Peter Viney's Blog

Directed by Aaron Sorkin
Written by Aaron Sorkin
Amazon Prime

CAST

Nicole Kidman – Lucille Ball (Lucy Ricardo)
Javier Bardem – Desi Arnaz (Ricky Ricardo)
J.K. Simons – William Frawley (Fred Mertz)
Nina Arianda – Vivian Vance (Ethel Mertz)
Tony Hale- Jesse Oppenheimer (producer)
Alia Shawkat – Madelyn Pugh (writer)
Jake Lacy – Bob Carroll (writer)
Christopher Denham – Donald Glass (director)
Linda Lavin – older Madelyn Pugh
Ronny Cox – older Bob Carroll
John Rubenstein – older Jesse Oppenheimer
Ron Perkins – Macy, head of CBS

I love Lucy. That wasn’t a title, I really do love Lucy. Lucille Ball. When we took boxes of videos to the charity shop, the Lucy videos survived the cull, even though there is no longer an easily accessible way of playing them.

The film’s biggest problem for audiences is set out in the first few seconds of Being the Ricardos where they tell you that today a major TV hit has 10 to 15 million viewers but that I Love Lucy used to attract 60 million every Monday night.

They need to tell you that because in this film, we are talking about 1953.

The background

They fail to say the true reason why I Love Lucy was so important. It was first aired when light domestic comedies were rehearsed, then played in front of a single camera, broadcast directly into the ether, then lost forever. If they were recorded at all, it was with kinescope, literally filming the TV camera signal from a monitor with 16 mm film. Live audiences were thought too dangerous in a studio full of hot lights and trailing wires.

Lucille Ball, one of the canniest people in Hollywood, insisted from the outset (1951) on recording the show on film. Not just on film, but on 35 mm film for the highest quality. CBS and sponsor Philip Morris were worried about the cost, but Ball and Arnaz offered to take a massive $1000 a week pay cut to compensate. Because of union regulations, it was impossible for them to produce, direct and act for CBS, so they formed their own production company, Desilu. Their next innovation was to find a studio large enough to accommodate a live audience, and not only shoot on 35 mm, but to shoot on three cameras simultaneously (allowing the wide shot, and two angles). They weren’t the first to use multiple cameras for TV, but they were the first to do it for a mass market programme.

That meant it could be copied, syndicated around America, then around the world. It also meant it could be re-run forever. In the late 70s and early 80s, the afternoon repeats of I Love Lucy and its successor, The Lucy Show were a pleasure. When we were visiting America in the late 80s and 90s, you could usually find one or the other on the schedules. In 2012, Americans voted it “Best TV Show of All Time.”

This stuff all comes very rapidly into the film, but it is blink and you’ll miss it. An interesting piece in the film is where Lucille is doing a radio comedy, and a producer notes how she gestures and uses expressions for a radio recording. She says she learned that from Jack Benny – you play it to the audience in the room to get reactions, The implication is that led to her insisting on a live audience for the TV series.

I was worried about assumed knowledge, and rightly so. I went to get some LPs as Christmas presents and chatted to the twenty-something and thirty-something who run the shop, and neither had ever seen a Lucille Ball programme. On the phone to a forty-something, the same message came across. Lucille Ball is a towering figure in my generation’s view of the 50s and 60s, and much more so in North America. She’s not well-known currently.

Then on to the start of the film. You need to know the basics. Lucille Ball and her husband, the Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz, had a tempestuous relationship. It was so tempetuous that she says in her autobiography that after one row she went out and smashed every window in Desi’s new station wagon with a hammer.

On the TV show of I Love Lucy, they play Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, a married couple (who also have a tempestuous relationship) with Lucy being an aspiring actress and Ricky being a Cuban bandleader who runs a local night club. That wasn’t a major conceptual leap then. The series had four stars, because their older neighbours, Ethel and Fred Mertz, feature strongly. Ethel was played by Vivian Vance and Fred was played by William Fawley. You need to know that,

I checked on Wikipedia, and I’ll quote them, because I suspect a re-run of the original show might not resonate with a 2021 audience of young women:

WIKIPEDIA: Lucy also exhibited many traits that were standard for female comedians at the time, including being secretive about her age and true hair color, and being careless with money, along with being somewhat materialistic, insisting on buying new dresses and hats for every occasion and telling old friends that she and Ricky were wealthy. She was also depicted as a devoted housewife, adept cook, and attentive mother. As part of Lucy’s role was to care for her husband, she stayed at home and took care of the household chores, while her husband Ricky went to work

I’ll add that in 1953, the word was comedienne not comedian. You could also say that the TV character of Lucy was a ditzy blonde, except that she was a fiery redhead, but on a black and white TV you couldn’t tell the difference.

In the film, Being The Ricardos Lucille Ball discuss her female stereotype with the writer Madeleyn Pugh ‘from a different generation.’ No, sorry, this screams “shoehorned in” / “pushed in with a sledgehammer” nearly seventy years after the event.

Being The Ricardos

The film is in colour and sequences from the I Love Lucy show are black and white. We found the film surprisingly dark and murky as we saw I Love Lucy as always so brightly lit and were expecting some California sunshine. Nicole Kidman isn’t a lookalike, but she is a soundalike, and says she started smoking to get her voice sounding right. The I Love Lucy series was Philip Morris sponsored, and there’s an early joke in the film where the advertising guys realize that Lucille is smoking rival brand, Chesterfield.

When they show the black and white sequences from shows, Kidman really does look like Lucy.

September 1953 proved to be the blackest month in the life of Lucille Ball …

Forever Lucy, Joe Morella and Edward Z. Epstein, 1973

The story is ostensibly set in just one week of the show’s run (cf: My Week With Marilyn). The week is the second week in September 1953. It was the week where Lucille Ball was publicly accused of being a communist. In 1953 we are at the height of the Hollywood trials (witch trials?) where the House Un-American Activities Committee were visiting the world of 1984 thirty plus years early upon America. It started with Senator McCarthy in 1947, focussed on writers. It moved on to actors. The era is a popular theme … see the stage play 8 Hotels on Paul Robeson (reviewed here) and the House Un-American Activities Committee. You could be accused of being a communist simply for signing a petition on a studio lot for (say) providing Christmas dinner for migrant workers, as Lucille Ball had. Robeson was considerably more than a petition signer. Lucille Ball had also ticked a box saying she was a party member back in 1936, on the urging of her grandfather.

In the film, it it also appears to be the week she announced that she was pregnant and they would have to write it into the script … CBS and Philip Morris balked at the word “pregnant.” That’s all well recorded as is Desi’s persuasive telegram to the head of Philip Morris, and the terse reply. Lucy’s second pregnancy was announced fifteen months earlier in May 1952. However, because they don’t signpost flashbacks, it could be argued as a flashback … though seemed to me to be repeated throughout the week.

And third, it’s also the week that matters come to head over Desi’s frequent nighttime absences.

And fourth, it’s when she decides to wrest comedy control from the writers, producer and director.

Do we sense different events are being conflated? YES!

The strongest parts are Lucille Ball arguing with the director over comedy and showing how to do it better. I loved those (been there as the writer, done that on set myself.)

Javier Bardam is a perfect Desi. The real life Desi (and this character) have charismatic power. We see him on stage with his band, and Desi was a better bandleader than he was an actor, but he was the driving force in their relations with the moguls and sponsors. I won’t plot spoil.

Then J.K. Simons as William Frawley (who played Fred Mertz) and Nina Arianda as Vivian Vance (who played Ethel Mertz)are outstanding support. Again, they’re not lookalikes in the colour sequence, but really conjure up Ethel and Fred in the black and white ones purporting to be the TV show.

The political theme disappears for most of the week (as it did in reality), coming to a head at the end, just before the Friday show recording. As do events with Desi. It came to life on the Friday with the Los Angeles Herald-Express printing a red headline with LUCY IS A RED. That came in the morning in real life, not just before the show. The headline is accurate. There are five (at least) missed opportunities in the film.

• First, the date of the actual headline and the show was September 11th 1953. Yes, nine / eleven. Lucille Ball’s nine / eleven. I’d have at least let that show in close up on the newspaper, even if not mentioned.
• Second, Lucille was so traumatized by the headline that she had went and had her hair dyed a lighter shade than its normal flaming red for the show. I’d have included it. They didn’t.
• Third, Desi was negotiating with Hollywood columnist and power-broker Hedda Hopper throughout the day. She’s always a great one to lampoon.
• Fourth, there was an obvious flashback … in reality, Desi had confronted Senator McCarthy face-to-face at Del Mar race track months earlier and had him reveal that there were no charges against Lucy.
• Five, Desi’s actual speech to the studio audience is recorded, and was funnier and stronger than the one in the film. Watch it and see.

As the titles roll, it announces Lucille’s filing for divorce in 1960, the “morning after their last show together.’ That makes it look right after this show, but no, it was seven years later.

Is this a positive? The actual episode which was filmed on September 11th was the second in the Third Season, The Girls Go Into Business. That was broadcast on October 12th, and in it Lucy and Ethel buy a dress shop. We don’t see any of that.

The episode they’re working on in the film Being The Ricardos is about Ethel and Fred coming to dinner, and is Fred and Ethel Fight which was filmed on January 30th 1952, and broadcast on March 10th 1952 (so eighteen months earlier). It must have been chosen so that they could show Lucille directing a sequence she was not acting in.

There are faults in the film. They flash forward to the writers (as older people) remembering events. They flash back to events in Lucille and Desi’s past, such as her declining to tour with Desi, the end of her film career, her attempts to make it in radio.

It could be that they were deliberately muddying timelines and flashbacks to make it a more dramatic week.

They show her interview with the studio after The Big Street with Henry Fonda, and they drop her contract after a critically acclaimed film. The interview is priceless, and I enjoyed that sequence. However, they don’t point out that it happened in 1942, eleven years before the action and she had several large roles in films after that.

One flashback is to Lucille insisting Desi be her co-star. She had been working on My Favourite Husband and they wanted to continue the casting or find a new co-star. From the film when she meets the CBS TV executives:

MACY: I don’t ordinarily come to meetings like this. This meeting is several floors below my general interest. I’m here to deliver a hard truth. We cannot have an All-American girl married to a man who isn’t American.
LUCILLE: He is American. He was a sergeant in the US Army and he served in the war.
MACY: You know exactly what I mean Lucy. He’s Spanish.
LUCILLE: He’s never been to Spain in his life. He speaks Spanish. He was born in Cuba.
MACY: You know exactly what …
LUCILLE: You mean? I do.

According to the biographers, it was even more overtly racist than that with the words ‘white girl’ and ‘Latin man’ used.

I’ve read three books on Lucille Ball. I knew what they were talking about. I really don’t think a younger audience who hadn’t read the facts or experienced the shows would have a clue where they were in the timeline.

It’s up for loads of awards. I believe that’s my generation as judges. If you don’t know the back stories, I think it lacks clarity and signposting the timeline. It is a highly enjoyable movie though, with the performances from the four “stars” of I Love Lucy all deserving of high praise.

Did I say we are Lucille Ball fans? Well, this photo is from 1992 at Universal Studios in Orlando when we met Lucy and Karen got to do a duet.

(Alright, I suppose as it was a theme park it may not actually have been the real Lucille Ball …)