Robert B. Weide

Weide was the director and main writer for Mr. Sloane, a 2014 British comedy series.

I have some kind of knack for getting to know or becoming very close with people I've long admired. Kurt Vonnegut and I—it's not an exaggeration to say we were best friends. And I grew up just idolizing him."

Weide then directed Woody Allen: A Documentary, a two-part film for the American Masters series that aired in 2011. The film takes a look at Allen's nearly seven-decade career as a director and comedian. It features interviews with Allen, Diane Keaton, Scarlett Johansson, Martin Scorsese, Chris Rock, Owen Wilson, Larry David, Penelope Cruz, and Leonard Maltin. The New Yorker critic Richard Brody wrote, "It’s a close look at how Allen’s career was shaped, from his Brooklyn youth to his precocious launch as a comedy writer, his rise to local fame as a standup comedian and to national celebrity on television, his move from screenwriter to director of the 'early, funny' films to internationally lionized auteur to pariah and, gradually, back again."

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 principal director and an executive producer of Curb Your Enthusiasm for the show's first five years. He was the recipient of repeated Primetime Emmy Award nominations for his work on the show, and won an Emmy in 2003 for his work as director during its third season.

In 1998, Weide directed the documentary Swear to Tell the Truth, which received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Documentary. Robert De Niro narrated it and it featured interviews with Bruce's ex-wife Honey, mother Sally Marr and former TV host Steve Allen, who had Bruce on his show a few times. The film debuted on HBO.

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 producer.

Weide's next project focused on the career of Mort Sahl. The project was part of the American Masters documentary series, which originally ran on PBS in 1989.

Weide co-wrote W. C. Fields: Straight Up (1986) with Joseph Adamson and Ronald J. Fields. Adamson directed it and Dudley Moore narrated. In an interview with The Los Angeles Times, Weide said, "“The film is 94 minutes long. We had access to all of his feature films, and clips from 1915 on. We have newsreel footage, outtakes, and material never seen before. We also have interviews with people who knew and/or worked with Fields, or have special knowledge of him, including Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Will Fowler, Madge Kennedy, who played in the 1923 stage production of ‘Poppy’ and co-starred in the movie, Leonard Maltin, Ronald J. Fields, propman Harry Caplan and an audio interview with the grown-up Baby LeRoy."

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 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."

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.