BEFORE: Norman Lear carries over from "Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It", and can we give an extra-loud Birthday SHOUT-out to Mr. Lear, who turned 100 years young yesterday? I didn't even plan this, it's just another one of those coincidences, and if I hadn't decided to slow my Doc Block down a bit, I wouldn't have landed a film with him right on his 100th birthday, how about that?
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Being the Ricardos" (Movie #4,075)
THE PLOT: Explores the rise of comedian icon Lucille Ball, her relationship with Desi Arnaz, and how their groundbreaking sitcom "I Love Lucy" forever changed Hollywood, cementing her legacy long after her death in 1989.
AFTER: Well, here we are again, at the intersection of the image that celebrities in the 1950's put out into the world with the reality of what was going on behind the scenes. The sitcom that was all about love, about the crazy, perfectly imperfect marriage of the fictional Ricky and Lucy Ricardo was the story that everybody in America watched on TV, but by now it should come as no surprise that the real-life Lucy and Desi Arnaz didn't have the perfect home life. Did I need both this film and "Being the Ricardos" in the same movie year? No, I really didn't, because they both tell the exact same stories - how they met, how they fell in love, how they filmed their TV show, and how they fended off the accusations of Lucy being a communist. (I'll say it again, anybody could have been on the other end of that phone line, nobody can PROVE that it was J. Edgar Hoover, Desi could have pulled a fast one.)
But some people like fiction films, bio-pics with actors dressed up to look like other actors, and other people prefer documentaries. I'm still a bit upset that J.K. Simmons didn't win an Oscar for playing William Frawley, who cares if Nicole Kidman gets another Oscar, I want J.K. Simmons to win every time, even if he was only in a "Spider-Man" movie that year. Director Amy Poehler had full access to the estates of Ball and Arnaz, so there's plenty of recordings of them discussing their TV show and their marriages.
In the early days of TV, I think maybe viewers had a harder time distinguishing reality from fantasy, like today nobody thinks that the court cases on "Law & Order" are real, because we've been watching TV our whole lives and we know it doesn't reflect reality, even reality shows are partially scripted these days. But back then things were different, unless you happened to be part of that live studio audience and realized the Ricardos don't live in a real house, it's just a set. Maybe some people at home thought the cameras went over to the Arnaz house to film an episode, or maybe they didn't think about that much at all, they just accepted the image on the TV screen as a form of reality. Lines got blurred further when Lucille Ball got pregnant (for the second time) and they worked her pregnancy and baby delivery into the show, and I wonder how many people at home knew that the actress had two kids, while the character had only one.
And of course, if you couldn't show a pregnancy on TV, you couldn't have two characters getting divorced, either, no no, it just wasn't done! So I think the couple had to keep acting as if they were married on screen for a while after they were splitsville in real life, but I could be wrong here. Even now people look back on Lucy and Desi as one of the great love stories, but the truth is that they both had longer marriages with their next partners after they divorced.
The real legacy of Lucille Ball is this - a woman who co-ran, then ran solo, a TV production company. Desi got out of management a few years after they split up, but Lucy kept running the company through the later incarnations of "The Lucy Show". And Desilu Productions was responsible for some really big TV shows in the 1960's, like "That Girl", "The Untouchables", "Mission: Impossible" and "Star Trek". Think about how huge the "Star Trek" franchise is now, seven or eight spin-off shows over the years, and three different movie series. All that (eventually) came from a TV show produced by Lucy and Desi's company! And Desilu Studios was also the filming location for "The Dick Van Dyke Show", "My Three Sons", "I Spy", "Hogan's Heroes", "Family Affair" and "That Girl". Yeah, they had kind of a huge lot, they bought the old RKO Studios and turned that into Desilu. Eventually Lucy gave up the studio, too and sold everything off to Gulf & Western, which started Paramount TV, though now I guess it's all under the CBS banner.
The couple was ahead of their time in so many ways - not just in the innovative set design and multi-camera techniques that Desi introduced, but they divorced back before it was trendy to do so, co-parented and remained friends, which happens so often these days that we all just take it for granted now. Yeah, Lucy and Desi invented that, I'm pretty sure.
Amy Poehler directed this, and she really did a lot with a little - most documentaries would interview about 50 people to try to convince us of how great the subject is, but the in-person cast list here is minimal. Really, do you need more than Carol Burnett, Charo and Bette Midler? No, I guess you don't. To be fair, it feels a bit like they planned the shoot and then realized that most everybody in Hollywood was on vacation that week. Thankfully there were enough clips from "I Love Lucy" to use to pick up the slack.
Also starring Lucie Arnaz (last seen in "Robert Klein Still Can't Stop His Leg"), Carol Burnett (last seen in "The Kid Stays in the Picture"), Charo, David Daniels, Journey Gunderson, Laura Laplaca, Eduardo Machado, Bette Midler (last seen in "Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind"), Gregg Oppenheimer and the voices of Desi Arnaz Jr. (last seen in "Dean Martin: King of Cool"), Dick Cavett (last seen in "Becoming Cousteau"), Michele Spitz
with archive footage of Desi Arnaz, Lucille Ball (also last seen in "Dean Martin: King of Cool"), Ray Charles (ditto), Andy Griffith (ditto), Fred Astaire (last seen in "Joker"), Barbara Billingsley, Fanny Brice, Xavier Cugat, Sammy Davis Jr. (also carrying over from "Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It"), Judy Garland (ditto), Louis B. Mayer (ditto), Joan Rivers (ditto), Walt Disney (last seen in "Walt: The Man Behind the Myth"), Dwight Eisenhower (last seen in "Standing in the Shadows of Motown"), Queen Elizabeth (last seen in "Sammy Davis Jr.: I've Gotta Be Me"), Larry Fine (also last seen in "Robert Klein Still Can't Stop His Leg"), Curly Howard (ditto), Moe Howard (ditto), Preston Foster, William Frawley, Gale Gordon, Katharine Hepburn, J. Edgar Hoover (last seen in "The One and Only Dick Gregory"), Buster Keaton (last seen in "Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project"), Mary Tyler Moore (ditto), Nancy Reagan (ditto), Harpo Marx (last seen in "Can We Take a Joke?"), Carmen Miranda, Gary Morton, Ronald Reagan (also last seen in "Becoming Cousteau"), Donna Reed (last seen in "The Automat"), Ginger Rogers, Cesar Romero, Mickey Rooney, Robert Stack (last seen in "Spielberg"), Robert Young (ditto), Ed Sullivan (last seen in "Mr. Saturday Night"), Dick Van Dyke (ditto), Danny Thomas, Marlo Thomas (last seen in "The Female Brain"), Vivian Vance, Max von Sydow (last seen in "I Am Divine"), Mary Wickes, Walter Winchell, and the voice of Johnny Carson (also last seen in "Dean Martin: King of Cool")
RATING: 5 out of 10 roles in RKO musicals
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