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Authors: Jess Oppenheimer,Gregg Oppenheimer

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Our natural choices to play the Mertzes were Gale Gordon and Bea Benaderet, but by the time
I Love Lucy
was sold, they both had other
commitments. So we drew up a list of likely character actors and began our search.

We were still pondering who would play the Mertzes when I got a phone call from Milton Biow, who had just returned from his European trip. He was obviously in a good mood. “I was thinking about the show all the time I was away,” he began. “I think it’s going to be a great program.” And then, almost as an afterthought, he added, “By the way,
when are you and the Arnazes moving to New York?”

I nearly dropped the phone. “New York??? Who’s moving to New York? Nobody told me anything about that!
I thought the deal called for the show to originate from here—live—with kinnies for the cable, like
Burns and Allen
.”
And I explained that we had no intention of moving to the East Coast.

“Jess!” he said. "Jess—I bought a show that’s going to be done from
New York
. I’m not about to put on a program where 15 percent of the audience see it clearly and 85 percent see it through a piece of cheesecloth.”

What he was referring to, of course, was the fact that in those days there was no coaxial cable that reached across the country. Only the part of the audience that could pick the show up
live
would see it clearly. The rest would see a kinescope—a low-quality motion picture of the program photographed off the tube during a live broadcast. And 85 percent of the audience was in the East and Midwest.

It took about a week for us to settle the matter. To solve Biow’s concerns about picture quality, we argued in favor of doing the show in Hollywood, but
on film
, like another new situation comedy,
Amos ’n’ Andy,
set to debut on CBS-TV the following month. Biow was skeptical, but after screening a print of
Amos ’n’ Andy,
he finally agreed, on one condition—the
I Love Lucy
film would have to be at least equal in quality to
Amos ’n’ Andy,
else we would have to do the program live from New York as he had originally wanted.

Well, the decision to film the series had solved one problem, but it created another. CBS estimated that filming the show would
double
the production costs—an additional $5,000 per show. But Biow was unwilling to pay a penny more for each episode. And instead of a show every
other week, Biow was insisting on a weekly show. Lucy
would have to sacrifice her screen career to gamble on television.

Don Sharpe came up with a clever compromise.
Lucy and Desi were to receive a weekly salary of $5,000 between them. Don proposed they cut their salary by $2,000 a week if CBS would make up the remaining $3,000 budget shortfall.
Since Desilu owned 50 percent of the show, Don figured this salary cut would really cost Lucy and Desi only $1,000.

Don’s idea was acceptable to Lucy and Desi. But Desi saw an opportunity to make back the money by selling the films of the show overseas. If he and Lucy were going to risk everything on the show, he told Don, the film negatives must be owned 100 percent by Desilu Productions. To everyone’s surprise, CBS agreed. We had a deal.

We still had to decide
how
to film
I Love Lucy.
When we agreed with Milton Biow that the show would be produced on film, we deliberately left this issue open, and with good reason.
Amos ’n’ Andy,
the film quality standard against which our show was to be judged, was shot on a soundstage without an audience, out of sequence, just like a motion picture. And then, after the film was edited, an audience was brought in to a theater and shown the film, and their laughter and applause recorded and then dubbed into the film’s sound track.
Without any live audience reaction during the performance to go by, the actors on
Amos ’n’
Andy
simply had to guess at how long to wait before proceeding with their next line. Not surprisingly, they often guessed wrong, and the audience reactions sometimes covered the dialogue. None of us wanted this to happen on
I Love Lucy.

We held a series of brainstorming sessions to come up with a better solution. One of the ideas we had was to rehearse the show all week on CBS’s Stage A and then, when we felt we were ready, bring in an
audience and carefully time and record every one of their laughs. Then we would go over to a movie soundstage and film the episode—motion picture–style with one camera—leaving the appropriate timed gaps for the laughs. But all of this sounded impossibly confusing, and so we quickly dropped the idea.

Apart from its complexity, the “timed laughs” method was unacceptable to us for a more fundamental reason. What we really wanted to do was film the show in front of an audience. There is that quality, that response, that comes only from a live experience. And the American public had learned to expect this after 25 years of listening to studio audiences laugh on radio.

We knew from
My Favorite Husband
that an audience would give us not only the right character of laugh for the situation—it would also give us perfect timing. The audience’s reaction told the actors when to stop, and then, as the laughter died down, to go ahead again. This interaction between audience and performers had other benefits. It enabled the actors to gloss over the things that weren’t going so well, and then really milk it when things were going wonderfully.

For Lucy, doing the radio series in front of a live audience had been like having an opening night every week. She would get keyed up with nervous excitement and her adrenaline would be flowing, resulting in a combination of elements that just couldn’t be faked.
No, the viewers at home would know whether it was a real, live performance.

So our meeting naturally turned to a discussion of the logistics of shooting the show in sequence, in front of an audience, just like a live TV show, but using film cameras instead of TV cameras. We knew that the technique of using multiple film cameras moving on dollies, pushed to various positions, with the camera operator riding, had been around since the late 1920s.

“Why,” someone asked, “hasn’t anyone used this method on TV?”

“They have,” said a voice on my right. It was Eddie Feldman, head of Biow’s radio and television departments on the West Coast. “Ralph Edwards films
Truth or Consequences
for us live, in front of an audience, with three motion picture cameras. The guy we should talk to is Al Simon.”

One of the CBS executives, who had heard of Simon as a radio comedy writer, was skeptical. “What does a radio writer know about filming a TV show in front of an audience?” he asked Eddie.

“Just more than anyone else in Hollywood, that’s all,” Eddie countered. “He’s the guy who developed the three-camera technique that Edwards is using on
Truth or Consequences.

“Well then let’s get him over here!” I said.

Al came over right away. We told him our problem, and he described the technique that he had developed for Edwards with the help of RCA. Although
Truth or Consequences
was a game show, Al didn’t see any reason why our show couldn’t be filmed the same way. By the end of the meeting, we had hired Al as our production manager.

Al’s first assignment was to find us a director of photography.
Lucy urged him to call Karl Freund, the brilliant, award-winning cinematographer who had photographed Lucy so beautifully in
DuBarry Was a Lady.

When I first heard Freund’s name mentioned, I thought we were daydreaming.
Freund was a giant in the movie industry. His film credits included Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis,
All Quiet on the Western Front, Dracula, Camille,
and
The Good Earth,
for which he won the Oscar. I never thought that a man of Freund’s stature would want to do television. But after several appeals from Lucy and Desi, this living legend stepped from the rarefied air of feature pictures and joined us in the lowly new medium of TV.

Al and Desi spent practically the entire summer searching for a suitable theater in which to film
I Love Lucy,
but they came up empty-handed. With less than two months to go until our October airdate, we were running out of time.
Finally, in late August, Al got a call from his friend Earl Spicer at RCA.

“I just got a call from Jimmy Nasser, who owns General Service Studios,” Spicer told Al. “He’s heard you’re looking
for a place to film your show. He’d like you to consider his studio.”

“Earl,” Al replied, “we’re not making a motion picture. We’re doing the show in front of an audience. We don’t need a movie studio. We need a theater.”

Spicer was determined. “Listen, Al. Jimmy is a hell of a nice guy, and he’s having tremendous financial problems right now. As a personal favor, would you just go over there with me and talk to him?”

“Okay, Earl. I’ll do it for you. But we’ll both be wasting our time.”

General Service Studios was an eight-soundstage motion picture studio
located not far from our offices at CBS Columbia Square. When Al got there that afternoon, he saw that Spicer hadn’t been exaggerating about Nasser’s financial difficulties. Besides Nasser, they were accompanied on their tour by the bankruptcy custodian.

When Nasser showed him Stage 2, Al realized that if he could knock down a wall and create an entrance for the audience on the side street, maybe we
could
use a motion picture soundstage, after all. He asked if we could make our own entrance. “Sure,” Nasser said, “if you get the necessary permits, and as long as you agree to put it back the way it was when you leave.”

Walking around Stage 2, Al started to see other advantages. Live TV generally used flimsy sets, which had to be “struck” quickly after each show, to make way for the next program. We had planned to do the same thing. Al figured that if we could rent the stage on a full-time basis, we could build substantial, realistic sets and leave them up all the
time. And they would be available for us to rehearse in.

The more he thought about the possibilities, the more excited Al became. He was so afraid that we would lose this golden opportunity that he made a handshake deal then and there to rent Stage 2 for a year for $1,000 a week.

The news that Al had rented a motion picture studio soundstage came as a shock to Desi and me. Not only had we not been looking for a soundstage—neither of us had authorized Al to make a rental offer to anybody.
But when we visited Stage 2 and took a look for ourselves, we both agreed with Al that it was just what we were looking for. We finally had our “Desilu Playhouse.”

Three Cameras or Four?

W
E WERE JUST ABOUT
to sign a long-term lease with General Service Studios when I realized that I still hadn’t seen even a draft of my own contract with Desilu. I decided to speak to Desi about it.
When I told him of my conversation with Harry Ackerman and my 20 percent interest in the show, Desi hit the ceiling.
CBS had never mentioned my contractual arrangement—not even when they agreed to give up their own interest in the series.

“This can’t be!” he yelled. “Lucy and I own the package. How can CBS do this? No way are we going to do the show. Forget the whole thing!”

And w ith that, Desi stormed off the lot. When he got home, he told Lucy, “The show is off.” Lucy was in shock. “We can’t back out now!” she told Desi. And she broke into tears and phoned me at home.

I told her my side of the story—CBS had promised me a 20 percent interest and that’s the reason I had agreed to do the TV audition program. When I told Lucy that the network had simply forgotten to inform her and Desi about my deal, she started to sob. “Jess,” she said, “Jess—everyone knows we’re doing it. If we don’t go through with it, they’ll say we failed. My entire career is at stake!” But I explained to her that naturally, if my understanding wasn’t lived up to, I would have to back out of the show.

It looked as though the whole thing would fall apart.
But after long negotiations, Desi finally agreed to let me have the 20 percent interest.
I said I thought Bob and Madelyn should have an interest in the show as well, but he wouldn’t give anyone else anything. So I gave Bob and Madelyn a five percent interest out
of my share, leaving me with 15 percent.

Things were starting to fall into place.
To play the landlord, we had already hired William Frawley. Frawley was a familiar character actor
from films, with the screen persona of the kind of sport you’d find in a pool hall—the unpolished guy with a heart of gold. He was the perfect Fred Mertz.

Marc Daniels was the ideal choice as our director, a talented professional who had won awards for his direction of live TV drama in New York using multiple cameras.
On Marc’s recommendation, Desi and I drove down to the La Jolla Playhouse one evening to see a relatively unknown actress named Vivian Vance play the leading role in
Voice of the Turtle
. And by the end of the first act, Desi and I agreed that we had found Ethel Mertz.

We filmed our first show on Saturday evening, September 8, less than two weeks after moving onto the General Service lot. And we managed to get five more episodes in the can before the first one hit the network.

BOOK: I Love Lucy: The Untold Story
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