Money For Nothing

This week, in between reminding myself what my thesis is about, after dog walking and before hanging out at The Banknote, I've been watching the first season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the weirdly un-sitcomish sitcom starring Larry David, and it reminded me of the time I had dinner with Howard West in Beverly Hills in 1996.

Howard West is one of the executive producers of Seinfeld, along with Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, but my dinner with him had nothing to do with that. What it had to do with was two guys named Stuart and Steve, who published a magazine called Websight, and a deal we were cooking. The search engine company I worked for was looking for content, and they had it.

The night before my dinner with Mr. West, Stuart, Steve, a couple of their friends, and I, had gone bar hopping. Bar hopping in L.A. is quite a different experience from bar hopping in Toronto. In Toronto, you have hundreds of bars in a few square blocks, and you either walk or cab around. Nobody walks in L.A., though. Stuart, who was driving, lived in Manhattan Beach. He picked me up at the Figueroa, an exotic hotel that I swear I've recognized in episodes of Alias, then we gathered the others and drove for miles up Sepulveda into Hollywood.

We started at a pretentious martini bar, then drove over to Vine to some place that was decorated with an abundance of palm trees. Indoors. Good to see that La La Land is not without a sense of irony. Our third stop was an out of the way club, the entrance to which was an unmarked door in an alley. As we approached a bouncer opened it from the inside, gave us the once-over, and permitted us to proceed into a long, dark, corridor. Two more bouncers — clearly, they were triplets — watched us pass; the last one nodded his head to indicate a staircase. We went up.

The club was small, dark, narrow, and free of frippery of any kind. I barely discerned a ledge along the wall, against which leaned several tall, skinny, bored looking people.

"Cameron!" exclaimed Stuart, as he approached one of them. Introductions were made all around. Cameron Diaz had posed for the cover of Websight earlier that year, and so was acquainted with Steve and Stuart. This was two years before There's Something About Mary, so she wasn't yet the A-list celebrity she would become. Still, I remember noticing two things about her: that she was as tall as I, and that she had a quality. A movie star quality.

She was a model, and had done some acting, but what she really wanted to do was sing. "Do you guys know any karaoke bars around here?" she asked.

The next evening, Steve and Stuart arranged for me to have dinner with Howard West, of Shapiro/West and Associates, one of the biggest talent agencies in Hollywood. Mr. West, as they always referred to him, had invested in their magazine, and was interested in finding out about "this Internet thing." My boss, the president of the search engine company, was in San Francisco that week, and decided to fly down for the evening.

He was always schmoozing and wheeling, but very little dealing went on until after he was gone. Maybe another time I'll tell you about the deal we made with the software company whose employees wore Star Trek uniforms in their trade show booth, and which imploded when its president took the entire company on a retreat to what turned out to be a Scientology compound.

We met at a cozy French restaurant on Beverly Boulevard at the appointed time. Mr. West's limousine pulled up in front of the door, just as Mr. President and I were entering. He greeted us, and then he was the mayor. The hostess came outside to show us in. We were ushered to a secluded table in a glass-enclosed alcove, looking out into the small garden. Mr. West's table.

"I've taken the liberty of ordering for all of us. I hope neither of you has any food allergies?" asked Mr. West.

My parents raised me with the understanding that, if someone is making you dinner, or buying you dinner, you eat whatever they serve you without complaint.

There were no complaints. I don't remember what we ate, but I remember that it was delicious. We read no menu; no prices were posted in the window. Courses were presented and removed unobtrusively. Movements were directed by the occasional raised eyebrow or finger of Mr. West's. The chef came out to greet him, and ask how we enjoyed our meal. No bill was accorded Mr. West, not even discreetly.

As we chatted during the meal Mr. West asked whether I watched Seinfeld.

"Of course," I replied. "In fact, I watched the show back in 1989, when it was on on Wednesday nights and called The Seinfeld Chronicles."

There's a good chance that if I were to call Mr. West today, he might remember me, just because of that sentence.

He was a charming man, Mr. West was — still is, I'm sure — and once we'd established Seinfeldian common ground he regaled me throughout the meal with tales of the early days of the show, before it became the monster hit and landmark program it was to become.

"When Larry and Jerry came to me with their idea for this show, a show about nothing, I don't know what made me go along with them. I thought they were crazy, but I sold the pilot to the network. They ordered four shows after the pilot."

"Is that good?" I asked.

"My dear, it had never been done before. When the network wants to give a show a chance, they order six episodes, then decide whether to continue or cancel. I got four only because of who I am. I was sure I'd owe them big down the road."

"But you had the last laugh, didn't you?"

"I sure did, eventually," Mr. West smiled, "But it didn't come easy. Not until Cheers went off the air in '93 and they moved us to Thursday nights did we find an audience. No one saw those early shows."

"I did."

"What was your favourite episode?" Mr. West asked me.

"The one where they go shopping and can't find their car in the parking lot. Kramer's carrying around a box with an air conditioner, and Elaine has a goldfish, and they wander around and around looking for their car. I remember thinking, this is brilliant. Who hasn't had that happen? But when it happens to us, we find our car, eventually. They don't, for hours. It felt like a horror movie. Funny, but scary at the same time."

I think it was only then that Mr. West believed I hadn't been bullshitting him.

"That episode must have taken days to shoot," I ventured. "And having to close down a parking lot while you did it? I thought you didn't have much of a budget in those early years?"

"That wasn't a real parking lot," Mr. West replied.

"You're kidding."

"It was a set. We built it. Believe it or not, it's cheaper to build a parking lot set and fill it with cars in the studio, than it is to go out on location and film in a real parking lot."

Everything I know about television, I learned from Howard West.

"Did you ever notice the Pepsi in Jerry's fridge?" Mr. West asked me.


"You mean the six pack of Pepsi that's there in one episode, and in the next it's a six pack of Coke?"

I'm not sure, but I think Mr. West might have wanted to kiss me just then.

"People are always asking me how much Pepsi paid us, or how we made that deal, or why we didn't do what all the other shows did — make a prop that looks like a Pepsi can, but isn't."

"I wondered about that myself," I said, "I mean, how can you get away with that? Isn't there some sort of rule in television? Characters in movies and on TV always order "a beer" or "a cola"; never a brand name. I assumed it wasn't allowed."

"That's what everybody assumes, but it's not true. There's no rule, or law, it's just a custom. Producers have always taken the position that they don't want to give free advertising to the brands, so they use fake props instead. But we, like I said, had a shoestring budget. Jerry's the one who suggested, why don't we just put a real six pack of Pepsi in the fridge? We all looked at each other; no one had a good reason why we shouldn't, so we did. But where Jerry was really brilliant was a couple of weeks later when he suggested this time, let's use a six pack of Coke."

At the end of the evening Mr. West shook Mr. President's hand, and kissed me on the cheek. Websight magazine ceased publication a few months later, our deal vapourized, and I never saw Mr. West again.

Back in Waterloo, a week later, Mr. President came to my desk. "I just had a phone call from Howard West," he told me. "He asked about you, and said he found you charming and candid."

Candid? I'm not sure whether that's a good thing. But to this day, whenever I put a six pack of Pepsi in the fridge, I think of Mr. West.
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Click here to read another story about Sass's adventures during the Internet Days. In the next story, Sass finds out how her father's trip to Germany went.