“Curb In Costume”: How President Obama Persuaded Larry David To Return To TV With HBO’s ‘Life, Larry And The Pursuit Of Unhappiness’

Imagine, for a second, that Thomas Jefferson didn’t write the first draft of the Declaration of Independence. Larry David can.

David, dressed in layered woolen and cravats, kicks off his new HBO comedy series Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, produced by President Barack Obama and his Higher Ground banner, by imagining Robert R. Livingston, one of the other founding fathers, wrote the first draft.

“It really didn’t take me that long, I only used two quills,” he says in the opening episode, before being queried about his list of grievances that include being told who is attending a dinner party and making it illegal to share an umbrella.

“We jokingly call it Curb in costume,” executive producer Jeff Schaffer, David’s longtime Curb Your Enthusiasm partner, told Deadline in a Q&A interview (read below).

The show emerged after President Obama called his golfing buddy David and asked whether he’d be interested in making a show to celebrate the 250^th anniversary of the United States of America. David, a history major, was tickled by the idea.

Schaffer praises HBO comedy chief Amy Gravitt for taking the leap after he said, “What if I could bring you two people that half of America loves?”

It then became a “summer camp” for comedians, including Curb regulars and the likes of Kathryn Hahn, Jerry Seinfeld and Rita Wilson, with David and President Obama as camp counsellors.

There is clearly a chemistry between the pair. Obama kicks off the premiere, which launches today, Friday, June 26, by celebrating America’s 250th birthday.

“Our founding fathers drafted a charter to guarantee the rule of law and the rights of man. Together they established a new nation, one where power resided not with a monarch but with ordinary citizens. We hold these truths to be self-evident. They remind me that all men are created equal. It was a radical idea, revolutionary, but what truly makes America unique is the fact that we’ve always been a work in progress,” he says in the first episode. “We’re not perfect, we can be irascible, petty, selfish, cheap, and let’s face it, some of us will always find something to complain about, but as Americans, we have always found a way to overcome these naysayers, these deeply unpleasant people who stood in the way of progress.”

That’s where David, a man who doesn’t get excited by much but admitted at the show’s premiere event that he was “enthusiastic”, comes in.  

DEADLINE: I can’t imagine Larry says yes to too many people.

JEFF SCHAFFER: Larry only says yes for one reason, one reason only. It’s not about the who, it’s really about the what. For him, the idea either grips him or, in 99% of the cases, he doesn’t want to do it. This is a guy, if one of his good friends is having a movie premiere, he goes, ‘Where is it?’ If they say it’s in Hollywood, he’s probably not going. It’s a commitment. Your time is so valuable, even more so in the late 1700s when your lifespan is not that long. You got to really weigh the importance of every social event.

Larry saw the fun of throwing himself in the middle of history, because I think for Larry, his comedy is so often big thing, little thing. Even look at Seinfeld, you’re going to get to do your own pilot, wait, who stole my raisins? History is writ so large and Larry writes so small that the juxtaposition tickled him. To be honest, he likes being in costume, he really likes that. We’d already dipped our toe in these waters when we did this Super Bowl commercial.

DEADLINE: There’s a Declaration of Independence sketch in the FTX commercial that you did.

SCHAFFER: I love that line from the commercial, ‘Even stupid people vote’. We couldn’t do it again, but it was such a fun commercial. I don’t know what happened to those guys, they were nice, I’m sure they’re fine. But I think Larry had so much fun doing that commercial, and he remembered, as we were talking about this, how much fun he had being in costume, and he forgot how much he hated being in wigs.

DEADLINE: I’d have thought Larry might actually like the wigs because of, you know, being bald.

SCHAFFER: I think he likes the concept of the wig, but he doesn’t like the physical feeling of the wig, that facial hair and stuff. It’s gonna be itchy, wearing one of those big whisker things for 12 hours is rough.

DEADLINE: There was also the Revolutionary War reenactment in a season of Curb.

SCHAFFER: Larry in costume looks like the Mr. Potato Head toy, you can just attach different ears or different hair or give him a different hat or put a different facial hair, that’s what his head is, it’s a real life Mr. Potato Head that you can now put anything on. The looks are fun. He would have been a great statesman in the 1700s or 1800s, having that cane and some stentorian bellows, with the cane as a flourish, he really missed his century.

DEADLINE: How similar was this to making a season of Curb?

SCHAFFER: Writing wise and comedy wise, it’s done basically the same, we wrote an outline and then we sort of rewrite on the day. One of the things that we decided to do was have a sort of documentary style preamble to each sketch, which shouldered a lot of the burden explaining [things like] ‘What is the Alamo, who was fighting, who died?’. It’s educational and hopefully interesting. Sam Jackson’s voice was the perfect bounce to that whole thing, but that’s the setup, so it helped us, so that we could now do the comedy. We did the dialog and the comedy just like Curb. But what was very different from Curb was the production value, and the way we shot it. Larry and I talked about making sure this didn’t feel like a sketch show.

DEADLINE: You didn’t want it to feel like an SNL sketch, right?

SCHAFFER: No disrespect, SNL, they’re great, but they’re on stage, we’re out there. We built the Wright flyer, we’re in a World War One trench, we’re on a boat. We wanted it to feel very cinematic and also very authentic and then throw Larry into that. The only thing that’s not authentic is Larry, then let that cause all hell to break loose. It was really fun for me just to be able to shoot these both cinematically, but also, of course, do all the Curb stuff that we do with the comedy.

DEADLINE: There’s plenty of actors from the Curb family like Jeff Garlin, Susie Essman, JB Smoove and Vince Vaughn as well as many actors who appeared in the show.

SCHAFFER: This is basically a time road trip, right? You bring your family, so JB came on the road trip, and Susie, and Jeff, and Vince, and then you also got your extended family, which are these friends of the court who we just love working with like Jon Hamm, Sean Hayes, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Kaley Cuoco, and we’re bringing all these people back that we had so much fun with on Curb.

Then there are people that we’ve never gotten to work with, that we always wanted to, where schedules didn’t work out, or whatever, like Kathryn Hahn, who’s brilliant, and just so fun. The casting, was really, really fun, and the hardest part was just everyone’s here for a day, and can we line up the location and the person. They’ve all got busy lives, but I’m really, really happy that we got all the people we got in.

DEADLINE: What was the relationship like between Larry and President Obama? I imagine Obama is usually in charge but in this case, Larry gets to tell him what to do.

SCHAFFER: I’d never met President Obama until now. We’re going to a meeting with him, and the first thing he says to me is ‘You golf?’ I said ‘Not really’. He points at Larry and says ‘This guy is better than you’d think he’d be by looking at him, but he wears so much sunscreen. I say, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s like playing with a mime’. I get it, I’ve seen that and Larry just goes, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, my dad’s not from Kenya’. That was minute one. From this moment on, we just need to see them together, that’s what you saw in the teaser, in the opening and what you’re going to see later in the episodes.

The President had read a lot of the sketches and liked it all. He had a note about something and Larry says, ‘Yeah, well, don’t you worry about that’. The President says, ‘Alright, I see how this is going to be’.

DEADLINE: I gather Obama’s line about Larry having old lips was his own.

SCHAFFER: Old lips is 100% President Obama. He was great, his timing wasn’t good for a former President, it was good. It’s one of the coolest moments of my entire career is getting to sit on that set with the President. By the way, the President said to me, ‘I just have fun being annoyed by Larry’.

DEADLINE: It’s a bit annoying he’s so good at everything.

SCHAFFER: Think about how many people are bad at everything. Someone has to be good at everything. [Obama] also said ‘When we get together I start sounding like [Larry]. I don’t talk like that to other people’. Yeah, he sucked you into his black hole of negativity. Now you, an inspiration to millions, are kvetching.

At the end of the shoot, he was watching all the stuff and he says, ‘I see how this works now. Larry makes the world uncomfortable and you make sure the world makes Larry uncomfortable’. That’s literally how we shoot the show.

DEADLINE: President Obama already has three Emmys for narration, but next year could be up for a guest star Emmy.

SCHAFFER: The President and I are going to release a musical single, so he can go for the EGOT.

DEADLINE: Larry’s already thrown you under the bus by saying he’s a history major but you know nothing about American history.

SCHAFFER: American history is not my strong suit. In college, I was a biological anthropology major, which was a lot of neurobiology, but I did study a lot of history, but it was actually Mesoamerican archeology, Maya and Aztec stuff. I also did classics, so I like ancient history, I like Mesoamerican history, but modern American history was never, I will admit, of never particular interest to me.

I’d say we should do something about winning the popular vote and losing the election and Larry would be like ‘Yeah, let’s do it about Samuel J. Tilden’. I mean that literally could have been a country western singer, for all I knew. I’ll give you another perfect example. We didn’t have to research this because Larry knew that Mary Todd Lincoln, after the assassination, wouldn’t leave the White House and he thought it’d be really funny to be the one to kick her out.

DEADLINE: There are some grievances in this that have appeared in Curb like respecting wood, the happy new year line, the chat and cut, is that intentional? Is it Larry drilling home that these are things that really bother him?

SCHAFFER: They are definitely some of the sharper things sticking in his craw. It wasn’t out of laziness, for instance, when we’re doing the Declaration of Independence, we thought, how great might this country have been had we only done these few things. I know we did it on Curb but we want to do it back here, and look what we could have had, we could have had a country where everyone picked a line and stayed in it.

DEADLINE: You said that making this show for the 250^th anniversary of America was like throwing a birthday party for your friend who’s in rehab.

SCHAFFER: He’s all fucked up, but we still love him.

DEADLINE: What was doing that with President Obama like?

SCHAFFER: When you’re doing a show about American history, you want to do it warts and right now we have this orange saggy wart that we wish would go away, but the nice thing about having President Obama produce this and be a part of it is that this country’s had a lot of fuck ups, we’ve seemed to have learned very little, but we’re still moving forward sometimes, and then we move back a little bit, but we always move forward again. While Larry’s pointing out a lot of the steps back, the President is telling us we can still step forward.

One of the things we also tried to do was talk about today with a historical perspective, because we do repeat history, we make the same dumb mistakes, like not listening to science so let’s talk about vaccines but let’s do it with polio. Being able to talk about modern times by looking back was something that was interesting to us.

DEADLINE: I imagine the limited nature of this was also an appeal.

SCHAFFER: One of the appeals for Larry is that you don’t have the burden of doing a whole season and then talking about another season, it’s just a time in history. At that point it was six episodes but we ended up doing so many sketches it was seven, but the appeal of it was sort of a one and done thing for right now.

DEADLINE: Was there any push back for a seventh episode?

SCHAFFER: It cost the same. We shot everything, and then things were longer. This was not an expensive show. It looks really good, our production team and our costumers, can’t say enough about how diligent and accurate, and just amazing they were and the way they stretch the dollar was just brilliant.

DEADLINE: What’s the mood in the camp now? Larry seems quite happy on the press tour.

SCHAFFER: I think there’s two things. One, we’re still in post. On the day of the premiere, we mixed [episode] six. We’re mixing and coloring and stuff right now, so it’s all very fresh, and he’s watching and really liking what he’s seeing. He loves American history. He loved the cast and the crew. He had a really, really fun time. It’s just a really fun, odd, unique thing for this moment. It’s our birthday gift to America. Hope you like Larry.