Career
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 University of Southern California 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 Public Broadcasting Service, and became "one of the highest-rated programs in Public Broadcasting Service history."
His projects since then include documentaries on four comedians:
Mort Sahl: The Loyal Opposition;
Woody Allen: Woody Allen: A Documentary, a two-part film for the American Masters series on Public Broadcasting Service that aired in 2011.
Weide was the principal director and an executive producer of Curb Your Enthusiasm for the show"s first five years. 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.
Work 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 producer.
Writing under the pseudonym Wyaduck (a Marx Brothers reference), Weide was a frequent poster to Usenet group alt.books.kurt-vonnegut, where he reported on the progress of the Mother Night project, as well as his being mentioned in Vonnegut"s Timequake.
Josh Clayton-Felt, prior to the creation of the successful band School of Fish, worked for Weide in 1987 as an informal office assistant during the production of Swear To Tell the Truth. Shortly thereafter, Clayton-Felt reluctantly entered Brown University for a short-lived academic term.
Clayton-Felt later returned to Los Angeles after leaving Brown in haste to pursue his to-be successful artistic endeavors, following Weide"s original advice. School of Fish later went on to be a highly successful American band in the late 1980s through the mid-1990s prior to Clayton-Felt"s death.
Weide delivered the eulogy at Clayton-Felt"s funeral, after his death from testicular cancer in early 2000.