Writers Had a Ball With Show (1990)

Middletown, New Jersey-bred television sitcom maven/producer Billy Van Zandt has been in a loony bit of heaven these past couple of weeks. Imagine a gig where every waking moment is spent reveling in the wails of Lucille Ball and the babbaloos of Desi Arnaz.

Van Zandt and his writing partner, Jane Milmore, are the writer-producers of “I Love Lucy: The Very First Show,” an hour-long special of interviews and clips surrounding the long-lost experimental pilot for what was to become one of the most successful sitcoms in television history. “I can’t begin to tell you how much fun it’s been,” said Van Zandt, who with Ms. Milmore has written for “Newhart” and “Anything But Love” and is now developing shows for the Grant/Tribune production house.  “More than 30 years in the making.  Wonderful stuff.”

The genesis of tonight’s special is slightly convoluted, but no less wonderful for it. It seems that the wife of Bud Grant, the former CBS president who is Van Zandt’s boss, was at a party at her friend’s house when the friend, the widow of Pepito, “The Spanish Clown” of vaudeville and early TV, showed her a videotape made from an old kinescope. The woman [Joanne Perez] said it was something her late husband had made with Arnaz and Ms. Ball that never appeared on television.

When Grant heard of the tape, he zoomed over to check it out. Sure enough, Pepito and the Arnazes had put together a pilot of sorts to try to sell their sitcom idea to CBS.

“CBS had offered Lucy her own show, but she said Desi had to be on it,” said Van Zandt. “The CBS executives didn’t think his Spanish accent would cut it. So Lucy and Desi took their act to vaudeville houses around the country to rave reviews. They made this videotape and CBS said, fine, we’ll take the show but you have to find your own sponsor.

Phillip Morris finally bought the time and the rest is, as they say, history.” 

The original tape, though, never ran.  For one thing, it was 34 minutes long and, because of that, probably never really was meant to air, at least not without some editing. But since Grant brought it to him to make into an hour show three weeks ago, Van Zandt has been so immersed in Lucydom that he knows just about every one of her video high jinks and banana-peel slips.

“It’s been less like writing a TV show and more like putting on a play,” said Van Zandt, who in fact does put on annual plays he’s written with Ms. Milmore in various Monmouth County New Jersey theaters. “The rush is unbelievable.”

Van Zandt induced Lucie Arnaz to host the show despite her original lack of interest. “We handled her parents so reverentially, she finally consented,” he said. “She didn’t want anything to do with it, but we had to send her the script to get some legal things cleared and she liked it.

“I think what really changed her mind was that we treated her father with respect,” said Van Zandt. “Here’s the guy who invented the way we do television and there’s no building here named after him, no statue, no studio, nothing. Desi invented the four-camera show, the rerun, for heaven’s sake!  Nothing against Lucy, but he was an innovator.”

Besides Ms. Arnaz, there are interview segments with Bob Carroll Jr. and Madelyn Pugh Davis, two of the three writers (with the late Jess Oppenheimer) on “I Love Lucy” and, according to the sardonic Van Zandt, “the best montage anyone has ever created in the history of television.” 

Fred and Ethel Mertz, the landlord/friends of the Ricardos, don’t appear in tonight’s pilot, having been added to the real show later. Some previews have erroneously noted that Lucy and Desi were known as Lucy and Larry Lopez in the pilot, but in fact, according to Van Zandt, the Ricardo name was adopted before the pilot so as not to confuse Desi’s bandleader character with a real Hispanic bandleader of the time, Vincent Lopez.  Pepito does his clown vaudeville act.

“But basically, the plot is like the plot of 5,000 other Lucy shows,” said Van Zandt. “Ricky’s the bandleader and Lucy wants badly to get into show business so she worms her way into his act. The only shame of this is that it is on at 10 p.m. It would have been great earlier in the evening so that kids could see something wonderful from TV history.”,

Van Zandt, a self-avowed Lucy fanatic, said this latest Lucy discovery is probably not the last treasure.

“I’m sure somewhere somebody has a blooper tape or some outtakes or something,” he said. “This show just provided some really great stuff.”

• Robert Strauss is the Asbury Park Press television writer.

Source:

Asbury Park Press, April 30, 1990, page A5, column 1