‘Seinfeld’ Writer Details Rampant Cocaine Use in ’80s TV Show Production: ‘Everybody Was Doing It’

Larry Charles, a longtime staff writer for Seinfeld, said “everybody” was doing cocaine in Hollywood in the 1980s, when he got his start on TV shows like Fridays and The Arsenio Hall Show.

“That’s how the work got done,” Charles told Page Six in a recent interview. “In the beginning, when you first started doing coke, it gives you incredible energy, it gives you incredible confidence.”

That drug use came amid “absurd deadlines” for TV writers, Charles said. “These are deadlines that humans can’t really meet without some kind of supplement,” he explained.

And TV producers used cocaine, too, according to Charles. “[They] were also completely indulging at the same time,” he said. “It was such a persuasive thing in the ’80s, especially in Los Angeles. You could go to a restaurant, [and] you’d see people doing lines at the table. It was a public display. There was no hiding it, and everybody was doing it.”

But cocaine eventually “takes its turn, and it starts to have the opposite effect,” Charles said, and he quit the drug.

Other people, however, “moved on to crack and other things and became addicts, and instead of being able to do their work, they kind of ruined their lives, unfortunately,” he added.

Later in his career, Charles was a writer and producer for Seinfeld’s first five seasons. He also served as showrunner for Mad About You and he executive-produced and directed episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Among other credits, Charles also directed the films Borat and The Dictator. Along the way, the TV veteran was nominated for Primetime Emmy Awards, Directors Guild of America Awards, and Writers Guild of America Awards.

And for more scoop, TV fans can read the showbiz stories Charles relays in his new memoir, Comedy Samurai: Forty Years of Blood, Guts, and Laughter, which Grand Central Publishing released last month. “In Comedy Samurai, Charles pulls back the curtain on the making of his successful projects, offering sharp, never-before-told anecdotes about Jerry Seinfeld, Sacha Baron Cohen, Bill Maher, Bob Dylan, Nic Cage, Mel Brooks, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Larry David, among many others,” the publisher says.