For director, co-writer and star Jerry Seinfeld, “Unfrosted” was an opportunity to bring something a little less serious to the entertainment zeitgeist. A humorless life without the ability to make fun of ourselves, he postured, doesn’t make for “good living.”
“Don’t give up laughing and humor and comedy in your life. It’s the best way to get through life,” Seinfeld said. “We all want to not hurt each other’s feelings. But if we go too far, and nobody can make fun of anybody, that’s not good living.”
“Unfrosted” is a fictionalized account of the creation of the Kellogg’s staple Pop-Tarts. The plot takes a “space race” approach, with Post Cereal as the other heavyweight in the fight to be the first to craft the toasted (or untoasted, if one prefers) pastry treat.
It costars a kaleidoscope of Hollywood funny people, including Melissa McCarthy, Amy Schumer, Jim Gaffigan, Hugh Grant, Peter Dinklage, Dan Levy, James Marsden, Max Greenfield, Jack McBrayer, Christian Slater, Cedric the Entertainer, Earthquake, Jon Hamm, Rachel Harris, John Slattery, and the list goes on and on. And most were chosen by Seinfeld personally to appear in his directorial debut.
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“Jerry called me and said, ‘I want to put you in the movie’ … I really thought it was a crank, [but] it turned out to be true,” Earthquake said. “He loved my special on Netflix … and he put me in his movie.”
At the April 30 premiere at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, the cast almost uniformly evoked the word “precise” when describing Seinfeld’s directing style.
“There’s a detailing to Jerry,” Gaffigan said. “Even if you look at the television show, ‘Comedians in Cars,’ it’s just two people talking. The reason it works is because Jerry probably has the endurance to sit in the edit studio longer to make it right.”
“It’s like a sailboat race,” Seinfeld said, describing his own leadership. “You gotta have a captain.”
Greenfield added there was still a very collaborative, inventive nature to the set, which he likened to working on a sitcom.
“They would rewrite the scene [and] come up with new jokes” after shooting it the first time, Greenfield explained. “It was a lot like working on multicam [shows], which I’m very comfortable with, and to get to work with Jerry in a way that I understood was the greatest.”
“Sometimes I would stay on [script], sometimes I would go off. I would kind of go on the moment,” Seinfeld explained.
Co-writer Spike Feresten said that the creative team, which also included Seinfeld, Andy Robin and Barry Marden, wasn’t sure how to even describe the tone of the movie until they were finished with it.
“We were kind of flying blind,” he said. “And where I landed with it was obvious. It was ‘Seinfeld’ in tone … [It was] the same rules we would use to write a ‘Seinfeld’ episode … This is just a ‘Seinfeld’ episode with a much bigger budget. I guess it’s just the way we like to write.”
Sarah Cooper, who plays Poppy Northcutt in the film, said that the sitcom tone helped keep things light during the shoot.
“Instantly [Jerry said], ‘Guys, we’re making a movie about a Pop-Tart, relax.’ He took it in stride,” she recalled. “He put it in perspective. He made everybody relaxed, which I really appreciated.”
“Frosted” streams on Netflix May 3.
