When people die, their children inevitably take possession of whatever they owned. Usually, the kids pick through the stuff, take what they like and tag-sale or donate the rest.
This was not an option for Lucie Arnaz, the daughter of TV comedy legends Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. When Lucille Ball died in 1989, three years after the death of Desi Arnaz, Arnaz inherited a ton of scrapbooks, clips, photos and home movies, spanning their childhoods, early adulthoods and early married life, many of which Lucie had never seen.
“I started watching all these home movies. While I was watching them I realized how many of the people I was watching were still alive. They were working with them or knew them or grew up with them and knew so much more about them than I did.”
It was a windfall of memories she didn’t know her parents had. Inheriting those memories gave Arnaz the idea for a documentary. “Lucy and Desi: A Home Movie” first broadcast in 1993. On Sunday, May 26, Arnaz will be at Ridgefield Playhouse to show the film and talk to the audience after. She will be accompanied by Laurence Luckinbill, her husband of 33 years and the movie’s co-producer.
This will be an encore presentation of the film at Ridgefield; in 2010, the movie was shown there and dozens of people had to be turned away. Sandra Consentino, whose husband Joseph is artistic director of the Ridgefield Playhouse Film Society, was the editor on “Lucy and Desi: A Home Movie.”
In a phone interview from her home in Weston, Arnaz says she was compelled to make the movie not just because of the avalanche of her parent’s stuff, but also because a docudrama, “Lucy & Desi: Before the Laughter,” went into production just after her mother died.
“It was not a very flattering picture of the two of them, and it was done by the network that they put on the map,” she says, referring to the phenomenal success on CBS of the landmark series “I Love Lucy.” “It was very flat and tabloidesque. I had meetings with them before they made the movie. They sent me the script thinking I would help them. I said ‘are you crazy, this is the worst piece of you-know-what, why are you doing this?’ Their idea of an answer was ‘you should have seen the last script’.”
So she sat some of her parents’ friends and siblings in front of a camera and recorded their memories. Then she approached NBC and sold the movie idea in one meeting. It was shown on Valentine’s Day in 1993. It won a prime-time Emmy for Outstanding Informational Special.
Arnaz’s interviewees — including herself and her brother, Desi Arnaz Jr. — don’t shy away from the unpleasant aspects of the Arnaz-Ball marriage. These included Lucy’s sad childhood, workaholism and maternal standoffishness, Desi’s difficult relationship with his mother, his drinking and infidelities, his insecurity at being what Arnaz calls “Mr. Ball” and their inability to forgive and forget.
Arnaz, who plans to move to Palm Springs, Calif., as soon as her Connecticut house sells, says her goal in making the film was not to ignore the flaws in her parents’ characters and marriage, but to flesh them out and make them real people.
“The people I interviewed answered me with love, even when the answers were rough to hear,” she says. “I knew it was time for the truth to be told in way that was still a loving and compassionate story.”
Strangely, one thing Arnaz’s film does not have is even one second of footage from “I Love Lucy,” the show that is the foundation of her parents’ legend. That stems, Arnaz says, from her anger at CBS over “Lucy & Desi: Before the Laughter” and her decision afterwards to take the movie to NBC, which in turn made CBS angry. CBS owns the rights to all the “I Love Lucy” episodes.
“The only amount of footage that we asked for was a tiny tiny little bit of it. Less than a minute, 10 seconds of ‘Vitameatavegamin,’ 10 seconds of the chocolate factory, 10 seconds of the grape stomping, on and on … maybe a minute and 16 seconds. I was willing to pay for it, They said ‘no, you can’t use it’,” she says. “My chore … my mission, if I chose to accept it … was to make a documentary biography of Lucille and Desi without one frame of ‘I Love Lucy’ footage. And now I like to repeat that I won an Emmy.”
“LUCY AND DESI: A HOME MOVIE” will be screeened at Ridgefield Playhouse, 80 East Ridge Ave. in Ridgefield, on Sunday, May 26, at 6:30 .pm. The film’s director, Lucie Arnaz, producer Laurence Luckinbill and editor Sandra Consentino will do a Q&A; after the screening. Admission is $10, $7.50 seniors, $5 students. Details: www.ridgefieldplayhouse.org.
