Larry David has reigned as the king of cable comedy for quite a few years now due to the continued success of his HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm. His largely improvised look at what it’s like to be a rich, curmudgeonly Hollywood type getting in fights with everyone, everywhere he goes, is a comedy goldmine, and has proved that his network success with Seinfeld was in no way a fluke.
To this point though, David hasn’t been able to successfully make the transition to being a feature film presence. When David takes a film role, more often than not, we end up with something like Whatever Works, the Woody Allen film that was probably his least acclaimed work of the past decade. But, if news being reported today is to be believed, Larry’s luck might be about to change.
THR has a report that David is currently in negotiations to star in a new comedy from Superbad director Greg Mottola, that’s coming from a treatment by Alec Berg, Jeff Schaffer, and David Mandel – all writers who David is familiar with from their work on Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Reportedly, the still-untitled comedy is going to be largely improv-based – much like David’s current television work – with a loosely scripted plot that’s being kept under wraps used as a framework for heat-of-the-moment riffs.
As anyone who’s spent any real time watching Curb Your Enthusiasm over the years can confirm, this is a formula that has produced untold amounts of hilarity so far, but David’s humor is largely rooted in uncomfortable situations and over-the-top confrontations. Is that the sort of thing that could successfully be stretched out to feature-length, or is Curb Your Enthusiasm’s sitcom format the perfect bite-sized vehicle to take in the comedian’s admittedly potent flavor? Might a Larry David movie be a bit too intense to sit through? Time will tell, but with names this familiar in charge of the creative process, this has to be seen as a project that should be welcomed with at least guarded enthusiasm.
And now it’s probably time to start speculating as to whether or not they’ll write a role for Richard Lewis. If he gets left out in the cold it could serve as prime fodder for fights on the next season of Curb.