Even Jerry Seinfeld Had to Be Talked Into the Pop-Tart Movie

“It was COBID,” says Jerry Seinfeld. “I had nothing to do.”

And that’s why you’re getting a movie about Pop-Tarts, comedy fans. Even Seinfeld, a guy who’s built a career kvetching about all things breakfast, didn’t dream that Pop-Tarts would be an amazing subject for a feature film. “I got talked into it,” he told GQ. “It wasn’t my idea.” 

Well, there’s a ringing endorsement. Seinfeld takes it a step further, declaring that despite directing and starring in a movie about breakfast pastries, doing so meant participating in a dying industry. Movie people “don’t have any idea that the movie business is over,” he says. “They have no idea.”

He’s not telling the people putting up the cash but movies as he knew them are gone for good. “Film doesn’t occupy the pinnacle in the social, cultural hierarchy that it did for most of our lives,” he says. “When a movie came out, if it was good, we all went to see it. We all discussed it. We quoted lines and scenes we liked. Now we’re walking through a fire hose of water, just trying to see.”

Even though movies are dying, he says, the people who make them are as committed to their jobs as ever. “These movie people are unbelievable. They’re insane. Like we had a prop master, Trish Gallaher Glenn. She had a room and it was floor-to-ceiling toys and bikes and clothes, everything from that era. Everybody does their job 150%. It is weird.”

All of Jerry’s show-biz friends are befuddled: What’s going on? How do you do this? What are we supposed to do now? Seinfeld doesn’t know what all of the movie people are going to do either. But as for Jerry, “I have my own thing, which is more valuable than it’s ever been,” he says. “Stand-up is like you’re a cabinetmaker, and everybody needs a guy who’s good with wood.”

How exactly is telling jokes in front of a brick wall like crafting a hunk of birch into a custom mission hutch? “There’s trees everywhere, but to make a nice table, it’s not so easy,” he says. “So the metaphor is that if you have good craft and craftsmanship, you’re kind of impervious to the whims of the industry. Audiences are now flocking to stand-up because it’s something you can’t fake. It’s like platform diving. You could say you’re a platform diver, but in two seconds we can see if you are or you aren’t. That’s what people like about stand-up. They can trust it. Everything else is fake.”

And that “everything” appears to include Pop-Tart movies.