I Love Lucy: The Untold Story by Jess Oppenheimer, Gregg Oppenheimer Read Free Book Online

and his nightclub boss. But that would mean the situations would revolve more around Ricky’s job than domestic life. And that was definitely out.
    We finally decided to add an older couple, Fred and Ethel Mertz, whose only asset was the apartment building that the Ricardos lived in. We would reverse the roles from the radio show—in this case the younger couple would be better off financially. Just as on My Favorite Husband, we figured we could pursue the examination of marriage from these two different age levels and economic levels. We’d be able to pair them off as couple against couple, women against men, or haves against have-nots, all setups that had worked for us on the radio series.
    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 othercommitments. 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 everyother week, Biow was insisting on a weekly show. Lucywould 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