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

was to find us a director of photography.Lucy urged him to call Karl Freund, the brilliant, award-winning cinematographer who had photographed Lucy so beautifully in DuBarry Was a Lady.
    When I first heard Freund’s name mentioned, I thought we were daydreaming.Freund was a giant in the movie industry. His film credits included Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, All Quiet on the Western Front, Dracula, Camille, and The Good Earth, for which he won the Oscar. I never thought that a man of Freund’s stature would want to do television. But after several appeals from Lucy and Desi, this living legend stepped from the rarefied air of feature pictures and joined us in the lowly new medium of TV.
    Al and Desi spent practically the entire summer searching for a suitable theater in which to film I Love Lucy, but they came up empty-handed. With less than two months to go until our October airdate, we were running out of time.Finally, in late August, Al got a call from his friend Earl Spicer at RCA.
    “I just got a call from Jimmy Nasser, who owns General Service Studios,” Spicer told Al. “He’s heard you’re lookingfor a place to film your show. He’d like you to consider his studio.”
    “Earl,” Al replied, “we’re not making a motion picture. We’re doing the show in front of an audience. We don’t need a movie studio. We need a theater.”
    Spicer was determined. “Listen, Al. Jimmy is a hell of a nice guy, and he’s having tremendous financial problems right now. As a personal favor, would you just go over there with me and talk to him?”
    “Okay, Earl. I’ll do it for you. But we’ll both be wasting our time.”
    General Service Studios was an eight-soundstage motion picture studiolocated not far from our offices at CBS Columbia Square. When Al got there that afternoon, he saw that Spicer hadn’t been exaggerating about Nasser’s financial difficulties. Besides Nasser, they were accompanied on their tour by the bankruptcy custodian.
    When Nasser showed him Stage 2, Al realized that if he could knock down a wall and create an entrance for the audience on the side street, maybe we could use a motion picture soundstage, after all. He asked if we could make our own entrance. “Sure,” Nasser said, “if you get the necessary permits, and as long as you agree to put it back the way it was when you leave.”
    Walking around Stage 2, Al started to see other advantages. Live TV generally used flimsy sets, which had to be “struck” quickly after each show, to make way for the next program. We had planned to do the same thing. Al figured that if we could rent the stage on a full-time basis, we could build substantial, realistic sets and leave them up all thetime. And they would be available for us to rehearse in.
    The more he thought about the possibilities, the more excited Al became. He was so afraid that we would lose this golden opportunity that he made a handshake deal then and there to rent Stage 2 for a year for $1,000 a week.
    The news that Al had rented a motion picture studio soundstage came as a shock to Desi and me. Not only had we not been looking for a soundstage—neither of us had authorized Al to make a rental offer to anybody.But when we visited Stage 2 and took a look for ourselves, we both agreed with Al that it was just what we were looking for. We finally had our “Desilu Playhouse.”

Three Cameras or Four?
    W E WERE JUST ABOUT to sign a long-term lease with General Service Studios when I realized that I still hadn’t seen even a draft of my own contract with Desilu. I decided to speak to Desi about it.When I told him of my conversation with Harry Ackerman and my 20 percent interest in the show, Desi hit the ceiling.CBS had never mentioned my contractual arrangement—not even when they agreed to give up their own interest in the series.
    “This can’t be!” he yelled. “Lucy and I own the package. How can CBS do this? No way are we going to do the show. Forget the whole thing!”
    And w