Robert B. Weide

Robert B. Weide (born June 20, 1959) is an American screenwriter, producer, and director, perhaps best known for his work on documentaries and Curb Your Enthusiasm. 2Career Weide began working with film at an early job inspecting 16mm educational films at the Fullerton Public Library in Orange County, California. In 1978, while taking film production courses at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, California, Weide decided to produce a documentary film on the Marx Brothers, inspired by his love of their work. Undeterred about his career plans by repeated rejections of his applications to the USC School of Cinema-Television, he worked on the project on his own time, and with help from Charles H. Joffe got the rights to clips necessary to make the film. The Marx Brothers in a Nutshell was broadcast in 1982 on PBS, and became "one of the highest-rated programs in PBS history."His projects since then include documentaries on four comedians: W. C. Fields: Straight Up, which won a 1986 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Informational Series; Mort Sahl: The Loyal Opposition; Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth, a 1998 documentary which won a Creative Arts Emmy and was nominated for an Oscar; Woody Allen: Woody Allen: A Documentary, a two-part film for the American Masters series on PBS that aired in 2011.Weide was the principal director and an executive producer of Curb Your Enthusiasm for the show's first five years. He was the recipient of repeated Emmy nominations for his work on the show, and won an Emmy in 2003 for his work as director during its third season.Weide's first feature film as director, How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, was released in October 2008, to generally unfavorable reviews, though it topped the United Kingdom's box office during its opening weekend.Weide was the director and main writer for Mr. Sloane, a 2014 British comedy series. 3Work with Kurt Vonnegut Weide wrote and produced the 1996 film adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night. With Vonnegut's support, Weide chronicled him on film starting in 1988 and has obtained footage of him from 16mm home movies dating back to 1925; a documentary is in the works. Weide was also working on a film adaptation of The Sirens of Titan until the film rights were sold to another produce