Veteran sitcom writer Larry Charles says cocaine was rampant in Hollywood during the ’80s.
“That’s how the work got done,” he tells Page Six exclusively in a recent interview.
Charles got his start writing for the comedy series “Fridays,” an “SNL” knockoff that aired on ABC on Friday nights from 1980 to 1982. Among its ensemble were Michael Richards and Larry David.
“In the beginning, when you first started doing coke, it gives you incredible energy, it gives you incredible confidence,” he explains, before adding that writers were handed “absurd deadlines — these are deadlines that humans can’t really meet without some kind of supplement.”
And it wasn’t just the writing staff that was using the drug.
“It was the producers themselves,” he shares, “[They] were also completely indulging at the same time, it was such a persuasive thing in the ’80s, especially in Los Angeles.”
Charles claims the drug use wasn’t just limited to the studios but was flagrantly used everywhere. We must note, however, that Charles, the writers and producers voluntarily took the drug and weren’t forced by anyone.
“You could go to a restaurant [and] you’d see people doing lines at the table,” he continues. “It was a public display. There was no hiding it, and everybody was doing it.”
However, the superhuman focus that cocaine imbues eventually wanes, and “at a certain point, it takes its turn and it starts to have the opposite effect.”
The Brooklyn native, 68, confesses that he was fortunate because he was able to “kind of quit cold turkey and walk [away] from it forever,” but not everyone was as lucky.
“A lot of people kind of graduated because you reached that point, that crossroads where it’s not helping anymore,” he remembers.
Sadly, some “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.”
Nose candy tales are just some of the stories included in Charles’ recently published memoir, “Comedy Samurai: Forty Years of Blood, Guts, and Laughter.”
In it, he recounts working on “Seinfeld,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” directing Sacha Baron Cohen in “Borat,” “Brüno,” and “The Dictator,” and directing Bob Dylan.
Charles is ruthlessly honest about himself and others, confessing he no longer speaks to either Baron Cohen or David, who he considers his comedy mentor.
Charles and David had a falling out over a proposed documentary and haven’t spoken since 2022.
Charles is equanimous over the rift.
“It’s the truth,” he shares. “It’s not that sad, at least I don’t think so, and I don’t think that he thinks so.”
“I mean it’s disappointing,” he clarifies, before noting that “as you get older, you have friendships that just drift for one reason or another…you know life is temporary. And I think we’re both at that age where we could acknowledge that kind of larger context of the inevitability of things ending.”
A rep for David didn’t immediately respond to Page Six’s request for comment.
Charles, who recently suffered a heart attack and lost his home in the California wildfires, says that he also went through “a sort of bottom” but has since “climbed out of that.”
He credits meeting his second wife and “a great psychiatrist.”
“They also really helped me kind of realize that I didn’t deserve to be treating myself that way. I could do better.”
He admits that he’s not completely healed. “I don’t think it ever goes away,” but those negative feelings have “shrunk.”
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