Buzz Words

Jerry Seinfeld waxes nostalgic about Bee Movie

by Tami Fertig

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One night, while having dinner with Steven Spielberg, Jerry Seinfeld shared a random thought. "I had come up with a joke," he says during a press conference at the Four Seasons Hotel. "A movie about a bee called Bee Movie. I just had the title." While he never intended for this title to become anything more than a title, Spielberg insisted he take it further. It didn't take much convincing. "You can't imagine what it's like when Steven Spielberg gets excited by something you say," he says. "It's intoxicating."

The focus on bees was only natural. After all, as any fan of Seinfeld's defunct television series knows, he's got much in common with the neat, compulsive, honey-making machines. "I crave organization, and I envy the utopian society they have," he says. "They have a perfectly functioning society. The development of the hexagon is the world's most used shape. Nobody can improve on that."

Of course, nobody's gonna want to see a movie where everything's a-okay. That's where Barry B. Benson — a bee (voiced by Seinfeld) who's just graduated from college — comes into the picture. Barry fears spending the rest of his life making honey in the hive, which, needless to say, is quite a crisis in his world. "If you're a bee, if everything you eat is honey, and everything you do is honey, and you think, 'I don't know if I'm into this honey thing,' that's kind of funny," says Seinfeld.

The role of Barry, with his suspiciously Jewish-sounding parents and resemblance to Dustin Hoffman's Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate (Seinfeld's favorite movie), came easily to Seinfeld. The only minor issue was the fact that at Seinfeld, at 53, is quite a bit more mature than the bee he portrays. "I was a little younger," he says, "so I tried not to do any hacking coughs that reveal my age."

(tami.fertig@citypaper.net)

Bee Movie is now playing at area theaters.