Over 11 years and 570 episodes, John Rabe and Team Off-Ramp scoured SoCal for the people, places, and ideas whose stories needed to be told, and the show became a love-letter to Los Angeles. Now, John is sharing selections from the Off-Ramp vault to help you explore this imperfect paradise.
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It certainly helped that he had Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, and Woody Allen in the writers room; and Imogene Coca and Carl Reiner on stage with him. But still, to do an hour-and-a-half of live television for 39 weeks a year, to carry the whole show? This is what Sid Caesar did in the 1950s.
Caesar died Wednesday at the age of 91. This is part of an interview I did with him in 2000 at his home in Beverly Hills, which was never broadcast. In it, he wants to make clear that live television was hard, and gave the audience much more than today's shows.