In the fall of 1951, television audiences were introduced to a show biz-obsessed redhead and her bandleader husband, played by the real-life couple Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.While Lucy was undeniably the star on-camera, off-camera it was Desi, a refugee from Cuba with no connection to the world of entertainment, who would change the way television worked. The most significant thing about Arnaz that people don't know, according to biographer Todd Purdum, is that he and his colleagues made the decision to film "I Love Lucy" on 35mm black-and-white film, "making possible its preservation, and essentially the invention of the rerun, and then syndication sales, and the whole modern way that television economics work."One of the most striking revelations in Purdum's book, "Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television," is why the show was even created.
"It was partly created to save their marriage," he said."Desi was on the road, which enabled him to philander, and that bothered Lucy a great deal.
She'd kind of reached the limits of her career in movies, and she'd gotten a radio show called 'My Favorite Husband,' in which she played a kind of a zany housewife, married to the fifth vice president of a bank.And CBS then said, 'We'd like this show to make the transition to television.' And Lucy said, 'Well, I only want to do a television show if Desi can be in it with me and play my husband.'"CBS and sponsors were worried that audiences wouldn't accept them as a couple.
(Never mind they'd been married for ten years.) Desi and Lucy also wanted to shoot the show in Los Angeles, where they'd laid down roots.Back then, New York City was the hub of television production."Everything was about the family," said daughter Lucie Arnaz, who was born just six weeks before her parents shot the first episode of "I Love Lucy." "It was always about, 'No, no, no.
We have a plan.We wanna be together.
We wanna be in California.' Which is crazy when you're nobody.He wasn't a big star.
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