Jerry Seinfeld, 53, sounds as excited as if he's just started his career.
As the media blitz -- or let us just use the inevitable buzz pun already -- for the new Dreamworks animation, Bee Movie, goes into orbit, Seinfeld is suddenly back in the spotlight.
Not that he's every been too far away. Along with buddy Larry David, Jerry created a sitcom with his name, featuring a caricatured version of himself. Calling Seinfeld just a sitcom, of course, is tantamount to calling Jerry mildly rich.
The show is the most successful American sitcom of all time, and earns more through syndication and DVD sales than most current shows earn during primetime. Seinfeld is a television megastory, a phenomenon that caused Jerry to earn, going by Forbes magazine, $267 million in 1998, more than Steven Spielberg and Michael Jordan combined.
The show ended in 1998, Jerry walking away from a deal offering him $100 million for another season, a historic amount in tvland.
After making television history, most expected Jerry to go the film way, but he went determinedly back to his stand-up comic roots, and continues to be a most demanded performer.
Now he returns. There is the legendary story of dinner with Spielberg, and Jerry kidding about a film about a bee, called a Bee-Movie. Spielberg bit the bait instantly, and called Dreamworks. "I wasn't pitching him," Seinfeld told The Guardian in an interview, "but then he started pitching me: 'You gotta make this.'"Jerry Seinfeld was making a movie.
In the animated Bee Movie, Jerry's co-written the script with some Seinfeld alumni, besides just voicing the lead character. And he's hooked.
"I never thought I'd be doing this. I thought I'd write the screenplay and do the voice and they'd make the movie. And then I started coming out here and got more and more interested," he tells the Washington Post. "I read every line with every actor. For the whole movie. I worked with every animator on every shot. And there's 1,400 different shots. I sat with every animator for every shot. Do I sound obsessive? I am."
Bee Movie, an animated feature made for an estimated $150 million, opened in the US on November 2.
Photograph: Getty Images
