So that night we had dinner. He had his usual two-inch steak, baked potato, asparagus, etc. I was nervous and not too hungry, so I just had （in a salute to him） a Caesar salad. And I said, “Sid, I know your renewal contract is coming up. I don’t want you to sign it…I want you to quit. I want you to quit this show, this highly successful, top-rated show.”
“What are you, crazy?” He laughed.
“I want you to quit. I want us to get on a plane and fly to Hollywood. I want us to make movies. Movies last. It’s fifty years later but we still see Harold Lloyd hanging from that clock in Safety Last! We still see Charlie Chaplin eating his shoe in The Gold Rush. Movies are forever, but no matter how brilliant you are on television it’s forgotten a week later. On TV it’s all a thing called kinescope—I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what we’re being captured on. It could be cellophane! It could be cotton! We come and we go. We explode every week, we do a show and in an hour it’s forgotten. You’re forgotten and you’re a genius. You’re brilliant. You’re funnier than big Hollywood comedy stars like Danny Kaye and Red Skelton. You’re funnier than anybody in Hollywood. You’ll be a revelation to the world! Now, they only know you on television and they’re crazy about you. If you do movies, they’ll be crazy about you in Sweden, in France, in Moldavia. And you’re handsome! You could carry a picture. You’ll be the funniest leading man that ever lived! And we’ll take our time. It’s not like we’re going out there looking for a job. They want you. You’re already a star. We’ll move your face from a little TV set to the big screen.”
He was blinking a lot, and I knew that the more he blinked the more he was getting it. He said, “I’m not going to give you an answer now, but you’re making a lot of sense and I’m really gonna think about it.”
He didn’t say a word about it the next day, or for that matter he didn’t say a word about it for the next two weeks. I was scared. I was puzzled. I didn’t know what to think. And then, finally, he chased everybody out of his office and sat me down. He said, “Mel, you’re probably right. It might be wise to leave at the top of your game in television and get into movies where your career could last a lot longer. But I couldn’t do it. I signed with the network to do the show for the next three years. I’ll tell ya why. When I told Max Liebman that I was thinking of quitting and going to Hollywood and gave him all your good reasoning why I should, he said, ‘You may be right or you may be wrong. Let me talk to NBC.’？”
It was the end of 1952 and Sid was earning about five thousand dollars a week, a gargantuan sum for that time. When Max Liebman told the head of NBC that Sid was thinking of not renewing, that he was thinking of going to Hollywood and making movies…they made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. They didn’t want, under any circumstances, to lose their time slot and its incredibly lucrative sponsorship. So they offered him an unprecedented raise in salary. He would go from five thousand dollars a show to twenty-five thousand dollars. Which came out to a million dollars a year.
He said, “Mel, I just couldn’t say no.”
Last-minute rehearsal rewrite session with （left to right） writers Danny Simon, Joe Stein, me, Neil Simon, Tony Webster, Mel Tolkin, Sid Caesar, and NBC executive Hal Janis.
I never brought it up again, and we went into our next seasons with flags flying.
In 1954 NBC split Your Show of Shows up into three different entities. Max Liebman went on to produce musical specials, which were called “Spectaculars.” Imogene Coca got her own show, a sitcom, and Sid went on to do three more seasons in a new incarnation called Caesar’s Hour, an hour-long version that had much more comedy than the ninety-minute Your Show of Shows. Mel Tolkin, Carl Reiner, and Howie Morris went with Sid. Lucille Kallen went with Imogene.
After the first couple of seasons on Your Show of Shows, the comedy writing demands had become too great for just Mel Tolkin, Lucille Kallen, and me, so we added the Simon brothers writing team—Danny and his kid brother, “Doc” Simon. The “Doc” being Neil Simon, who later would go on to be one of the most celebrated comedy playwrights on Broadway. Neil taught me that every second counts in comedy writing. Both Danny and Neil were like that. They took advantage of every second and every joke at their disposal. Neil never forgot a joke. He said that he never forgot anything that he ever heard that had made somebody laugh, whether he wrote it down or not. That’s the type of memory he had. He didn’t need to steal jokes; he was so damn talented.