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

film, we deliberately left this issue open, and with good reason. Amos ’n’ Andy, the film quality standard against which our show was to be judged, was shot on a soundstage without an audience, out of sequence, just like a motion picture. And then, after the film was edited, an audience was brought in to a theater and shown the film, and their laughter and applause recorded and then dubbed into the film’s sound track.Without any live audience reaction during the performance to go by, the actors on Amos ’n’Andy simply had to guess at how long to wait before proceeding with their next line. Not surprisingly, they often guessed wrong, and the audience reactions sometimes covered the dialogue. None of us wanted this to happen on I Love Lucy.
    We held a series of brainstorming sessions to come up with a better solution. One of the ideas we had was to rehearse the show all week on CBS’s Stage A and then, when we felt we were ready, bring in anaudience and carefully time and record every one of their laughs. Then we would go over to a movie soundstage and film the episode—motion picture–style with one camera—leaving the appropriate timed gaps for the laughs. But all of this sounded impossibly confusing, and so we quickly dropped the idea.
    Apart from its complexity, the “timed laughs” method was unacceptable to us for a more fundamental reason. What we really wanted to do was film the show in front of an audience. There is that quality, that response, that comes only from a live experience. And the American public had learned to expect this after 25 years of listening to studio audiences laugh on radio.
    We knew from My Favorite Husband that an audience would give us not only the right character of laugh for the situation—it would also give us perfect timing. The audience’s reaction told the actors when to stop, and then, as the laughter died down, to go ahead again. This interaction between audience and performers had other benefits. It enabled the actors to gloss over the things that weren’t going so well, and then really milk it when things were going wonderfully.
    For Lucy, doing the radio series in front of a live audience had been like having an opening night every week. She would get keyed up with nervous excitement and her adrenaline would be flowing, resulting in a combination of elements that just couldn’t be faked.No, the viewers at home would know whether it was a real, live performance.
    So our meeting naturally turned to a discussion of the logistics of shooting the show in sequence, in front of an audience, just like a live TV show, but using film cameras instead of TV cameras. We knew that the technique of using multiple film cameras moving on dollies, pushed to various positions, with the camera operator riding, had been around since the late 1920s.
    “Why,” someone asked, “hasn’t anyone used this method on TV?”
    “They have,” said a voice on my right. It was Eddie Feldman, head of Biow’s radio and television departments on the West Coast. “Ralph Edwards films Truth or Consequences for us live, in front of an audience, with three motion picture cameras. The guy we should talk to is Al Simon.”
    One of the CBS executives, who had heard of Simon as a radio comedy writer, was skeptical. “What does a radio writer know about filming a TV show in front of an audience?” he asked Eddie.
    “Just more than anyone else in Hollywood, that’s all,” Eddie countered. “He’s the guy who developed the three-camera technique that Edwards is using on Truth or Consequences. ”
    “Well then let’s get him over here!” I said.
    Al came over right away. We told him our problem, and he described the technique that he had developed for Edwards with the help of RCA. Although Truth or Consequences was a game show, Al didn’t see any reason why our show couldn’t be filmed the same way. By the end of the meeting, we had hired Al as our production manager.
    Al’s first assignment