David Margolick + Bruce Goldstein: When Caesar Was King

Moderating this discussion is Director of Repertory Programming at Film Forum, Bruce Goldstein. This event will be hosted at The Strand at Columbus Ave (SCA) at 450 Columbus Ave.

Can’t make the event? Purchase a signed copy of When Caesar Was King here.

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From longtime New York Times and Vanity Fair writer David Margolick comes the first definitive biography of Sid Caesar: founding father of television comedy and icon to generations of Americans.

By the spring of 1954, Sid Caesar was the most influential, highly paid, and enigmatic comedian in America. Every week, twenty million people tuned their TVs to his NBC extravaganza, Your Show of Shows, and witnessed his virtuosity in sketches and film spoofs, pantomime and soliloquy. Onstage, Caesar could play any character and make it funny: a befuddled game-show contestant, a pretentious German professor, a beleaguered husband (opposite his redoubtable co-star Imogene Coca)—even a gumball machine and a bottle of seltzer.

To Caesar’s mostly urban audience, his comedy was an era-defining leap forward from the days of vaudeville, launching a new style of humor that was multilayered and full of character, yet still uproarious. To his rivals, Caesar was the man to beat. To his fellow American Jews, his show’s success meant something more: a post-Holocaust symbol of security and a source of great pride. But behind all that Caesar represented was the real Sid. Introverted and volatile, ill at ease in his own skin, he could terrorize his collaborators but reserved his harshest critiques for himself. After barely a decade, he was essentially off the air, beset by exhaustion, addiction, his own impossibly high standards, and changing viewership as television spread to the American heartland. TV’s first true comic creation was also its first spectacular flameout.

But in his wake came the disciples he personally nurtured—including Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, and more. Caesar left an indelible impact on what still makes us laugh. In When Caesar Was King, veteran journalist David Margolick conjures this complexman as never before. Deeply researched, brimming with love for Caesar and the culture from which he sprang, and reanimating a New York City that has all but vanished, this rollicking and poignant book traces the rise and fall of a legend.

Photo credit: Allan Ripp

David Margolick long reported on legal affairs for The New York Times, where he wrote the weekly “At the Bar” column and covered, among other stories, the trial of O. J. Simpson. He was then a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. His many books include Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink; Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song; Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns; and Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock. He lives in New York City.

Photo credit: Grant Delin

Bruce Goldstein is the Founding Repertory Artistic Director of New York’s Film Forum and founder of the distribution company Rialto Pictures. Under Goldstein’s direction, Film Forum Repertory has premiered virtually every major film restoration of the past 40 years; he has also created over 400 influential film festivals at the theater and has produced hundreds of special events..

Time Out New York named Goldstein one of the 101 essential people or places of New York, citing him “for keeping showmanship alive,” and, in 2005, “New York’s Finest Film Programmer.” In its 2012 “Best of New York issue,” the Village Voice called him “the Michael Jordan of Film Programmers.” Kent Jones’ profile of Goldstein in Film Comment was entitled “The King of New York.” Among Goldstein’s many other distinctions are a “Chevalier” (Order of Arts and Letters) from the French government, a special award from the New York Film Critics Circle for “visionary film programming,” and lifetime achievement awards from George Eastman House, Anthology Film Archive and the San Francisco Film Festival.

In 2023, Rialto's 25th anniversary was commemorated with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.