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

was going to be the producer, I would have to have ultimate control of all of the show’s creative elements. My contract spelled that out. Even Desi couldn’t override my decisions—only Lucy had that kind of veto power. But if Desi took the title of “executive producer,” I wondered, wouldn’t that cause confusion about my authority as producer of the show?
    And Desi was not the only one wanting to build a reputation as a TV producer. This was my first producing venture in the new medium. Now, so far it was quite successful. I was concerned that adding an “Executive Producer” credit might convey the impression that Desi, rather than I, had overall control of the show’s artistic elements.
    I suggested naming Desi as “Executive in Charge ofProduction” or “Co-Producer,” but neither of those titles interested him. After a long discussion without reaching any acceptable arrangement, we finallyagreed to discuss it again after we had both had a little more time to think it over.
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    A few days later, a friend introduced me to someone as the producer of I Love Lucy. After telling me how much she enjoyed the show, she asked me a question: “ I Love Lucy is only a half hour a week,” she said. “What do you do during the rest of the week?”
    I had no trouble at all finding things to do during “the rest of the week.” I once figured out that I was always working on something like thirteen episodes at a time. In addition to the one we were rehearsing, there would be the show the three of us would start writing that week, the show that was already in rewrite, another show that had been shot the week before, another one in mimeograph, another one in the first editing stages, still another in final stages, and so on. And for the upcoming shows I held production meetings casting, costumes, sets, props. On shows that had already been filmed there were meetings on editing, music, dubbing, publicity, you name it. Right on through to the answer print, people were continually coming to me and asking me detailed questions about this show or that. “In the rough cut of show number seventeen, in the opening scene,” somebody would say, “there’s a close-up of Desi at the telephone, and you told me you wanted to use a two-shot of Lucy and Desi, but we can’t use that angle because the boom wasn’t clear.” Now, somehow, I would always know exactly what they were talking about. Through somequirk of my brain, I could remember every bit of the footage on all of the shows. Automatically. That part was easy.The hard part was being responsible for actually putting all of these shows together, and for coming up with a new story with Bob and Madelyn every single week.

Anatomy of a “Lucy” Script
    WHEN I WAS WRITING I LOVE LUCY, the question that people asked me most often was, “Where do you get your ideas?” And I finally started answering them by saying, “Where did you get the idea to ask me that?” And that always stumped them.
    When Bob and Madelyn and I would sit down every Monday morning to plot another I Love Lucy show out of thin air, we would sometimes look at one another after about a half hour of nothing and ask sarcastically, “Where do you get your ideas?” And that’s when we really wished we had the answer.
    One of the first things that we discovered, after we had written just a few scripts, was that we were doing essentially the same story every week, with Lucy trying to get into Ricky’s act at the club. And so we started going in the direction of other, more normal domestic situations.
    We were never trying to manufacture something funny. Instead, we were looking for a situation where Lucy’s and Ricky’s problems and differences of opinion were the sameones that most of our audience had encountered. We called it “holding up the mirror.”
    We knew that as long as we were playing around with things that everybody has lived through, we would have a captive audience