. Okay, they sat down and Created a TV show. But yeah, you're right, it didn't happen like that. Larry had finished. He left after season seven, I think it was, of. Or maybe season nine, I can't remember, of Seinfeld, because he'd had enough. He actually found it incredibly onerous and stressful. He hated writing scripts, actually, which is one of the reasons that Curb is an improvised show with only story outlines rather than scripts. Because he hates writing scripts, hates memorizing lines. So he found it really difficult. He left. Seinfeld was a little surprised that Jerry wanted to continue without him. He thought the show would end, but it went on. That's okay. He still made money from it and a lot of money. And he was kind of floundering. He, he did a movie called Sour Grapes. And he must have had sour grapes after it came out because it will. It was a terrible movie and it got terrible reviews and nobody went to see it. And I think it was a Castle Rock produce film. And they must have not had a lot of faith in it because there are no significant actors in it at all. It looks bad. So he wasn't doing that well after the show. And he started thinking about going back to stand up. But Larry's standup career was very iffy. I mean, Seinfeld always said he would happily go back to stand up, which is exactly what he did after Seinfeld was over. But for Larry, it wasn't the same option because his career hadn't been very successful. So he's trying to think about it and he's talking to some people and he was talking to Jeff Garland, who eventually becomes Jeff, his manager on the show, about maybe going back to stand up. And Jeff talked about why don't we film it. Jeff had directed a couple of HBO specials, comedy specials, and he says, well, why don't we make a film about it? And thinking about it, Larry just wasn't sure that he could make a stand up comedy special where he's just up there for an hour talking in front of an audience. And so he thought, well, what if we do it where we show me getting ready and trying to figure out how I'm going to get on stage again after all this time has gone by. And then we'll show parts of the show and that's what they ended up doing. And Larry's instinct was right because what he's really great at is interacting with other people. Not so much standing there and just being a one man show, but whether it's a secretary or a doctor or a friend or his wife. The interactions with other people is really where he's able to comically shine. And I think his instinct was there. So they made this show. He called it this just one off special. He named it Caribbean Enthusiasm, which HBO was not so thrilled with the name. Like what? You know, which seems like there could not be another name for this show, but I can see how it seemed very odd at the time. And it was only after they made the special that he was talking with Jeff and said, you know, maybe this could be a show. And HBO jumped on it. They were, like, very happy to do it. And they said, okay, let's do it. 12 episodes. And Larry goes, I don't think I can do 12. How about 10? You know, I mean, who argues for fewer episodes? It just doesn't happen in Hollywood. So that's what happened in the first season. And you could see that he's. They worked some things out from the first to the second season. They weren't sure if he was going to have kids or not. They decided Larry does, of course, have two daughters, and they decided he wouldn't have kids. They couldn't decide whether Cheryl should be Jewish or not. They decided she wouldn't be. And it's good the first season, but it's still a little bit tentative as they're figuring things out. So it did take a little while. And Larry took a couple of seasons off. A couple of times. He took. Once, I think he took three years off, but the real break was when he took six years off, I think after season seven, I believe. And it wasn't like Larry said, I'm taking six years off. He just said, I'm going to take a year off. And then that year turned into two, and that year turned into three. But he was not sitting at home. He was very active. He wrote a play that became a Broadway hit. And I think that was probably. I have a theory that Larry's idol has long been. Well, I mean, he says Woody Allen's one of his idols, but I have this theory that he's looked to Woody's career as an example. Woody was a very successful standup comic. Then he started directing and make, you know, writing and directing movies. Then he started writing maybe, I'm not sure the order, but comic pieces for the New Yorker. He also wrote plays that were successful. And I think Larry looked at that and thought, well, maybe I can do some of that too. And Larry has written comic pieces for the New York Times, usually with a more political edge. So he wrote this play and indeed it was a hit. It's not a great play. It's kind of like a little bit warmed over Neil Simon maybe, but I'm sure watching him in it would have been a huge amount of fun. And then when, you know, he had a hard time doing the same thing night after night, finally he left and Jason Alexander took over. And that would have also been fun to see. So I don't think we're going to see revivals of that play, but it would have been really fun to see those original casts for sure. So he was busy. He did a TV movie for HBO called Clear History, which is actually funny. So if you haven't seen that, you might want to. And he's got some people like John Hamm in it who he later brought into Curb youb Enthusiasm. It has a little. It's not. It has a little bit of a feel of Curb. And I think he did some improvising with the actors too when he made it. And of course he was on Saturday Night Live a few times playing Bernie Sanders, who is his distant cousin. So he was in the limelight, he was very busy. And he eventually decided that he would like to do the show again, which I think made HBO and all the actors very happy. I'm not sure that the show was. A lot of people don't think that the later seasons are quite as good. I think there isn't a season that's not worth watching. But there definitely are highlights. And the later shows are. They're a little plot wise, they're a little bit looser, which actually sometimes I rather like. Some people prefer the really tight multiple crossing plots that ultimately sort of fulfill each other in the earlier episodes. But yeah, it's interesting to hear which are people's favorites. Although the highest rated one, if you look at IMDb is the very last episode where he redeemed himself after the Seinfeld last episode debacle.
- [34:15]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah, so like Seinfeld episode is one we don't talk about. Right. Because it's so like. Everyone like universally thinks it's so bad. Yeah. And I did love, because you were talking and you mentioned that he doesn't like to write like that. It was fascinating that his scripts, quote unquote, were like what, six pages? It was sort of like, here's the outline, let's go. So I thought that was really fascinating that he really wasn't writing anything.
- [34:42]
Josh Levine
I think they are sort of like 10 or 15 pages rather than 30 or 40 pages. And you know, if he. Some, you know, if he gets good lines in his head, he'll put them in, but mostly it's the comic situation. And he was pretty good at finding actors who really reacted well. Some of them, obviously, are comedians who are really good improvisers to begin with. People like Cheryl Hines was part of, you know, an improvisory. Is that the right word? Troupe? You know, so they. But then people like Jon Hamm, to mention him again, I think he's great on the show, and he's a very good. I actually think he's a terrific comic actor. And he just really naturally fell into it, you know, Tracy Allman, great comedian who really knows how to improvise. So he. He found good people, and he found people who just really fit the style of the show. And then he could play off them and he could have characters. For example, I don't think Larry was very comfortable writing black characters, understandably. He has a completely different background. And there's one line in Curb where he says, I find myself nodding to black people, which I find quite interesting. He wants them to know he's on their side. Right. That he's a good guy. And I think he makes use of that in the show. And then he'll have these characters, he'll let them improvise and use their own voices in the show. And I think that has really enriched the show when he has done that.
- [36:26]
Rebecca Buchanan
So, you know, you go through. You talk about Curb, and then you kind of end with life after Curb. Right. So can you talk a little bit about life after Curb? And.
- [36:35]
Josh Levine
Yeah, yeah. Well, one thing that happened, of course, with the fires in California and in the Pacific Palisades where Larry lives, so a lot of sites that were filmed actually got destroyed, and Larry's own house did not. But I think that no doubt had a big impact on all the people who live there. For one thing, he started touring, which was really interesting, and he actually filmed a special that was going to air after the show ended, where he sat down and was interviewed for an hour or an hour and a half. And the day before it was to air, he asked HBO to pull it. Now, you must have some schlep to be able to do that. And instead, he got this idea of actually touring around to New York, Chicago, other cities, and being interviewed on stage in front of an audience. And I think this is because Larry. And I don't know, this is my speculation, but Larry wanted to take a victory lap after all those years after the success of Kerr, after the last episode that was so warmly received, he Wanted to be able to stand in front of an audience and have them stand up and applaud. Why not? Who? I want it too, so who would if we wouldn't want it? So he figured out at the same time that, you know, I'm not that great at standup. I'm now like 78 years old. I'm going to go back on stage. But I am good at repartee, I am good at responding. So if I put someone in the other chair and we talk, we just talk. I don't have to plan or anything. I can tell stories, I can riff, I can make jokes. And that's what he's done. So it's, I think, in a way, it's also his way of finding a way to be successful on stage as a comic that doesn't have to have him just standing there alone, the man with the microphone. But at the same time, he can kind of claim that he finally was successful on stage as well as a comic. That's what I suspect, anyway. And now apparently he's got a new television show. We don't know too much about it yet, but Barack Obama is producing it. And it's supposedly going to be about American history, which I think that makes sense coming from President Obama on the one hand. But also I think Larry has a lot to say about American history. So I think that will be very interesting. And Larry's not one to pull his punches or to hold back his scathing criticisms of people, for example, in the present administration that he doesn't like. So I don't know how far it will go. I'm not sure. I don't know if they're filming it. They've really kind of kept it under wraps. But I'm really glad to see that he is still at it. And I think we need Larry's voice, so something to look forward to.
- [39:54]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah. So I'm gonna ask you my one final question. The book is out now, so people can get the book. Now, is there anything with the book you want to promote? Anything you're working on now that's going to come out, like, promotion wise, is there? Yeah. Self promote if you need to want to.
- [40:11]
Josh Levine
You know what? I'm not at this moment. I also. I write novels and kids books under another name, so I'm busy doing that. And I've had a couple books come out and I have. And so at the moment, I don't have another book for television and I'm not sure if I'm going to do another one. I was so happy to be able to go back to Curb and finish that story. So I'm really grateful that publisher gave me that opportunity. And you know, never say never. And maybe some idea will come up that I will want to do, but it hasn't happened yet, so I'll wait to see. But I hope people I think it's an enjoyable book and I also think it's an interesting book for people who are just in the arts to realize that it's not always easy. It can be a struggle. And even when you become well known, finding purpose in your life, finding where your voice should go next, I think it's a constant, ongoing thing. I don't think that Larry's ever gotten to the place where he's just, okay, I'm satisfied. I've done everything I want to do and I have more money than I can possibly spend in five lifetimes. I don't think that's the point for him. The point is to keeping part of the society that he belongs to, you know, keep having something to say about it. And he likes to make us laugh. So yeah, I hope people will read it for all those reasons.
- [41:57]
Rebecca Buchanan
Great. Again, Josh Levine, the author of Pretty, Pretty, Pretty Good, Larry David and the Making of Seinfeld and Curb youb Enthusiasm, thank you for talking with me on new books of popular culture.
- [42:08]
Josh Levine
Oh my great. I lost my voice there. My great pleasure, Rebecca. The remains of my cold thank you so much. The world moves fast. Your workday even faster. Pitching products, drafting reports, analyzing data. Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI assistant for work built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Microsoft 365 apps you use, helping you quickly write, analyze, create, and summarize so you can cut through clutter and clear a path to your best work. Learn more@Microsoft.com M365 copilot.