LUNCH WITH LYDIA
A decade after 'Seinfeld,' the comedian's still creating buzz
Posted on Sun, Oct. 28, 2007
By LYDIA MARTIN
You can't say Jerry Seinfeld isn't a sport. After all, in May, he donned a fuzzy bee suit and rode a cable off the roof of a hotel in Cannes for the sake of promoting Bee Movie, his first major project beyond stand-up comedy since his legendary sitcom signed off in 1998.
And maybe you've seen the goofy live-action trailers: Seinfeld flailing around in his roly-poly bee costume, banging into stuff for laughs.
But sitting here in a conference room at South Beach's Shore Club Hotel in a white button-down and dark jacket -- well, he doesn't seem in much of a mood for gags.
A photographer offers him a honeycomb and bee antennae by way of props. But Seinfeld's not going there.
You already know that whatever you do, you shouldn't make any lame jokes about the ''buzz'' around Bee Movie, the DreamWorks animated film starring Seinfeld as Barry B. Benson, an Everybee sort who breaks from the hive. Other reporters have tried puns, and Seinfeld has not been amused.
Sure, he's making a few jokes today, but it's a little surprising just how much of a straight man Seinfeld can be.
What's funny to him these days?
DADDY'S VIEW
''I have no idea. But when they laugh, you know you've got it,'' he says. ``I have kids now. And I go to these children's birthday parties and I hate them. And I start to envy the piñata. That's where my head is at now.''
His mother lives in Palm Beach County, but he rarely ventures to South Beach, he says. Which is fine, because he has a pretty good handle on the place as it is:
``I haven't been here much, but my sense is that there's not a lot of work getting done here. People are hanging a lot of white drapes. They're very interested in bottled water. And they really think that some are better than others. And, um, it's pathetic.''
Bee Movie, opening Nov. 2., started out as not much more than a play on words, Seinfeld says. He happened to be having dinner at Steven Spielberg's place in the Hamptons. During a lull in the conversation, Seinfeld blurted something about how it would be funny to make a project called Bee Movie, a takeoff of the term ''B movie,'' which refers to a low-budget, schlocky film, and have it actually be about bees.
Seinfeld had nothing beyond that. But Spielberg ran with it, immediately calling Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks chief. By the next day, Katzenberg was on the horn to Seinfeld, saying he wanted to move forward with the project.
''I always thought they were funny, the way they lived in these hives,'' Seinfeld says about his long-standing bee curiosity. ``It kind of reminds me of a corporate environment, with offices and different floors. I would watch these documentaries and would say, they really have like a utopian society. It's a perfect society. It just seemed like, what a great setting for a comedy, a perfectly utopian corporate society with this product. They have a product.''
Barry bugs out when he discovers humans have been stealing honey and profiting from it for ages. So he takes the human race to court to win all the honey back. Of course, things get sticky.
''He's very fearless in the way he goes about things,'' Seinfeld says of his wise-cracking, pollen-happy alter ego, not too huge of a departure from his old sitcom character. Except Barry sports black-and-yellow striped turtlenecks. And matching sneakers. DreamWorks scrapped more than 800 versions of Barry before it settled on the gangly-limbed character with the bulbous bull's-eye bottom. Seinfeld doesn't just star in the movie, he also writes and produces. And gets a bunch of friends into the act. Look for fun, animated cameos by Ray Liotta, Sting, Oprah and others. Co-stars include Matthew Broderick, who plays Barry's best bee buddy Adam Flayman, content to live out his life as a company man making honey for the Honex Corporation; Chris Rock as Mooseblood the mosquito, whom Barry bumps into on a windshield; and Renée Zellweger, the human florist who saves Barry's life after some oaf tries to swat him with a boot.
BEEFRIEND, GIRLFRIEND
O Bee and girl instantly hit it off. Seinfeld says he saw Zellweger in the role from day one.
``She is a brilliant actress. I wanted a girl that a bee would be attracted to, so it had to be somebody sweet.''
Couldn't be, say, Uma?
``No. It had to be somebody warm and sweet, and that's Renée.''
Usually, actors who voice animated characters have nobody to play off. They read their lines alone in a sound booth, just a microphone and a script in front of them. Because Seinfeld was involved in every aspect of the production, he was always on hand to record with his co-stars.
''It virtually never happens. Of all the animated work I've done, only once before had I had a session with two actors together,'' says co-director Steve Hickner, who in September joined Seinfeld on a several-city promotion tour. ``On The Prince of Egypt, we had Sandra Bullock and Jeff Goldblum together for one day. On this movie, we had the fortunate ability to have [Seinfeld] play against every actor in the movie. It changed everything. There was a lot more ad libbing and things that were embroidered upon.''
So would Seinfeld get off on being a real bee?
``As long as you get to fly, I think I could deal with the other stuff. Flying just seems like a great feature of living.''
But then he'd have to answer to some queen.
``Well, who doesn't? I'm a married man. I know what that's like.''
It's been an obsessive, four-year project to get Bee Movie off the ground. Now that it's in the can, what comes next for Seinfeld?
``I've never planned anything in my whole career. I could take some time off. I have been working pretty intensively on this. . . . But I was away from the family a lot, which I don't like because, you know, I'm in my 50s, and I came to family living late, and I really want to experience it.''
Then again, he could never do another project and still go down in history as one of the most successful entertainers in the world.
''Yeah, but who cares about history? You want to make use of your abilities while you're alive,'' Seinfeld says.
Would he consider TV again?
``I have my stand-up act, which is what I really love to do. I'm really a comedian. That's really my job. These other things come up, and I invest myself in them, but then I just go back to what I normally do for a living.
And then he's off:
``I've been thinking about the OnStar System that they're putting in cars and how sad are we that we have set up satellites now because we can't get this key thing straight? That the key comes with you when you leave the car. We used to be able to do that. That was our responsibility. We have now been relieved of that.''
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