Yesterday I watched a really good movie that is on Amazon Prime called Being the Ricardos. It stars Nicole Kidman as Lucille Ball and Javier Bardem as Desi Arnaz, who was Lucy's husband and co-star of the hit show I Love Lucy. The movie takes place during a specific point in Lucy's life in the 1950s, when Lucy faced allegations of being a member of the Communist Party, and the week leading up to the allegations. The film's dialogue is incredibly smart and quick, and so watching this movie a second time helped me better understand points in the dialogue I didn't get at first. Like so many people, I really loved I Love Lucy as a kid and watched it on TV Land a lot. One of my favorites is the "Vitameatavegamin" episode where Lucy gets drunk from tasting several spoonfuls of Vitameatavegamin while filming a commercial for the product. I really didn't know much about Lucy and Desi's personal life, though, to be honest. I only remembered them as Lucy and Ricky, but this movie, whose executive producers are Lucy and Ricky's two children, Desi and Lucy, really showed me a side of their life that was really interesting.
The movie also shows the thought and detail that went into even writing the script for each episode, and as someone who doesn't work in television or screenwriting seeing this process gave me a deeper appreciation for a lot of the work that goes into writing a show. During a table read, Madelyn Pugh and Bob Carroll, the writers of the show, go over the script with Lucy and Desi. However, Lucy interrupts to find weaknesses in the script and what could be better about certain scenes. In one particular scene, Lucy is supposed to be setting the dinner table while Ricky Ricardo (Desi) is supposed to walk in and put his hand over her eyes, and she is supposed to guess who he is. She lists off eight different names of men before finding out that the person behind her is Ricky, but Lucy questions during the table read why Lucy even needs to guess eight different men when she clearly knows it is Desi. She also wants to add in a bit where she arranges and cuts flowers for a vase, but Jess Oppenheimer, the producer, doesn't think they will have time for that part so he insists that they cut it and move on. When meeting with the executives at CBS, Desi and Lucy also made a decision that the executives thought was too controversial: letting Lucy be pregnant on the show. The reactions that Madelyn, Jess and Bob give Lucy and Desi when they announce they are expecting their second child are not super joyful, because they think that if viewers watch Lucy's pregnancy it will be too controversial and they won't want to watch the show anymore. Jess also informs Lucy and Desi that they can't even use the word "pregnant" on the show, so Desi writes a telegram to the head of Phillip Morris, a tobacco company that sponsors the show, to allow Lucy's pregnancy to be written into the show. I remember watching the show The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel one time and on one of the episodes in season 2 she is pulled off stage for using the word "pregnancy" in one of her acts. I think I still see a lot of this today, where if an actress is pregnant, the showrunners will have to cover up her pregnancy especially if the character they play isn't pregnant. In season 3 of the show Brooklyn 99, Amy Santiago has to play a pregnant prison inmate and honestly, I thought she was wearing a prosthetic belly, but in reality, Melissa Fumero was actually pregnant. I remember Gina Linetti, another character on the show, was also pregnant in one of the episodes, and Chelsea Peretti, who plays Gina, was pregnant in real life. This is a topic I would love to look into more though, because it doesn't seem like a big deal to me that the character would be pregnant, but to the people running the show and the actors, it requires making a lot of decisions about how to write the pregnancy into the show or hide it.
Another important point they talk about in Being the Ricardos is the character of Ethel Mertz. Vivian Vance, the actress who plays Ethel, is very physically attractive, but her character is supposed to be frumpy and unappealing compared to Lucy's curvy attractive character. Towards the beginning, Vivian is seen wearing a beautiful cocktail dress to wear during the dinner party scene of the show, and Lucy confronts her about it, telling her that Ethel isn't supposed to look attractive in the show, implying that she should wear something less flattering. Vivian is also on a diet and is trying to lose weight, and Madelyn brings her French toast, sausages and orange juice, but Vivian politely turns breakfast down because she is on a diet, prompting Madelyn to make a comment about her weight loss. When Vivian asks Madelyn who sent her to brin her breakfast, Madelyn lies and tells her it was Tino, the waiter, but Vivian doesn't believe her. Lucy comes to Vivian's dressing room and apologizes for the way she has been treating her on the show, and Vivian asks her if it was really her who sent Madelyn to get her breakfast (the show writers don't normally bring breakfast to the actors) and send the message that she needs to put on weight for Ethel's character. Lucy tries to reason with Vivian that the diet she is on is unhealthy, but Vivian tells her that she needs to basically back off because this is my diet and my life and just because the writers made the character look a certain way doesn't mean I need to do that. This puts a strain on Vivian and Lucy's friendship, especially when Lucy tells Vivian that they need to make Ethel overweight and frumpy because most American women look like Ethel, not like Lucy, who is thin and attractive, so most women will see themselves in Ethel. Lucy later apologizes after Vivian tells Lucy that the comment she made about Vivian's body was hurtful, but this scene still stuck with me because it showed how there was still a lot of stigma when it came to talking about body image and weight loss. It also showed how frustrating it must have been for Vivian to play Ethel because jokes are constantly being made at the expense of Ethel and that really hurts Vivian.
This movie made me think a lot about the TV show The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which was also produced by Amazon. Throughout the show, Miriam "Midge" Maisel, challenges a lot of deeply rooted ideas about womanhood, and she faces a lot of discrimination for being a female comic. At first she was going to see her ex-husband, Joel, do stand-up comedy and stay in the background while she brought the homemade brisket. However, after he cheats on her, she goes to the Gaslight club and drunkenly does her own standup about how her husband cheated on her and how she stayed in this marriage and realized how deeply unhappy and unfulfilled she was. Comedy provides her an outlet to express her authentic self at a time when comedy was dominated by white men, and with the help of her manager, Susie, she makes serious breakthroughs in the world of comedy and learns so much about the profession along the way. She faces a lot of challenges, including sexual harassment, erratic scheduling, bad relationships, divorce, and disapproval from her family for wanting to go after her dreams. But seeing how she grows and develops so much confidence even with all the rejection and criticism she faces really encouraged me. There is one episode in season 1, where she meets a famous female comedian named Sophie Lennon, who plays a character called "Sophie from Queens." Sophie from Queens is from a low-income background and is overweight and boisterous, and Midge thinks that Sophie is really the character she is playing and starts to think this woman could be her mentor because she is so down-to-earth. But when Sophie has Midge come to her house, Midge is surprised to find that Sophie lives an affluent life of luxury and is also not the very warm and kind-hearted person that she plays onstage. Instead, Sophie is incredibly condescending to Midge, and even makes fun of her for wanting to see the kitchen of her house, which Sophie hadn't set foot in because Sophie has lots of butlers to bring her food and things. Sophie also admits that she wears a fat suit to play Sophie From Queens. When Sophie asks Midge what her gimmick is, Midge is confused because she just shows up as herself when performing and seems okay with it. However, Sophie, being of a different generation, tells her that men want to fuck her, they don't want to laugh with her, and that she needs to put on a gimmick just as she had done as Sophie from Queens in order to make it in the comedy world. I thought Sophie was going to be a mentor and role model to Midge because they were both female comedians trying to survive in a cutthroat male-dominated industry, but instead Sophie crushes Midge's dreams and tells her to give up on comedy. Instead of letting that discourage her, Midge decides to still be true to herself and even calls out Sophie in one of her acts for being a fraud. Throughout the show, Sophie does everything she can to bring Midge down as revenge for Midge telling everyone that Sophie was a phony and wore a fat suit to play her role, but Midge refuses to back down and she ends up following her own path as a comic.
Being the Ricardos also kind of reminded me of a movie I saw called Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. Throughout Being the Ricardos, Lucy is adamant about putting in scenes that the producer doesn't want and even at 2:00 AM calls Vivian and Bill, who play Ethel and Fred in the show, to redo one of the scenes. They think she is being ridiculous for doing this, but Lucy insists that they put her changes in the script and that Vivian and Bill redo the dinner scene. She tells them that she wanted to do this show so that it would help bring her and her husband closer because he was always performing at the club (Desi was a bandleader) or playing cards on the boat, and he was secretly cheating on her with other women. Bill tells her that Desi is acting this way because he feels threatened that Lucy is making so many of the creative decisions. It was really groundbreaking for Lucy to make so many creative decisions and run the show because this was during the 1950s, where ideas of womanhood still weren't progressive. Lucy tells Bill that she has to deal with male egos constantly, and that she is still committed to her marriage to Desi even though deep down she was really unhappy with her marriage. Lucy's desire to make a lot of the creative decisions on the show reminded me of Ma Rainey (played by Viola Davis.) In Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Ma Rainey insists on having full and complete control of her creative process and fights the white executives of the recording studio to death when they attempt to exploit her voice for profit. She knows that as a Black woman, the white recording executives wouldn't give her credit and would make her produce her music without her or her band getting any royalties or pay. She knows her worth and she insists on getting the respect she deserves. She comes in late to recording sessions, and it's a summer day in Chicago, so the recording studio was hot with no A/C, so she demands that someone get her a Coca-Cola from the store. When she gets what she wants, she records the music for them. I think because she had the confidence to believe in herself, she could also stand up for her nephew when Levy, one of the bandmembers, picked on him for having a speech impediment. They have to record her nephew's introduction several times, and the executives nearly give up, but Ma insists they re-record it several times until he gets the introduction right. When he finally does, they are blown away and her nephew also regains his confidence that he was able to confidently record the introduction. This reminded me of in Being the Ricardos when Lucy insisted they do the scenes over and over even when the producer and crew wanted to move on and even when her writing staff was sick and tired of her and Desi making so many changes to the scripts. Lucy knew that if she didn't speak up, that she was going to lose her power and was going to let Jess, the producer, control all of the creative decisions for the show, and she wanted to have a say in the script. She also faced a really difficult time in her career, when RKO dropped her acting contract and refused to give her movie work, and instead gave her gigs in radio. She felt that radio was not where she was supposed to be, and it wasn't until some producers from television came and asked her to be in a TV show because they liked her distinct voice and style of humor that she was able to chart that new path for herself. Even still, she knew that she was dealing with a bunch of men who wanted to exploit her talent for profit, so she insisted on having artistic control. When meeting with the TV executives, Lucy agrees to do the show but insists on her real-life husband, Desi, playing her husband in the show. The executives are extremely reluctant to let Lucy, a white American woman, let her husband, who is Cuban, to play her husband on screen. I had to remember that this movie took place before the 1967 Loving vs. Virginia court decision, which struck down laws that prohibited interracial marriage (if you haven't seen the movie Loving, which shows how this case went to the court, it is incredible), and so these white male executives thought that they would get in trouble for showing an interracial couple on the air. However, Lucy pushes back, reminding them that yes, Desi is from Cuba, but he fought in the U.S. Army and has strong ties to America. This reminded me of how the music executives tried to tell Ma Rainey what to do, but she refused to let them exploit her music or her in any way, shape or form. If she hadn't pushed back, she would have suffered the same fate as one of the members of her band, Levy. Levy wrote his own music and thought that these white recording executives were going to pay him fairly for his music, but the white executives ended up stealing his music without giving him credit even when they lied and told him it wasn't the music they were looking for. This reminded me how Black musicians faced a serious uphill battle in the music industry to be fairly compensated and respected as human beings.
No comments:
Post a Comment