Search Results for: caesar's writers

Another day, another obit. Neil Simon — arguably the most successful playwright of the last century or two — died early this morning in New York. The cause is being given as complications from pneumonia but Mr. Simon had been in failing health for some time…since 2004 when he wrote an update on his most famous play and gave us Oscar and Felix: A New Look at the Odd Couple. It ran briefly at a playhouse in Westwood and he never wrote another play. If he wasn't writing plays, you know he had to be sick.

The man's output was staggering. If you read all the obits, you'll see a lot of different counts as to how many stage plays, how many screenplays, etc. That's how prolific the man was. His byline appeared on countless scripts…and he even "doctored" hit shows without credit, including A Chorus Line. My favorite would be The Odd Couple, of course, but I remember many wonderful times in the theater because of him. I never laughed as hard in my life as I did at a production of The Last of the Red Hot Lovers that starred Jack Weston…and that's not even considered one of Simon's best works.

And if you read all those obits, you don't need me to tell you the details of his extraordinary life. Here are links to ones at Playbill, in the Los Angeles Times, the Hollywood Reporter and the New York Times. All tell the tale of this amazing man who first distinguished himself writing for Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows. And almost all of the obits on the 'net will give you inaccurate lists of the other writers who worked on that TV program.

What none of them can possibly convey is how many productions there have been around the world of Simon plays…how many actors learned and earned being in Simon plays…how many people learned to love live theater at Simon plays. These all will continue for centuries to come.

I had two encounters with Mr. Simon, neither of which will mean a lot to you but they meant a lot to me.  One was after an outta-town tryout of his Broadway-bound play, Chapter Two.  It was down at the Ahmanson and my date and I were exiting the theater after the performance, long after the rest of the audience had departed.  I think she had a problem that necessitated an extra-long stay in the Ladies Room.  Anyway, we're walking out and there's Neil Simon, who at this stage was attending all or most performances, deciding what to change.  As he explained in almost every interview, his plays weren't written.  They were rewritten…again and again in tryouts until he was satisfied.

I saw him there and had to say something to just, you know, "connect."  I said, allegedly to my date but for his ears, "You know, the guy who wrote this might have a career some day."  Knowing I'd said that to get his attention, he stopped, extended his hand for shaking purposes and asked me, "What did you really think of it?"  And I suddenly found myself in one of the scariest moments of my life.

I said — and this was not at all a fib — "If I paid top dollar to see this on Broadway, which I probably will, I'd be happy I'd spent the money."

He said, "Good. Now, tell me something you didn't like about it."

Consider that for a moment. Here's the most successful playwright in the world asking a total stranger — and he didn't even know I was a writer, albeit one way, way down on the food chain from him — to criticize his work. There were hints to his success sprinkled all throughout him asking me that.

Thinking as fast as I could, I said something like, "There were moments here and there where I felt Anita Gillette's character was a little too clever and funny. She's supposed to be aware that she's not as quick-witted as her new husband and now and then, she seemed very quick-witted."

Mr. Simon thought for a second and said, "You're probably right. I don't think I'm going to change it but you're probably right." Then he thanked me, shook hands again and turned to go in a way that I think was intended to say politely that he was done with me and had no interest in a continuing conversation. Okay, fine. I was happy. My date wasn't.

As we turned to go, she said, "You didn't introduce me!" I replied, "I didn't introduce me, either." I heard a snicker and glanced over to see it had come from Simon, who gave me a look of amusement. I kept waiting for our exchange to turn up in something he wrote later but I guess it didn't make the cut.

In my other encounter with him, I was actually introduced. It was in 1996 at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills — an event taped for TV called Caesar's Writers. Sid was there and so were a bevy of men (all men) who'd written for his TV shows and all gone on to great success. Along with The Great Caesar, the dais was Mel Tolkin, Carl Reiner, Aaron Ruben, Larry Gelbart, Mel Brooks, Danny Simon, Sheldon Keller, Gary Belkin and Neil, and it was hosted by a pal of mine, Bob Claster. This was a sold-out-immediately event and I think Bob got me in because I'd persuaded Belkin to participate and because I'd brought as my date, Sid's old sidekick, Howard Morris.

Howie introduced me to everyone and when we got to Neil Simon, it was…well, for me, on a par with meeting Stan Freberg or Jack Kirby or Groucho or anyone else whose work I'd incessantly admired. Nothing particularly quotable was said. It was just important to me and I felt that Mr. Simon knew it was important to me (Howie had introduced me as a writer) and…well, what I remember is a warm feeling that I was standing there for maybe five minutes talking with the guy who wrote some of my favorite things in the world. For a half-second there, I wanted to say but didn't, "Oh, thank you for treating me like I belong on the same planet as you and for not being an asshole. That means a lot to me."

Howie Morris was also my ticket for hanging around with those guys a lot before and a little bit after the event…though Neil hurried out right after, concerned for his brother. In the midst of the on-camera conversation, Danny took sick and walked off the stage. The video was skillfully edited to remove his exit and to call no attention to his sudden disappearance…and it turned out he was okay.

Before the show, I don't think I've ever been in a room with such sharp, witty people — especially Larry Gelbart, who said something brilliant and hilarious with each breath. I said almost nothing…and I couldn't help noticing that Neil Simon said almost nothing. Like me, he just happily played audience for the others.

Comedy writers sometimes don't like to laugh at the quips of others. They don't like admitting that even for a moment, someone thought of something funny that didn't occur to them. Not Neil Simon. He laughed as much as anyone…maybe more than me, even. I didn't say anything because I had absolutely nothing to add. He didn't say anything because he had absolutely nothing to prove. Nothing at all.

Because of a looming deadline, I stand to not have very much blogging time this weekend so I thought I'd repeat an article that appeared here on February 17, 2014. This was not long after the passing of one of television's greatest comic talents, Sid Caesar. What follows got a lot of mail and a lot of links and attention then so maybe you'll enjoy it now. Or maybe you'll do what I might do and just click away and find a website with new content today…

Today, I want to start with two similar anecdotes that one hears in or about Hollywood. Both deal with the not-uncommon situation where someone who is older and accomplished has to audition for someone who is young and perhaps not well-informed about the person who is there to try out for a job.

In one, the older/accomplished person is the great director, Billy Wilder. In it, Wilder has come in to talk to a much younger studio executive about perhaps directing a project. The much younger studio exec says, "Thank you for coming in, Mr. Wilder. I'm afraid I'm not familiar with your work. Could you give me a brief rundown of what you've done?"

To which Mr. Wilder replies, "You first."

In the other, the older/accomplished person is the actress Shelley Winters and the much younger person is a casting director. The casting director asks pretty much the same question of Ms. Winters —

— and Ms. Winters, who has had these auditions before and is sick of them — reaches into an enormous purse she's carrying and hauls out the Academy Award she received for The Diary of Anne Frank and the Academy Award she received for A Patch of Blue. She slams them down on the casting director's desk and says, "That's what I've done!"

I can't say for sure that either of these stories is true but they are widely-told and widely-believed.  I've also heard a version in which it was Wilder who brought his Oscars to the meeting and when asked what he'd done, brought out his for The Apartment, Sunset Boulevard and The Lost Weekend, plus his Irving Thalberg Award.  In any case, that question is asked of veterans too often. Show Business is all about selling yourself and if you're around for any length of time, you will eventually be selling yourself to people who are much younger and don't know who the hell you are. A lot of older folks have a chip of massive proportions on their shoulders over this.

In 1983, I was auditioning voice actors for a cartoon special I'd written and would be voice-directing. In fact, it was my first voice-directing job. I had written all the major roles with specific actors in mind and would have been happy to just cast them without forcing them and a host of others to traipse into a studio in Burbank on a very hot day to audition. But the network insisted I read and record at least three actors, including my first choices, for each part. One of the actors I knew I wanted was Howard Morris so we called him in.

You know Howard Morris. That's because if you come to this weblog, you're a well-read, intelligent human being. Alas, in 1983, Howie was 64 years old and hadn't been appearing on television or in movies with any regularity. He felt he was spending his life auditioning for a stream of folks too young to have seen Your Show of Shows or any of the other fine things he'd done.

I had met Howie before, most recently when I was eleven years old. That day in '83, I was 31 but I probably looked 11 to him. He was, as I would learn, a wonderful, sweet man but he had a temper — a bad one at times. A lot of things pissed him off and a biggie was, as he put it, "auditioning for teenagers." A man of great accomplishments, it drove him crazy that the whole question of whether he worked — whether he got to do what he loved and what paid his bills — was in the hands of children who were too often unaware of those accomplishments.

So when I said to him, "Mr. Morris, it's an honor to have you here," he fixed me with a confrontational stare and tone and said, "Oh, yeah? You have no idea who the fuck I am."

Ah, but we were even: He had no idea who the fuck I was, either. He didn't know he was there to read for a guy who'd written the part with him in mind because I was so very familiar with his work.

He also didn't know he was there to read for a guy with a great memory and an obsession with the entertainment industry, comic books and cartoons included. That has been one of the Secret Weapons of my career. The first time I met Jack Kirby, he was impressed with how much I knew about the comic book field. When I went to work for Sid and Marty Krofft, they too were startled by the history (some would call it trivia) I could come up with about them and the folks with whom they worked. Marty found it especially useful when we were courting guest stars to appear on our shows. One time, he introduced me to Jerry Lewis and said, "Mark here knows every single thing you've ever done." I didn't but I knew enough to more than flatter Jer.

So I told Howie, "I know who the fuck you are. You were on Your Show of Shows with Sid Caesar and then you did Caesar's Hour with him. You were in Finian's Rainbow on Broadway and you directed the pilot for Get Smart and lots of episodes of shows like Hogan's Heroes and The Dick Van Dyke Show. You played Ernest T. Bass on five episodes of The Andy Griffith Show and directed a couple of them, too. You were in The Nutty Professor and you also directed a bunch of movies including Don't Drink the Water, Goin' Coconuts with Donny and Marie, With Six You Get Eggroll with Doris Day and one of my favorites, Who's Minding the Mint? You were the voice of Beetle Bailey on his cartoon series and then you were Jet Screamer on The Jetsons and you were Atom Ant and you were Mr. Peebles, the pet store owner who kept trying to sell Magilla Gorilla and you were the voice of the koala bear in all those Qantas Airlines commercials and you directed most of the McDonaldland commercials and you were the voice of about half the characters in them and can we get on with this audition so I can get you in my show now that I've proven I know who the fuck you are?"

We were friends from that moment on. And he was great on that show and others I used him on. I really loved the guy.

But there was one disadvantage to being around Howie. You had to keep listening to the Shelley Winters anecdote, which he told constantly. I must have heard it from him fifty times. Because he was so mad at having to audition for people who didn't know who the fuck he was.

The last two decades of his life, Howie did not work as much as he wanted to and I suspect that attitude was one of the reasons why. I don't mean the attitude of producers and casting directors who hadn't bothered to familiarize themselves with his résumé. I mean his attitude, as expressed to me when he came in for his audition with me. 95% of the time, that would cause the person with hiring power to think, "Well, this guy would sure be a lot of trouble."

It wasn't just that he was confrontational and occasionally angry. It's that when someone walks in the door clinging to long-ago accomplishments, you wonder if they're capable of turning loose of the past and living in the present. Howie certainly was.  Once he felt he was among friends, he was a pussycat…a very talented pussycat.  Not everyone is.

On one project I worked on for a few days, I found myself writing sketch comedy with a guy who'd been at it since about the time I was born. I started to tell him an idea I had for a skit about two friends and one of them owes the other some money. Before I'd said much more about it than that, he interrupted me and said, "Oh, yeah…the money-owing bit. I did it with George Gobel. I can just write it up."

I knew the routine he was recalling. It was an old burlesque sketch that turned up in a lot of early TV shows and it wasn't at all what I had in mind. But that was all we were going to get out of this guy.  We were not, by the way, writing for George Gobel…or anyone who worked in his style.

There's a difference between bringing experience to a project and bringing a stubborn denial that things change…and should. I know an older writer (meaning: older than me) who had a personal Golden Age in the sixties and seventies writing detective shows like The Name of the Game and Cannon and Barnaby Jones. Every time I run into him, he starts in bitching about how "these damn kids" who are now the producers and show-runners won't hire him to write the cop shows of today.

To him, it's pure Ageism…and I don't doubt there's some of that. There's a lot of Ageism out there. But if he does have a chance to get any work these days, it isn't helped that he so obviously doesn't want to write the current shows. He wants to write Banacek.

The other day when Sid Caesar died, I wrote a piece here about how every time anyone hired him, his natural instinct was to turn whatever he was doing into a sketch from 1957. No one doubted his talent. A lot of producers just doubted he could or would do their show instead of doing his show. Let me give you an amazing example of this. Some of you are going to think I'm making this up…

Sid wrote his autobiography twice. I haven't read the second one but in the first one, which he called Where Have I Been?, you can read the following beginning on page 261 of the original hardcover…

…I was called over to Paramount Studios to meet with two TV producers who had sold ABC a pilot for a new situation-comedy series. I was told they had been associated with Taxi, a series I thought was quite good. Their new show was about a bar and the quaint characters who hung out in it. I was to be one of the quaint characters.

I had read the script, which they sent over in advance, and I didn't like it very much. The role they had in mind for me, in particular, was pure cardboard, strictly one-dimensional. But I saw some promise in it if I could be allowed to add some of my own shtick. So I went over to see the producers.

I expected to be meeting with Jim Brooks or Stan Daniels, two top talents, who, in addition to creating Taxi had previously been involved with The Mary Tyler Moore Show, among others. Instead, I found myself in a room with a couple of twenty-five year olds who seemed to know of me only from a part I had played in the movie Grease in 1977. I soon realized that, like so many of their generation in the industry, their concept of comedy did not go back beyond Gilligan's Island, on which they had been raised as children.

I said, "I have a few ideas to make my part a little more interesting and meaningful." They stared at me coldly and said, "We're perfectly satisfied with the part as we wrote it, Mr. Caesar." I felt my temper rising, but I controlled it. I went through the motions of having an amiable chat with them before I got up and said, "OK. That's it. Thank you. Goodbye." They were startled. Actors don't walk out on the almighty writer-producer when a possible five-year series contract is being dangled in front of them.

But I figured the concept was so poor it probably never would make it to a series anyway. Besides, even if it did, who would want to be associated with such shit?

And that is why Sid Caesar was not a regular cast member on that unsuccessful piece of shit, Cheers.

I mean, you figured it out, right? It wasn't on ABC. It was NBC. And it wasn't a five-year series, it was eleven, during which it was maybe the most acclaimed situation comedy on the air. But the show he walked out on with such disgust was Cheers.  It went on the air about the time his book came out and it stayed on for a long, honored time.

The producers he met with were almost certainly Glen and Les Charles, who were not twenty-five years old. Glen was 39 and Les was 33. (When Sid Caesar started on Your Show of Shows, he was 28 and Mel Brooks was 24.) By this point, the Charles Brothers had not only produced Taxi — a show he and most of the country thought was "quite good" — but they were also writers for The Bob Newhart Show, the one where Bob played a psychologist. That was a rather fine show, too.

Giving Sid the benefit of every doubt, maybe the pilot script he'd read wasn't as wonderful as the eventual series. The role in question was reportedly Coach and it may at that stage have been somewhat different from what Nicholas Colasanto wound up playing.

Still, Caesar had been around TV long enough to know that scripts — especially pilot scripts — get rewritten and rewritten and rewritten. He'd done the Broadway show Little Me, which Neil Simon rewrote extensively throughout rehearsals and tryouts. Things change as you cast roles and get into rehearsals and the project takes shape. That's why when you consider signing on for a project, you take into account the reputation and talents of the folks you'll be working with. You trust in their ability to fix that which needs to be fixed…especially when they've just done a successful show you thought was "quite good."

(I've only met the Charles Brothers once, by the way, and don't really know them. But they're very bright, nice guys and I'll bet you they knew exactly who Sid Caesar was. Just as I'll bet they didn't learn comedy from watching only Gilligan's Island.)

The tragedy, of course, isn't just that Sid walked out on one very popular, highly-honored series. It's that for the rest of his career, any time some producer said, "Hey, why don't we get Sid Caesar for this role?," someone probably told him about the way Sid had treated the Charles Brothers. Which meant that the producer said, "Well, let's see who else might be available…"  The anecdote not only suggested he'd be difficult to work with but also that he was hopelessly out of touch with what current audiences would like.

And had he been on Cheers, a couple of new generations would have known him and that would surely have translated into offers for other TV shows and for movies. Look at what being known from being on a current series, even as a guest star, has done for Betty White and Jerry Stiller and Shelley Berman and even Sid's old cohorts, Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. This is on top of the millions and millions of dollars and probable Emmy Award(s) Sid would have had from being on Cheers instead of sitting home, stewing about how there was no place for him on television.

None of this is to suggest that there isn't a lot of Ageism in the entertainment industry…or that there aren't plenty of people in power who don't know a whole lot about the history of their business. But there are know-nothing bosses everywhere in every walk of life. If you try to avoid them all, you'll never get a job…and sometimes, you're wrong about them the way Sid was wrong about the guys who had that show set in a bar.

The world keeps turning and you have two choices: You can turn with it or you can spend your time trying to shove it back in the other direction. Since no one has ever succeeded at that yet, I don't know why people — especially people who could be as brilliant as Sid Caesar — keep trying. Besides, it's so much fun to hop on and go along for the ride, especially when the alternative is being left behind.

One of the greatest variety shows of all time — some would say the greatest — was Your Show of Shows starring Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner and Howard Morris. And a lot of them would tell you that one of the funniest sketches on Your Show of Shows was the one about the German general…and they'd be wrong.

Not that it wasn't funny. It was hilarious. It just wasn't on Your Show of Shows, despite its inclusion on that "best of" film they released in 1973, Ten From Your Show of Shows. That series was replaced in 1954 by a new series called Caesar's Hour and the German general sketch was performed on that show. In fact, it was on the first episode of Caesar's Hour in September of 1954. Here it is as performed there by Sid Caesar and Howard Morris…

Funny, right? Well, any student of comedy might learn something from watching this next version of the sketch, performed December 3, 1961 on The Ed Sullivan Show by Mr. Caesar and an actor I can't identify. The gent, as you'll see, does a decent job but he's not Howie Morris…

I knew Howie pretty well and I remember him being pretty angry that Sid had done this but I never saw the Sullivan performance until recently. I don't recall if he was asked or not. This was about the time Howie moved out to Hollywood and made the movie Boys' Night Out with Kim Novak and began directing TV shows and doing cartoon voices. So he may not have been in New York when Sid wanted to do the sketch on Ed's show.

Nevertheless, decades later he was still angry that Sid did a sketch that, Howie claimed, the two of them largely wrote together…and which was obviously staged by having the new actor carefully study a kinescope of the original. It sure looked like they also showed it to the set designer for the Sullivan program and probably the wardrobe person and the director…and they even use the same music. Howie said he never was paid for it and was pretty sure the official writers of Caesar's Hour weren't paid either.

The second version is funny too but there's just something missing in it…and it's not just Howie Morris, though that's a large part of it. And does anyone have any idea who his replacement was? The guy looks familiar.

In the spirit of "Better late than never," I just realized that I never shared this great message I received from Frank Buxton upon the passing of Robin Williams. Frank worked with Robin on Mork & Mindy and knows as much about comedy as anyone I've ever met…

As always, thanks for your unique perspective on things, in this case Robin Williams.

One thing that hasn't been talked about much is that Robin pretty much brought improv into the main stream, a contribution that has led to improv groups, improv clubs and improv training that thrive today around the world. There was precedent for creating-on-the-fly, of course; Sid Caesar and his cohorts come to mind. In fact, I used to watch Caesar's rehearsals from the darkness of the balcony in New York and the performers really were extraordinarily inventive.

But prior to Mork and Mindy, sitcoms were pretty much word-for-word as written. There was always room for improvement as we filmed but very little of it was contributed by the performers. That's why there were (and are) writers. The legend that the writers on Mork and Mindy once handed in a script with blank pages titled "Robin does his thing" is really apocryphal, although it may have been done as an inside joke. When directing Robin and Jonathan I was always prepared to let them improvise but made sure that we eventually got back on script so that we'd have something to show on TV. I am grateful for my experiences with Robin (and Jonathan) and indebted to them for making it possible for us to be creative as improvisers.

If anything comes of the tragedy of Robin's death I hope that it's a heightened awareness of mental health issues. Robin's demons were evident, even back in the early days, and I am not only saddened by his loss but also by the fact that nothing seemed to help him when he was in the depths. There's got to be more than just medication and therapy but what that is I don't know. I hope someone finds out.

I don't recall if Frank said this to me but I was always under the impression that the bulk of Mr. Williams' improvisations on that series were of great amusement to the studio audience but went unheard by the home audience after the show was edited.

On a three-camera film show like that, not only do the actors rehearse the lines they'll speak but they rehearse where they'll be standing when they say them, and the camerapeople rehearse pointing the cameras at them when they're in their proper places. There's a limit to how much the performers can stray and still have the boom mikes hear them and the cameras frame the shot correctly. There's also a limit to how much the star can ad-lib and reasonably expect the other actors to ad-lib along with him and get to the story points that need to be said.

Most directors would probably say that improvisation can be a boon during rehearsals but a problem during the final filming. A director's number one responsibility on the set — the one most likely to get him fired if he fails at it — is to get all the necessary shots. He's in trouble if they get into editing and realize they don't have a vital line or close-up. Frank and another friend of mine, Howard Storm, each directed a lot of Mork & Mindy episodes. I'll bet they both made sure on the set that they got at least one good take of every line in the script.

Friday night, a packed house at the Silent Movie Theater saw a (mostly) non-silent movie — the 1973 compilation Ten From Your Show of Shows, which was shown in tribute to Sid Caesar. It was preceded by an interview. Our pal Kliph Nesteroff did a splendid job conversing with Mel Brooks, who spoke for almost an hour, much of it about his friend and one-time employer, Sid. It was a pretty funny conversation and I was wrong: He did not tell the story about Sid and the cab driver. He did, however, make fun of Kliph's pants.

Mel began by telling the audience, "I wish it was a pleasure to be here," then he sure proceeded to act like it was, telling how he met Sid, heaping praise on the man. He told a story he told when he was on with Conan O'Brien recently — one I'd never heard before and I've heard about a hundred Mel Brooks interviews, several of them long and in person. During the run of either Your Show of Shows or Caesar's Hour, Mel spent some time in Hollywood working on screenplays at Columbia. He has no known screen credits from that period but apparently he was out here for a while.

In this anecdote, he suggests to an exec that Sid Caesar, instead of making TV shows that are aired once and never seen again, should be making movies…written by Mel Brooks. Sid, at this point, is making about $5000 a week in television. The exec agrees that Mr. Caesar would make a terrific movie star and tells Mel the studio will meet or beat what Sid makes in TV. Mel rushes back to New York and tells Sid, pointing out how disposable it is to work in live television. Guys like Harold Lloyd and Danny Kaye will never be forgotten, he says, because their work is being preserved on film.

Sid is interested and for a brief time, it looks like he's going to forsake television for movies…but then the network offers to quadruple or quintuple his salary and in television, he stays. A great missed opportunity, thinks Mel.

It was a perfect story to tell in that setting Friday night. Mel didn't make this point but it's why he's there to introduce a bunch of grainy kinescopes of selected moments from Your Show of Shows instead of a great Sid Caesar movie from the fifties. I have the feeling there's more to the story than that but it's still a good story.

And it led into a great bunch of grainy kinescopes of selected moments from Your Show of Shows. The audience laughed a lot — less so at the closing take-off on This Is Your Life than at some of the less-familiar moments. All we could all think of was: Boy, those people — the writers and other cast members in addition to Sid — were sure good. And isn't it a shame there's no one today doing sketch comedy in quite that tradition?

The presentation was by the Cinefamily group that runs that venerated theater. There are some other great programs coming up, including another Kliph is hosting. I'll tell you about it shortly.

Today, I want to start with two similar anecdotes that one hears in or about Hollywood. Both deal with the not-uncommon situation where someone who is older and accomplished has to audition for someone who is young and perhaps not well-informed about the person who is there to try out for a job.

In one, the older/accomplished person is the great director, Billy Wilder. In it, Wilder has come in to talk to a much younger studio executive about perhaps directing a project. The much younger studio exec says, "Thank you for coming in, Mr. Wilder. I'm afraid I'm not familiar with your work. Could you give me a brief rundown of what you've done?"

To which Mr. Wilder replies, "You first."

In the other, the older/accomplished person is the actress Shelley Winters and the much younger person is a casting director. The casting director asks pretty much the same question of Ms. Winters —

— and Ms. Winters, who has had these auditions before and is sick of them — reaches into an enormous purse she's carrying and hauls out the Academy Award she received for The Diary of Anne Frank and the Academy Award she received for A Patch of Blue. She slams them down on the casting director's desk and says, "That's what I've done!"

I can't say for sure that either of these stories is true but they are widely-told and widely-believed.  I've also heard a version in which it was Wilder who brought his Oscars to the meeting and when asked what he'd done, brought out his for The Apartment, Sunset Boulevard and The Lost Weekend, plus his Irving Thalberg Award.  In any case, that question is asked of veterans too often. Show Business is all about selling yourself and if you're around for any length of time, you will eventually be selling yourself to people who are much younger and don't know who the hell you are. A lot of older folks have a chip of massive proportions on their shoulders over this.

In 1983, I was auditioning voice actors for a cartoon special I'd written and would be voice-directing. In fact, it was my first voice-directing job. I had written all the major roles with specific actors in mind and would have been happy to just cast them without forcing them and a host of others to traipse into a studio in Burbank on a very hot day to audition. But the network insisted I read and record at least three actors, including my first choices, for each part. One of the actors I knew I wanted was Howard Morris so we called him in.

You know Howard Morris. That's because if you come to this weblog, you're a well-read, intelligent human being. Alas, in 1983, Howie was 64 years old and hadn't been appearing on television or in movies with any regularity. He felt he was spending his life auditioning for a stream of folks too young to have seen Your Show of Shows or any of the other fine things he'd done.

I had met Howie before, most recently when I was eleven years old. That day in '83, I was 31 but I probably looked 11 to him. He was, as I would learn, a wonderful, sweet man but he had a temper — a bad one at times. A lot of things pissed him off and a biggie was, as he put it, "auditioning for teenagers." A man of great accomplishments, it drove him crazy that the whole question of whether he worked — whether he got to do what he loved and what paid his bills — was in the hands of children who were too often unaware of those accomplishments.

So when I said to him, "Mr. Morris, it's an honor to have you here," he fixed me with a confrontational stare and tone and said, "Oh, yeah? You have no idea who the fuck I am."

Ah, but we were even: He had no idea who the fuck I was, either. He didn't know he was there to read for a guy who'd written the part with him in mind because I was so very familiar with his work.

He also didn't know he was there to read for a guy with a great memory and an obsession with the entertainment industry, comic books and cartoons included. That has been one of the Secret Weapons of my career. The first time I met Jack Kirby, he was impressed with how much I knew about the comic book field. When I went to work for Sid and Marty Krofft, they too were startled by the history (some would call it trivia) I could come up with about them and the folks with whom they worked. Marty found it especially useful when we were courting guest stars to appear on our shows. One time, he introduced me to Jerry Lewis and said, "Mark here knows every single thing you've ever done." I didn't but I knew enough to more than flatter Jer.

So I told Howie, "I know who the fuck you are. You were on Your Show of Shows with Sid Caesar and then you did Caesar's Hour with him. You were in Finian's Rainbow on Broadway and you directed the pilot for Get Smart and lots of episodes of shows like Hogan's Heroes and The Dick Van Dyke Show. You played Ernest T. Bass on five episodes of The Andy Griffith Show and directed a couple of them, too. You were in The Nutty Professor and you also directed a bunch of movies including Don't Drink the Water, Goin' Coconuts with Donny and Marie, With Six You Get Eggroll with Doris Day and one of my favorites, Who's Minding the Mint? You were the voice of Beetle Bailey on his cartoon series and then you were Jet Screamer on The Jetsons and you were Atom Ant and you were Mr. Peebles, the pet store owner who kept trying to sell Magilla Gorilla and you were the voice of the koala bear in all those Qantas Airlines commercials and you directed most of the McDonaldland commercials and you were the voice of about half the characters in them and can we get on with this audition so I can get you in my show now that I've proven I know who the fuck you are?"

We were friends from that moment on. And he was great on that show and others I used him on. I really loved the guy.

But there was one disadvantage to being around Howie. You had to keep listening to the Shelley Winters anecdote, which he told constantly. I must have heard it from him fifty times. Because he was so mad at having to audition for people who didn't know who the fuck he was.

The last two decades of his life, Howie did not work as much as he wanted to and I suspect that attitude was one of the reasons why. I don't mean the attitude of producers and casting directors who hadn't bothered to familiarize themselves with his résumé. I mean his attitude, as expressed to me when he came in for his audition with me. 95% of the time, that would cause the person with hiring power to think, "Well, this guy would sure be a lot of trouble."

It wasn't just that he was confrontational and occasionally angry. It's that when someone walks in the door clinging to long-ago accomplishments, you wonder if they're capable of turning loose of the past and living in the present. Howie certainly was.  Once he felt he was among friends, he was a pussycat…a very talented pussycat.  Not everyone is.

On one project I worked on for a few days, I found myself writing sketch comedy with a guy who'd been at it since about the time I was born. I started to tell him an idea I had for a skit about two friends and one of them owes the other some money. Before I'd said much more about it than that, he interrupted me and said, "Oh, yeah…the money-owing bit. I did it with George Gobel. I can just write it up."

I knew the routine he was recalling. It was an old burlesque sketch that turned up in a lot of early TV shows and it wasn't at all what I had in mind. But that was all we were going to get out of this guy.  We were not, by the way, writing for George Gobel…or anyone who worked in his style.

There's a difference between bringing experience to a project and bringing a stubborn denial that things change…and should. I know an older writer (meaning: older than me) who had a personal Golden Age in the sixties and seventies writing detective shows like The Name of the Game and Cannon and Barnaby Jones. Every time I run into him, he starts in bitching about how "these damn kids" who are now the producers and show-runners won't hire him to write the cop shows of today.

To him, it's pure Ageism…and I don't doubt there's some of that. There's a lot of Ageism out there. But if he does have a chance to get any work these days, it isn't helped that he so obviously doesn't want to write the current shows. He wants to write Banacek.

The other day when Sid Caesar died, I wrote a piece here about how every time anyone hired him, his natural instinct was to turn whatever he was doing into a sketch from 1957. No one doubted his talent. A lot of producers just doubted he could or would do their show instead of doing his show. Let me give you an amazing example of this. Some of you are going to think I'm making this up…

Sid wrote his autobiography twice. I haven't read the second one but in the first one, which he called Where Have I Been?, you can read the following beginning on page 261 of the original hardcover…

…I was called over to Paramount Studios to meet with two TV producers who had sold ABC a pilot for a new situation-comedy series. I was told they had been associated with Taxi, a series I thought was quite good. Their new show was about a bar and the quaint characters who hung out in it. I was to be one of the quaint characters.

I had read the script, which they sent over in advance, and I didn't like it very much. The role they had in mind for me, in particular, was pure cardboard, strictly one-dimensional. But I saw some promise in it if I could be allowed to add some of my own shtick. So I went over to see the producers.

I expected to be meeting with Jim Brooks or Stan Daniels, two top talents, who, in addition to creating Taxi had previously been involved with The Mary Tyler Moore Show, among others. Instead, I found myself in a room with a couple of twenty-five year olds who seemed to know of me only from a part I had played in the movie Grease in 1977. I soon realized that, like so many of their generation in the industry, their concept of comedy did not go back beyond Gilligan's Island, on which they had been raised as children.

I said, "I have a few ideas to make my part a little more interesting and meaningful." They stared at me coldly and said, "We're perfectly satisfied with the part as we wrote it, Mr. Caesar." I felt my temper rising, but I controlled it. I went through the motions of having an amiable chat with them before I got up and said, "OK. That's it. Thank you. Goodbye." They were startled. Actors don't walk out on the almighty writer-producer when a possible five-year series contract is being dangled in front of them.

But I figured the concept was so poor it probably never would make it to a series anyway. Besides, even if it did, who would want to be associated with such shit?

And that is why Sid Caesar was not a regular cast member on that unsuccessful piece of shit, Cheers.

I mean, you figured it out, right? It wasn't on ABC. It was NBC. And it wasn't a five-year series, it was eleven, during which it was maybe the most acclaimed situation comedy on the air. But the show he walked out on with such disgust was Cheers.  It went on the air about the time his book came out and it stayed on for a long, honored time.

The producers he met with were almost certainly Glen and Les Charles, who were not twenty-five years old. Glen was 39 and Les was 33. (When Sid Caesar started on Your Show of Shows, he was 28 and Mel Brooks was 24.) By this point, the Charles Brothers had not only produced Taxi — a show he and most of the country thought was "quite good" — but they were also writers for The Bob Newhart Show, the one where Bob played a psychologist. That was a rather fine show, too.

Giving Sid the benefit of every doubt, maybe the pilot script he'd read wasn't as wonderful as the eventual series. The role in question was reportedly Coach and it may at that stage have been somewhat different from what Nicholas Colasanto wound up playing.

Still, Caesar had been around TV long enough to know that scripts — especially pilot scripts — get rewritten and rewritten and rewritten. He'd done the Broadway show Little Me, which Neil Simon rewrote extensively throughout rehearsals and tryouts. Things change as you cast roles and get into rehearsals and the project takes shape. That's why when you consider signing on for a project, you take into account the reputation and talents of the folks you'll be working with. You trust in their ability to fix that which needs to be fixed…especially when they've just done a successful show you thought was "quite good."

(I've only met the Charles Brothers once, by the way, and don't really know them. But they're very bright, nice guys and I'll bet you they knew exactly who Sid Caesar was. Just as I'll bet they didn't learn comedy from watching only Gilligan's Island.)

The tragedy, of course, isn't just that Sid walked out on one very popular, highly-honored series. It's that for the rest of his career, any time some producer said, "Hey, why don't we get Sid Caesar for this role?," someone probably told him about the way Sid had treated the Charles Brothers. Which meant that the producer said, "Well, let's see who else might be available…"  The anecdote not only suggested he'd be difficult to work with but also that he was hopelessly out of touch with what current audiences would like.

And had he been on Cheers, a couple of new generations would have known him and that would surely have translated into offers for other TV shows and for movies. Look at what being known from being on a current series, even as a guest star, has done for Betty White and Jerry Stiller and Shelley Berman and even Sid's old cohorts, Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. This is on top of the millions and millions of dollars and probable Emmy Award(s) Sid would have had from being on Cheers instead of sitting home, stewing about how there was no place for him on television.

None of this is to suggest that there isn't a lot of Ageism in the entertainment industry…or that there aren't plenty of people in power who don't know a whole lot about the history of their business. But there are know-nothing bosses everywhere in every walk of life. If you try to avoid them all, you'll never get a job…and sometimes, you're wrong about them the way Sid was wrong about the guys who had that show set in a bar.

The world keeps turning and you have two choices: You can turn with it or you can spend your time trying to shove it back in the other direction. Since no one has ever succeeded at that yet, I don't know why people — especially people who could be as brilliant as Sid Caesar — keep trying. Besides, it's so much fun to hop on and go along for the ride, especially when the alternative is being left behind.

Yesterday marked sixty years since the debut of the legendary Your Show of Shows, the legendary TV program starring Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Howard Morris and Carl Reiner, among others. It was a live show on Saturday nights which, contrary to the impression most folks have of it, was not ninety minutes of comedy sketches featuring those four folks. It was a variety show with dance numbers and music — including frequent helpings of ballet, classical and even opera — and other elements, including superb comedy by Caesar and Company. It ran on Saturday nights from February 25, 1950 until June 5, 1954 and then, like Germany after the war, they decided to break it up.

Ms. Coca went off to do her own series. Its producer, Max Liebman, went off to produce a series of spectaculars. And the comedy core of the show (sans Coca) refashioned itself as a new series called Caesar's Hour. Caesar's Hour was on for three more years and then Sid and some of the same crew did a series of intermittent specials.

Much has been made of the legendary writing staff of the various Sid Caesar shows which included, at various times, Mel Brooks, Lucille Kallen, Mel Tolkin, Aaron Ruben, Mike Stewart, Larry Gelbart, Danny Simon, Neil Simon, Selma Diamond, Sheldon Keller, Gary Belkin and many others. Carl Reiner was also a writer, though he does not appear to have ever received that credit. It's a little sore spot with some of those folks, and with TV historians, that so many confuse who worked on what.

At the moment (I'm sure it will be changed shortly) the Wikipedia page for Your Show of Shows has the following paragraph up…

Writers for the show included Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Danny Simon, Larry Gelbart, Mel Tolkin, and Carl Reiner who, though a cast member, always sat in with the writers. A common misconception is that Woody Allen wrote for Your Show of Shows; he in fact wrote for its successor program, Caesar's Hour, which ran from 1954 to 1957. Caesar, Coca, and Liebman had worked on The Admiral Broadway Revue from January to June 1949.

Almost right. As he told people over and over and over again, Larry Gelbart never worked on Your Show of Shows. Larry was hired on Caesar's Hour and he later wrote some of Sid's subsequent specials. He said this explicitly many times and sometimes got kinda steamed about having to say it. If you want to do a Google search on the subject, you'll find a dozen places where Larry insisted he never worked on Your Show of Shows. You'll also find ten dozen articles which say Larry Gelbart was one of the writers on Your Show of Shows and even won a couple of Emmys for it.

Over on this page for the wonderful Archive of American Television, you can view lengthy, fascinating oral histories of several key folks who worked on the Caesar shows (including Mr. Caesar, himself) and I recommend spending some time there. The interviews are fascinating and if you do watch them, you'll hear several of the interviewees, including Larry Gelbart, make the point that Larry Gelbart never worked on Your Show of Shows. The interviews are right next to a history of Your Show of Shows that someone took from Wikipedia. It includes the paragraph above that says that Larry Gelbart wrote for Your Show of Shows.

I believe, by the way, that the paragraph is also wrong about Woody Allen working on Caesar's Hour. Allen has said on several occasions that he only worked for Caesar on a couple of the later specials, collaborating usually with Gelbart. In his online interview, Gelbart says the same thing.

Could somebody who knows Wikipedia better than I do please go fix this? I know how to change a few words over there but I'm lost as to how to insert footnotes and supporting evidence. Change the bit about Gelbart and footnote it with his online interview for the Archive of American Television. Change the line about Allen and footnote it with page 111 of Eric Lax's biography, Woody Allen. It may be necessary to change some of the linked pages for Gelbart, Allen, Caesar's Hour and a few others, as well. And don't do it for me. Do it for Larry. This kind of thing really pissed him off.