Being the Ricardos (Amazon Studios, Escape Artists, Big Indie Pictures, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 9 p.m. I put on the movie Being the Ricardos with my husband Charles for Amazon Prime (and, fortunately, the cost was included in our Prime membership so we didn’t have to pay anything else to watch it.) Written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, who’s become something of a specialist in movies like The Social Network and TV series like The West Wing, tight-knit dramas taking place in enclosed spaces, Sorkin this time took on a particularly hellish week in the production history of the 1950’s TV series I Love Lucy. One was the revelation – first heard on radio on Walter Winchell’s show and then splashed across banner headlines in newspapers, at least one of whom printed a banner headline in red, that Lucille Ball had registered o vote with the Communist Party in 1936. This was in 1953, at the height of the House Un-American Activities Committee’s investigations of Communists and alleged “subversives” in Hollywood, and it’s a measure of Sorkin’s scriptwriting savvy that he has Lucille Ball (Nicole Kidman) more concerned about whether her husband, producer and co-star, Desi Arnaz (Javier Bardem), is having extra-relational activities with other women than the potential that being exposed as a “Red” could have had to destroy her career.

The other big crisis facing the producers of I Love Lucy was Lucille Ball’s pregnancy with Desi Arnaz, Jr. and the couple’s – particularly Desi Arnaz, Sr.’s – decision to incorporate Lucy’s pregnancy into the plot lines so Lucy and Ricky Ricardo would have a baby the same time as Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz had theirs. The film periodically flashes back to earlier times in Lucy’s life, like the making of the 1940 film Too Many Girls on which Lucy and Desi first met (it was a Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart musical, Desi Arnaz had been in the stage production and had had an instant success – especially when his spectacular final number sparked a nationwide craze for conga lines – and Lucille Ball was an RKO contract player assigned to play the female lead in the film, not the second lead as Sorkin’s script would have it) and the closest she ever came to dramatic stardom with the 1942 film The Big Street (based on a Damon Runyon story, “Little Pinks,” with Lucy as a bitchy, diva-esque entertainer whose gangster boyfriend pushes her down a flight of stairs and leaves her in a wheelchair, and Henry Fonda as the busboy at the club where she worked who becomes her caregiver out of an unrequited crush on her), only RKO fired her for reasons that aren’t clear in the film.

Actually I’d been under the impression that it was Lucy who bailed on RKO, not the other way around, because she had a contract offer from MGM – where her first film there was DuBarry Was a Lady, another diva-esque role with Red Skelton in Fonda’s place as the hapless proletarian who works at the theatre where she performs and has a crush on her. It was for this film, her first in color, that MGM hairstylist Sydney Guilaroff dyed her hair flaming red because “her soul is on fire.” Sorkin’s script has some inaccuracies – like when he says Lucy got the role in The Big Street only because Rita Hayworth and Judy Holliday had turned it down (at the time The Big Street was made, 1942, Holliday was a member of the Revuers comedy group in Greenwich Village and had never made a film), or early on when he refers to a “taping” of an I Love Lucy episode (at the time I Love Lucy was made videotape had not yet been invented and I Love Lucy was famously shot on film) or has people use slang expressions like “story arc,” “gaslit” and “copy that” that weren’t part of the language in 1953. But, with one major exception, Being The Ricardos is well cast and beautifully staged.

Actually I’d been under the impression that it was Lucy who bailed on RKO, not the other way around, because she had a contract offer from MGM – where her first film there was DuBarry Was a Lady, another diva-esque role with Red Skelton in Fonda’s place as the hapless proletarian who works at the theatre where she performs and has a crush on her. It was for this film, her first in color, that MGM hairstylist Sydney Guilaroff dyed her hair flaming red because “her soul is on fire.” Sorkin’s script has some inaccuracies – like when he says Lucy got the role in The Big Street only because Rita Hayworth and Judy Holliday had turned it down (at the time The Big Street was made, 1942, Holliday was a member of the Revuers comedy group in Greenwich Village and had never made a film), or early on when he refers to a “taping” of an I Love Lucy episode (at the time I Love Lucy was made videotape had not yet been invented and I Love Lucy was famously shot on film) or has people use slang expressions like “story arc,” “gaslit” and “copy that” that weren’t part of the language in 1953. But, with one major exception, Being The Ricardos is well cast and beautifully staged. The one exception is Javier Bardem as Desi Arnaz; Bardem is a talented actor but he’s all wrong for the part – he’s too old, not sexy enough and a mediocre (or worse) singer. (In the film The Mambo Kings Desi Arnaz, Jr. was quite effective playing his father on screen – the story is about a mambo band working to get a potentially star-making opportunity by appearing as guest stars on I Love Lucy – but by now he is too old for the part, too.)

Nicole Kidman has been criticized as well – notably by people who questioned the idea of a serious actress playing an irrepressible comedienne – but I thought she was excellent. If nothing else, this film reproduces just how hard it can be to make audiences laugh on cue, and like her filmmaking mentor at MGM, Buster Keaton, Lucille Ball approached the business of making comedy as a serious one. No doubt she’d heard the old adage, “If you’re laughing, the audience won’t be.” In one sequence she calls in the cast, including J. K. Simmons playing William Frawley playing Fred Mertz and Nina Arianda as Vivian Vance as Ethel Mertz, for a run-through at 2 a.m. to rehearse a new blocking she’s devised for a gag sequence: she’s cutting flowers for a fancy dinner at which, unbeknownst to the Mertzes – they are having a long-term argument and it looks like they’re headed for divorce court – she’s invited both Fred and Ethel in hopes of reconciling them. She cuts the flowers too short, then adds water to the vase, and the flowers start growing out of the vase (courtesy of one of the show’s writers, who’s under the table pushing them up). Ironically the whole flower sequence doesn’t end up in the episode as filmed and submitted to CBS for airing.

The story of how I Love Lucy got on the air in the first place is fascinating – and was best told by Desi Arnaz himself in his autobiography, simply titled A Book. It seems that Lucille Ball and Richard Denning were co-starring on radio in a sitcom called My Favorite Husband, in which he played a sportswriter and she played the typically ditzy wife whose schemes got min in trouble. CBS wanted to put My Favorite Husband on TV and Lucy was amenable, but on one condition: she wanted the part of her TV husband to be played by Desi Arnaz, her husband in real life. According to one account (alas not reproduced by Sorkin in the film), the “suits” at CBS told Lucy, “No one would ever believe you were married to a Cuban bandleader.” “Why not?” Lucy replied. “I am married to a Cuban bandleader.” Then CBS executives told Lucy and Desi that in order to do the show, they would have to move to New York. This enraged Lucy because the whole idea of doing a show with her husband was to keep him home in Hollywood at night and away from touring with his band, where she knew he would be tempted to drink and to have extra-relational affairs. (When she finally divorced Desi in 1960 she cited his drinking and womanizing as the reasons.) At the time virtually all TV shows were done live, and people on the East Coast got to see them as they were being performed while people on the West Coast got crappy-looking kinescopes – literally films made by sticking a movie camera in front of a TV set and filming the result – which were flown out to the West Coast so they could be shown in the same time slot, only three hours later to adjust for the difference between Eastern and Pacific time. (This was the start of the horrible tradition that makes the West Coast suck hind tit to the East Coast.)

Desi Arnaz wanted to shoot I Love Lucy on film so it would have the same visual quality wherever it was shown, and when the CBS “suits” insisted the show be done live because “we think Lucy is at her best in front of a live audience,” Desi said, “Fine. We’ll film it in front of a live audience.” Desi decided to use the three-camera technique that had been pioneered by Ralph Edwards on his TV quiz show Truth or Consequences, but had never been used on a scripted show before. He inadvertently also invented the rerun: before that if a radio or TV show were repeated, the only way to do it had been to recruit the same actors (or different ones if the originals weren’t available) and redo the whole show live. Given that I Love Lucy was produced as a tangible physical object, the shows could be run as many times as desired – and are still entertaining audiences even though Lucy, Desi and virtually all the creative people both in front of and behind the camera are dead. Charles liked the fact that Sorkin’s script made it clear that Lucille Ball had been a movie star – not at the top level of Joan Crawford or Bette Davis, but certainly a capable, highly creative and talented actress who could bring people out to theatres – and in addition to The Big Street I’d also recommend Dance, Girl, Dance (a much better film than Sorkin makes it out to be), DuBarry Was a Lady, Lured (when I wrote about that film in an article about underrated films by great directors – in this case, Douglas Sirk – I wrote that it contained “great dramatic performances by George Sanders and Lucille Ball – yes, you read that right”) and the 1949 Easy Living (which stars Victor Mature as a professional football player in one of the few films noir about a team sport).

Charles also didn’t like the way Sorkin’s script hammered home that William Frawley was an alcoholic – CBS originally didn’t want him on the show and Desi personally had to indemnify the network in case they lost money due to Frawley’s drinking issues. Overall, though, Being the Ricardos is an excellent film despite its flaws, and a touching portrayal of the creation of a cultural artifact that is still engaging audiences and moving people to laughter at one of the world’s greatest clowns.