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.