I Love Lucy: The Untold Story by Jess Oppenheimer, Gregg Oppenheimer
Authors: Jess Oppenheimer, Gregg Oppenheimer
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frozen in a giant block of ice, then we would have lost everyone.
It was just as important that the reason for everything be self-explanatory. I was a real stickler for this. On one of the shows we had a scene where the door to the Ricardos’ living room was left open, and in the next scene that same door had to be closed. In the meantime, the only two characters in the scene were supposed to be intently watching something on the television set. Well, this led to a tremendous discussion. My position happened to be that we must find some way to close that door. We just couldn’t find it closed. That would be too expedient. Someone suggested, “Well, during the time we aren’t watching that scene, Ricky or Fred could’ve gotten up during a commercial, noticed the door was open and closed it.”
“Sure, they could have,” I said, “ but there’s no way for the audience to know that they did, and it’s a bit disturbing, isn’t it, if the audience doesn’t happen to think, ‘Oh, I know what happened. They got up during a commercial and closed the door.’ Just a little disturbing thought that pulls some of their attention away from the comedy. That thought, you know, ‘Wait a minute—that door was open before. How did it get closed?’”
We finally solved the problem to everyone’s satisfaction. The first scene was rewritten so that when Ricky entered the room he pushed the door with such great force that it swung open, hit the door stop, and swung closed again. And we accomplished this by putting a thread on the door and pulling it closed. But the audience saw the door close onscreen, so that when we got to the next scene there was no question how it got that way.
This kind of thing created a lot more work for us as writers. We would spend hours and hours taking all the necessary information and lacing it in while other things were happening, until we had everything logically locked down. Of course, if someone sat down to watch just the last ten minutes of an I Love Lucy, they might say, “My God, this is ridiculous.” But someone else who had been watching from the beginning would say, “No, wait a minute. You don’t understand how they got into this mess.” And he could explain it logically.
My insistence on having a logical basis for everything sometimes caused clashes on the set. During rehearsals for one episode I was called down to the stage because Lucy and our first director, Marc Daniels, were arguing about a bit of business that Marc wanted to do that wasn’t in the script. This sort of thing happened all the time and usually the improvisations and suggestions were sound and they became part of the show, but not this time.
Bobby Jellison was playing a milkman, and he was in the Ricardo bedroom. And he wanted to get over to the window. Instead of walking around the bed, Marc wanted him to get up and walk across the bed. Lucy and Bobby both thought it was silly—there was no earthly reason why anyone would jump up on a bed if he could just as easily walk around it. But Marc felt that it was funny. When I came down and saw it, I had to tell Marc, “No, you can’t do it. Not unless you can give me a good reason why he would walk on the bed.” Now, that was in February 1952. After that, Marc, who was very concerned about who was boss, would literally cringe anytime I came on the stage.
Unfortunately, many of the I Love Lucy reruns on TV these days are missing a lot of the information necessary to have everything make sense. In 1958, a year after they stopped making the half-hour I Love Lucy shows, CBS cut about four minutes out of each of them for syndication purposes, to add more commercial time. And to avoid the expense of recutting the film using outtakes, footage from the other two cameras, all the cuts were made at the beginnings or ends of scenes.
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Photo caption (next page):
It was just the three of us—me, Bob, bottom right, and Madelyn, center—
It was just as important that the reason for everything be self-explanatory. I was a real stickler for this. On one of the shows we had a scene where the door to the Ricardos’ living room was left open, and in the next scene that same door had to be closed. In the meantime, the only two characters in the scene were supposed to be intently watching something on the television set. Well, this led to a tremendous discussion. My position happened to be that we must find some way to close that door. We just couldn’t find it closed. That would be too expedient. Someone suggested, “Well, during the time we aren’t watching that scene, Ricky or Fred could’ve gotten up during a commercial, noticed the door was open and closed it.”
“Sure, they could have,” I said, “ but there’s no way for the audience to know that they did, and it’s a bit disturbing, isn’t it, if the audience doesn’t happen to think, ‘Oh, I know what happened. They got up during a commercial and closed the door.’ Just a little disturbing thought that pulls some of their attention away from the comedy. That thought, you know, ‘Wait a minute—that door was open before. How did it get closed?’”
We finally solved the problem to everyone’s satisfaction. The first scene was rewritten so that when Ricky entered the room he pushed the door with such great force that it swung open, hit the door stop, and swung closed again. And we accomplished this by putting a thread on the door and pulling it closed. But the audience saw the door close onscreen, so that when we got to the next scene there was no question how it got that way.
This kind of thing created a lot more work for us as writers. We would spend hours and hours taking all the necessary information and lacing it in while other things were happening, until we had everything logically locked down. Of course, if someone sat down to watch just the last ten minutes of an I Love Lucy, they might say, “My God, this is ridiculous.” But someone else who had been watching from the beginning would say, “No, wait a minute. You don’t understand how they got into this mess.” And he could explain it logically.
My insistence on having a logical basis for everything sometimes caused clashes on the set. During rehearsals for one episode I was called down to the stage because Lucy and our first director, Marc Daniels, were arguing about a bit of business that Marc wanted to do that wasn’t in the script. This sort of thing happened all the time and usually the improvisations and suggestions were sound and they became part of the show, but not this time.
Bobby Jellison was playing a milkman, and he was in the Ricardo bedroom. And he wanted to get over to the window. Instead of walking around the bed, Marc wanted him to get up and walk across the bed. Lucy and Bobby both thought it was silly—there was no earthly reason why anyone would jump up on a bed if he could just as easily walk around it. But Marc felt that it was funny. When I came down and saw it, I had to tell Marc, “No, you can’t do it. Not unless you can give me a good reason why he would walk on the bed.” Now, that was in February 1952. After that, Marc, who was very concerned about who was boss, would literally cringe anytime I came on the stage.
Unfortunately, many of the I Love Lucy reruns on TV these days are missing a lot of the information necessary to have everything make sense. In 1958, a year after they stopped making the half-hour I Love Lucy shows, CBS cut about four minutes out of each of them for syndication purposes, to add more commercial time. And to avoid the expense of recutting the film using outtakes, footage from the other two cameras, all the cuts were made at the beginnings or ends of scenes.
----
Photo caption (next page):
It was just the three of us—me, Bob, bottom right, and Madelyn, center—
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