Larry David is indeed making a movie and it will indeed premiere on HBO. This we now know to be 100% true. Greg Mottola is attached to direct, Jon Hamm will likely co-star but, like most projects the creator of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm is behind, everything else has been very hush hush.
However, now that the film is a go, a 40-page outline of the story had made its way into the wild revealing the major plot thrust of the film. The majority of dialogue will be improvised so it’s likely some things will change but, after the jump, we’ll tell you – in pretty spoilery detail – what Larry David’s HBO film is about. And yes, it sounds like an epic episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
The Los Angeles Times got their hands on the half-script, half-treatment version of the story and describe it as follows. If you don’t want to be spoiled on the basic thrust of the story, click away now:
The plot concerns a marketing executive named Lenny (David) who is helping to market a new electric car. Because he objects to the name (it’s “the Howard,” after “The Fountainhead’s” Howard Roark), Lenny gets into a fight with the creator, a colleague named Haney, and in a fit of Davidian pique gives Haney back his stake in the project.
This being a David story line, the car of course goes on to become a huge success, making Haney absurdly wealthy and leaving Larry out of the money (shades of George in “Curb’s” faux-”Seinfeld”reunion, forfeiting all the cash he had made on a public-toilet app to a Bernard Madoff scheme).
Having lost his wife, house and everything else, including his hair (it wouldn’t be a Larry David project without a baldness joke), Lenny moves to Martha’s Vineyard. Years later we find him as a lowly paid[..]istant to an elderly woman, living incognito with a different look under the[..]umed name Rolly.
But his life is soon shaken up when Haney, fabulously successful and not recognizing his former co-worker, shows up, prompting Lenny/Rolly to hatch a plan to exact revenge.
The article goes on to say Lenny is very much like the Larry character from Curb Your Enthusiasm, just without the wealth or celebrity. It also makes it seem like this is all act one, or early act two stuff so there are sure to be plenty of other surprises in addition to all the improv.
Head to the LA Times to read more about the project.
It sounds like something I definitely would have gone to the theater to see but I’ll gladly set my DVR and watch it at home too. What do you think of the plot?
Here’s What Larry David’s HBO Movie Is About | /Film
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