|
Los Angeles, California Last month the young stars of a current CBS sit-com recreated the famous "California Here We Come" pose from I Love Lucy for the cover of a trade magazine. What struck me most when I read the accompanying article was that these young actors admitted they hadn't ever watched the "Lucy" series and barely knew who Lucy was. Allow me to enlighten them. I Love Lucy is the template on which all good sit-coms should be based. MGM film star, Lucille Ball, and her bandleader husband, Desi Arnaz, created their classic series back in 1951 in an effort to save their failing marriage. No one at the time was interested enough to finance their idea, so Lucy and Desi financed it themselves – making their own TV pilot for $5,000. Even with a finished pilot, CBS still wasn't interested – thinking America wouldn't accept an all-American girl married to a Cuban. It was only after Lucy and Desi went on the road in Vaudeville to prove America would accept the real-life husband and wife as husband and wife, and got all the show's advertisers in place on their own, that CBS finally agreed to put the show on the air. Television was never the same.  The author with Lucy on the set of their Emmy award-winning special. The technique of filming with three cameras before a live audience was the brainchild of Desi Arnaz who knew good comedians needed an audience. Performed as a stage play with cameras, the entire show was done in one take in the span of an hour and a half – out of respect for the studio audiences. I Love Lucy's innovative method of shooting is still the process sit-coms use today (although today's producers usually shoot three and four takes per scene, keeping their audiences captive until two in the morning). Because Lucy and Desi had no intention of filming the series live in New York like most other TV shows of the time, Desi decided to film the shows on 35mm film – so both coasts could have quality prints, and he and his wife could stay home in California. With this new set-up, Desi inadvertently created "the rerun," shifted the center of the television business to the west coast, and, more importantly, invented the lucrative syndication market. Every time the Friends and Seinfeld producers cash their syndication checks, I hope they thank Desi Arnaz. He made it all possible. The success of I Love Lucy is unparalleled in the history of television. The show never ranked less than third in popularity in the six years it was on the air. Stores across the nation closed on Monday nights when the show aired, posting signs that read, "We're closed. We love Lucy, too." The episode with the birth of their TV child "Little Ricky" bumped President Dwight D. Eisenhower's inauguration off the front pages. Some estimate that more people know the face of Lucille Ball than any human being that ever lived in the history of the planet. But to answer why I love "Lucy" in particular? Well, I have four reasons. One: The comic timing of Lucy, Desi, Vivian Vance and William Frawley is utterly perfect. Every young actor who wants to do comedy should watch every episode and soak up every nuance. There are no finer teachers of comedy in the world. Lucy's "listen, react, and then act" method of performing, taught to her at MGM by silent film legend Buster Keaton, is magical. It's like watching great music. And it's timeless, because the laughs come from real places and real characters. Lucy's reaction to setting her nose on fire in the Bill Holden episode is still priceless. Her work in the chocolate factory episode stuffing candy in her cheeks and down her blouse is as good as anything Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton ever did. Her ability to milk 30 seconds of different types of laughs from accidentally smashing eggs she's hiding under her shirt is purported to be the longest sustained laugh ever seen on television. And all her laughs were played out in wide master shots, so we could see the action and the reaction of the laugh in the same take, as opposed to a current world of close-up after close-up TV.
|
Newswire 
