A little while ago, Breitbart News tweeted…

Matthew McConaughey, who delivered a passionate plea for new gun control legislation in an address at the White House briefing room on Tuesday, has used 19 guns in 11 movies over 25 years, according to the Internet Movie Firearms Database.

Shortly after that, Lynda Carter — yes, the lady who played Wonder Woman — tweeted…

Yes, and I flew an invisible plane on screen but still support abiding by the laws of air traffic (and physics). Do people really not understand reality vs. fiction?

A couple of different folks, starting with Scott Marinoff, have suggested I alert you that the full video record of the Watergate Hearings can be enjoyed (that may not be the right word) at this link. I watched them at the time with way too much fascination.

I couldn't help but thinking as I watched that if I were a Republican serving on that committee, I would have had three conflicting thoughts throughout…

• Nixon and his cronies definitely did some very unethical and illegal things, many of which were also pretty damned foolish…
• If a Democratic administration had done these things, I would be eager to use this opportunity to oust many of them from office and send some of them to prison but…
• A lot of voters in my district want Nixon to remain in office, even if he is a crook. Some love him. Some don't but they don't want the Democrats to have a "win." So I have to defend him at all costs or I will have a primary challenger who will seriously threaten my chances of getting re-elected or ever having a role in my party. I could also lose vital financial support from a lot of wealthy donors who love the guy.

Eventually, the steady drip-drip-drip of revelations of wrongdoing budged Nixon's poll numbers with his supporters…and I like to think that if I were one of those G.O.P. Congressfolks who finally switched and voted against Nixon, it would have been because he was guilty and not just because his popularity was dropping and I felt it was safe to do the right thing.

I have no idea if that will happen this year. Maybe it's no longer possible. All I know is I'm not going to pay as much attention to these hearings as I did to the Watergate ones. I didn't have better things to do with my life in 1973 but I'd like to think I do now.

This is for my friend Shelly Goldstein. Shelly, here is what I'm sure you will decide is your all-time favorite video clip ever. And as you may remember, I have an entire suit made out of the same material as the boy singers' pants. This is, as you might imagine, from The Red Skelton Show…

Brian Dreger sends me a lot of interesting questions. Here's one…

I've been meaning to ask this for quite some time, and I apologize if it is rude or unprofessional, or something "that is just not done!"

When you're writing things that prevent you from blogging because of a looming deadline, is there some reason why you never — after the fact — mention what it is you've been working on? Is it contractually not allowed? Or for writers is it considered a "jinx move" that might put "the whammy" on the project? Just curious…

I think I have mentioned what I was working on occasionally but I don't do it often. There are a few reasons and the first one that comes to mind is that I think the Internet has too much self-promotion on it with people trying to sell you their current projects. If I have genuine news about something coming out and people are asking me about it, I'll address it here. But really, I like blogging better when I don't feel it's heavily-linked to my current income. I like this to be a place where I get away from that.

Also, writing is for me a very solitary experience and I like to keep it that way. I rarely discuss the content of what I'm writing with friends because I really don't want their input. If I do, I ask for it…but I rarely ask for it.

And I guess the main thing is that a lot of things I write — including some for which I am paid — never come out. I wrote a spec TV pilot which has been optioned twice now and may get a third "buy"…but I don't want to spend the rest of my life answering questions about what's up with it and what happened with it. When it's not an active project for me, I put it out of my mind and I don't want others putting it back in there.

And of course, I have a story. When do I not have a story?

Back in the seventies, a syndicated comic strip artist asked me to write gags for a new newspaper strip he wanted to do. This was in addition to the one he already had running in newspapers across the land. I wrote a batch and he decided I should not only be the sole writer of this new strip he'd conceived but also have my name on it. Well, that was nice. I wrote and he and his assistant drew about eight weeks of it and he sent those weeks to his syndicate, where it got a highly favorable response.

Note that I did not say they agreed to syndicate it. I just said that it got a highly favorable response. They loved the premise and they loved the name…but apparently not enough to immediately draw up a contract.

I was relatively new at the writing game and I made what turned out to be a mistake. I told my father about it and showed him the eight weeks. Perhaps in your life you have had a moment where a parent or someone else close to you way overreacted positively to something you did. When I was about eight, I could do a couple of celebrity impressions that probably weren't even good for a kid that age but my Aunt Dot thought I was ready for The Ed Sullivan Show and inevitable stardom.

Anyway, my father thought the eight weeks of this strip were genius, brilliant, fabulous…insert the synonym of your choice. Any day now, he was sure, newspapers would be axing Charlie Brown and that mutt of his to make room for our new strip, and my father could see my name (our name) every time he opened the L.A. Times.

For at least six months, he asked me every day if I had any news on the strip's certain sale and success. The truth was that the syndicate waffled and balked and at one point, a guy there who'd said "This is perfect just the way it is" sent us a passel of notes, asking us to redo the eight weeks and take out this character and change that character and add a new kind of character.

They wanted to change the whole premise (i.e., the premise they'd loved) and finally, they said the name of the strip — the one they'd loved — "has to go." And there was still no indication that they were serious about actually trying to sell it to client newspapers.

By that time, the cartoonist had decided he really didn't need the hassles of a second strip; not even if his assistant and I did 90% of the work on it. I had plenty of other things to do then so we jointly decided to just drop the project…and no, I will not run any samples here nor I will I divulge the name of the cartoonist. (But it was not Jim Davis. This was more than a decade before I met Jim.)

In the writing game, you have to do that all the time. You work on a lot of different projects. Some go forward, some don't…and sometimes, the ones that don't will disappear for reasons that have nothing to do with the merits of the material. An amazing number of projects vanish because there's some shakeup in a company's hierarchy and the new folks in charge reflexively don't want to go where their predecessors were heading.

You have to just file that one away and work on one of the others you have on your plate. I generally don't find that difficult to do…

…but with that proposed newspaper strip, it was tough. My father kept asking me about it and asking me about it and asking me about it…and I don't mean for weeks. I mean for years. No matter what else I accomplished, no matter how busy I got, he kept telling me, "You've gotta take that strip and send it around to newspapers. I'm sure they'd all start bidding for it!"

My father was a very nice man without a speck of malice, especially towards me. He was giving me what he thought was good advice…and he had his heart set on opening the paper every morning and being reassured that his kid had a job. But he just wouldn't listen to me explaining I was no longer interested in it…or that I didn't own the strip and the guy who did didn't want to pursue it any longer.

I never — well, rarely — made that mistake again. When I teamed up with Dennis Palumbo and we began selling scripts and ideas to television, our first few sales did not get made. We got paid but our scripts were not produced. I didn't tell my parents I was writing for TV until I could also tell them that a show I worked on, which would have my name in the credits, was on TV the following Wednesday. And by a fluke of timing, Dennis and I would get getting our second screen credit on a show that aired the day after. My father was real happy that week.

What I was writing the last few days here which distracted me from blogging was an assignment that may never go the distance. We all work on things like that. I have a friend who has made a very good living writing screenplays for which he is paid handsomely but which, for one reason or another, never get in front of a camera. I think he's done at least twelve of them. He doesn't tell people about them because he doesn't want people to keep asking him about each of them…or thinking he's a failure because for reasons that had nothing to do with the quality of what he wrote, they didn't get made. I think that's a very wise way to operate.

From the musical Sunset Boulevard, Glenn Close performs "With One Look." I saw this show twice — once in L.A. and then a few months later in New York. I wasn't fond of the show itself — nor am I of the movie on which it was based — but her performance gave you chills…of the good kind…

Hello. Still working hard on a script but I should be back to normal posting in the next day or three.

The House's Jan. 6 hearings commence Thursday night and I'm sure glad we now have an Internet. When Watergate occurred back in the Pleistocene Era, we pretty much had to be parked in front of our TV sets as they were transpiring if we wanted to watch…and of course, you could watch for a very long time when nothing was happening, or at least nothing of great interest. For these hearings, we can watch when we want to — on our computers if not on our TV sets. Or we can not watch and just let someone cut out all the procedural fluff and isolate the highlights. That's how I'll most likely watch whatever I watch.

42 days until Comic-Con commences.

Tomorrow! Tuesday! At a computer screen or iPad near you, master cartoonist Sergio Aragonés will be doing what he does best…drawing! More specifically, he'll be online drawing commissions to benefit the the National Cartoonists Society's charitable causes like the Milt Gross Fund, the Jay Kennedy Memorial Scholarship and the Cartooning for Kids program.

The ink begins flying at 4 PM West Coast Time and 7 PM East Coast Time. Here's the link to click in and watch him doing real cartooning in real time, all presented through the good offices of 4C Comics. Watch! Buy! But be there!

My longtime amigo Joe Brancatelli sent me this message. It's in two parts so I'll respond to it in two parts…

I was one of the "lucky" few to see the '96 Inherit the Wind revival with both Scott and Durning performing. It was not great. Lots of scenery-chewing by the actors and very little chemistry. And, honestly, I thought Scott was horribly miscast.

Just as with that Klugman-Randall production of The Odd Couple I mentioned not liking, I've received a number of e-mails from folks who saw it — presumably not on the night I did — and loved it. That's kind of how Show Business works. I also heard from others who saw George C. Scott and Charles Durning in Inherit the Wind and thought I missed out on something wonderful. You're the first person to tell me it wasn't wonderful…and again, that's how Show Business works.

I'm remembering, Joe, that a long, long time ago, you saw Lena Horne doing a one-woman show on Broadway. I just looked it up and it was there May 12, 1981 through June 30, 1982 with one hiatus in the middle. You thought it was one of the best things you'd ever seen and later, when you were in Los Angeles and she was doing it here, we went to see it. You wanted to see it again and you wanted me to see it and I wanted to see it…

…and we both liked it but afterwards, you said to me, "It was much better in New York." We then had a long discussion wondering if it you liked it more on Broadway because of the geography or subtle differences in the production or if Ms. Horne simply was better then and there than she was here and now. I believe we arrived at the conclusion that you could never say why for sure because — say it with me, everyone — "That's how Show Business works!"

George C. Scott sounds to me like ideal casting to play Henry Drummond but maybe I'm thinking of a younger, more energetic Scott than could possibly have been on that stage in 1996. I'm also thinking that it would have been fascinating to see Scott, even grossly miscast.

On to the second part of Joe's e-mail…

I read your Sid Caesar thing and, of course, could only shake my head. But there is one redeeming moment for him that you might have charitably mentioned. Revered as it is today and the ratings juggernaut that it became notwithstanding, Cheers in its first year wasn't great and was almost cancelled. I'm sure nothing Caesar wanted to add to the pilot was right, but his judgment about the quality of the show as he saw it in the early stage pilot might not have been totally wrong.

Quite right. But I did mention that maybe the script he read wasn't even as good as what finally aired. And I should have also noted that based on what I've heard from others since that piece first ran here, Sid probably wouldn't have gotten the part even if he'd loved the pilot script. I'm told that the Charles Brothers only auditioned him because someone upstairs at Paramount insisted, probably because the movie Grease had been such a moneymaker for the studio and Sid had played a "Coach" in that film. That's how executives think sometimes; like Sid Caesar playing a guy called that was guaranteed moola-in-the-bank.

The point remains that Caesar didn't demonstrate a willingness to work with younger people, nor was there the necessary recognition that times and tastes change. That's how Show Business works, too…and the longer you're in it, the more you'll encounter folks with hiring power who are younger than you. When I worked with Mr. Caesar, everything had to be done his way and his way was the way it was done in 1955 when he was the star of the show and calling the shots. It's a shame because he was so, so talented and his later years were so, so devoid of the kind of good work and recognition that others in his age group somehow managed. Thanks for the note, Joe.

If you didn't like the way Rod Stewart sang "Sweet Caroline" at that Platinum Jubilee concert, you're not alone. A lot of people didn't like it including — according to this — Rod Stewart…

Rod Stewart candidly revealed the BBC had made him sing football anthem "Sweet Caroline" seconds before he performed the tune at the Platinum Jubilee concert. The iconic singer, 77, left fans unimpressed on Saturday with his raspy rendition of the Neil Diamond track — with BBC viewers claiming he had "butchered" the famous karaoke song.

Finishing up a jaunty rendition of "Baby Jane," a relaxed Rod then spoke to the crowd: "This is a fun one for me to sing, the BBC made me sing it. Join in, make it comfortable for me."

When I worked on variety shows, I'd sometimes find myself in a meeting where a producer or a network guy would say of a guest star we'd signed, "What shall we have him [or her] sing?" And names of songs might be tossed around before someone (often, me) said, "Why don't we let him [or her] sing whatever he [or she] wants?" Sometimes, that settled the issue. Sometimes, not…because people who are in charge sometimes like to be in charge.

Here's our current favorite song here at newsfromme.com…and don't bother telling me Rod Stewart doesn't sing it as well as Neil Diamond. Nobody sings it as well as Neil Diamond. But here's Rod singing it at the Platinum Party at the Palace, a concert held the other night outside Buckingham Palace in celebration of Queen Elizabeth II being Queen as long as the mineral platinum. Thanks to buddy Tom Galloway for alerting me to this. Some members of the royal family don't seem to be too enthused about it all…

Another rerun, this time from October 22, 2012. In this time of COVID, I don't have any Tales from Costco because I get home delivery from them. I visited one Costco early in the COVID era to stock up on the necessities of life (toilet paper and paper towels, of course) and one since because I had a coupon to use up that could only be used for in-person shopping. But otherwise, Costco is no longer a place I go. It's a place I order from. I feel a sense of loss because home delivery doesn't give me anecdotes like this one. Or free samples…

It's been a while since I did one of these and not because I haven't been to a Costco. I just didn't find any interesting stories there while I was purchasing my five-year-supply of dental floss and my ten-year-supply of chicken wire. (By the way, someone wrote me that next time I was in Costco, I should pick up a lifetime supply of cole slaw. I already have that. For me, a lifetime supply of cole slaw is no cole slaw. I keep mine right next to my lifetime supply of no candy corn.)

So yesterday, I was driving back from San Diego and I needed to stop for lunch and gas. I arbitrarily got off the 5 in San Clemente, which is a good place to look for such things, and I guess my instincts secretly picked the off-ramp. Without consciously choosing to do so, I wound up driving past Sonny's, which is one of my favorite Italian restaurants. If you're ever in or passing San Clemente and you want a good, cheap place for a plate of pasta, try Sonny's.

I didn't, yesterday. Just wasn't in the mood for Eye-talian so I kept going, browsing San Clemente in search of lunch and petrol. Before long, I found them in the same place: The Costco in San Clemente. Spotted it. Noticed a Pollo Loco next door. Figured I could dine at Pollo Loco, then gas up at Costco. And hey, while I was there, I could pop into Costco for that most futile of goals, "just a few items." I decided to do Costco first, then the Pollo Loco. As it turned out, I dined so well on free samples at Costco, Pollo Loco was unnecessary.

So lunch was free. Of course, I did spend $300+ on cat food, electronics stuff and cleaning supplies while I was there. But lunch was free.

One of the snacks on which I snacked was the combined sampling of two products Costco sells: King's Hawaiian Sweet Rolls and a heat-and-eat package of shredded beef cooked in Jack Daniel's barbecue sauce. A nice, friendly lady at the end of an aisle was heating the beef in a small microwave, then scooping the meat onto rolls to make mini-sliders we could try. "They make their sauce with real Jack Daniel's Whiskey," she announced. "But the cooking process burns off all the alcohol."

As I helped myself to a sample, I said, "Good…because I'm driving." But the truth is there's about as much chance of me ingesting alcohol as there is of me feasting on cole slaw and candy corn. Less, even. I've actually tried cole slaw and candy corn. As I turned to continue with my Costcoing, an older woman customer asked me, "Is that true? About the alcohol burning off? Because I shouldn't have any of that if it doesn't."

I told her I was pretty sure it was safe and pointed to an eight-year-old who was not being restricted from helping himself to a sample. This woman was probably seventy and she said, "You were being cautious because you're driving…"

"That was just me being silly," I explained. "But even if there was alcohol in there, the portion size is too small to get a mosquito tipsy."

"That's good to know," she said. "I haven't had a drink in almost thirty years. What it did to me…I couldn't ever go through that again. Maybe someone like you can handle it…"

"Well actually, ma'am, I've got you beat. I haven't had a drink in sixty years and seven months."

"Really? How old are you?"

I said, "Sixty years and seven months. I've never had a drink in my entire life."

"Really? Not even beer? Or wine?"

I said, "Not even beer or wine. About thirty-five years ago, I had a Nyquil. I gather that's kind of like Jack Daniel's for people with bad colds."

"Never had a drink," she muttered to herself. And as she was muttering, my eyes fell on her shopping cart which was full of Grand Prix cigarettes. Maybe a dozen cartons of them.

"So you didn't have to quit because you never started," she exclaimed. "I wish I'd taken after you."

I had to get back on the road but there are times you'd hate yourself if you didn't say something. I said, "What you should really do is not take after my mother. Have you got two minutes for me to tell you about her?"

Here's another one of those videos of old Los Angeles where someone has enhanced the image and added a fake audio track. I like these, especially ones like this in which I recognize a lot of the scenery. This footage was shot in 1960 or not long after and there's a lot of driving around in areas where my parents used to drive around with me in the back seat. The last third or so may be of special interest to some because it was shot at Disneyland…

I mentioned Sid Caesar and Howard Morris in today's rerun article. That's as good a reason as any to rerun a link to a sketch you've almost certainly seen before…and certainly cannot see too often. This is the "This is Your Story" sketch, a take-off on the then-popular series, "This is Your Life."

Various sources online will tell you the sketch appeared on Your Show of Shows on April 3, 1954. It went largely unseen again until 1973 when it was used to close Ten From Your Show of Shows, a theatrical compilation film. It was thereafter played in many places including the memorial service for Howie Morris after he left is in 2005. It opened the ceremony and everyone howled with laughter throughout, including the man sitting in front of me, Carl Reiner…

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.