Hollywood watch
Rob Long
Once, sitting in a chaikhana somewhere in Uzbekistan, I looked up at the flickering television set to see an old episode of I Love Lucy, the iconic (and first) situation comedy broadcast on American television in the 1950s.
It was an oddly comforting sight. I had been away from home for several months. I was travelling alone. My stomach wasn't quite settled. But somewhere in Tashkent, I suppose, an Uzbek television programming executive had imagined that his viewers might enjoy the tales of a daffy redhead and her long-suffering musician husband. He was probably correct. People have loved that show for more than half a century. In the United States, at least, it's been in continuous reruns since its final first-run episode in 1956.
Jet-lagged and up late, I've caught episodes of I Love Lucy on hotel televisions in South East Asia, South America, Europe and Africa. I've seen them all, of course - it's sort of a given, if you're an American of a certain age - but if I'm flipping through the dial and catch sight of an episode, I'll always stick around to watch.
I Love Lucy was a physical show. Lucille Ball, the redheaded star, was a gifted slapstick comedienne - she was more given to pratfalls and hilarious stunts than snarky dialogue or withering insults. The most famous episodes almost always involved some sort of outlandish predicament: Lucy at a chocolate factory, trying to keep up with the speeding conveyor belt of chocolates by eating every other one; Lucy in Italy, bluffing her way through a grape-stomping; Lucy on a window ledge; Lucy in an Indian princess costume, trying to wiggle her way into her husband's nightclub act; Lucy and an enormous, expanding loaf of bread that bursts out of the oven and pins her to the wall.
It's hilarious. Trust me.
But like all brilliant set-ups, I Love Lucy started as a very different thing. We know how it turns out - Lucy the daffy redheaded wife; Desi the long-suffering Cuban bandleader husband; Fred and Ethel Mertz, the bickering neighbours and landlords - but when Lucy and Desi started creating a television series in 1951, they didn't have all the elements totally worked out.
The early pitch centred around the exploits of a Cuban band leader and his wacky redheaded wife, but it also included a Spanish clown called "Pepito" and a guy playing the band leader's agent. In many ways, it's a perfect Hollywood story: the project starts out one way, and gradually develops into another, funnier, more winning hit.
It's sort of like watching a group of people invent the wheel - it's so obvious to us now that a round thing under a heavy thing makes the heavy thing easier to move that it's hard to remember a time when things weren't so self-evident.
Most of I Love Lucy was written by the legendary comedy writer Madelyn Pugh Davis, who died last week at 90, and who singlehandedly proved false the notion - held quietly and dearly by a lot of comedy writers - that women, for the most part, aren't funny.
No comedy writer will ever admit that, publicly, anyway. But it's a male-dominated business, comedy writing, and I have yet to step into a writers' room that isn't permeated with a locker room vibe - nasty jokes, rather blue language, aggressive laughter - that isn't exactly female-friendly.
Davis, then, must have been something to watch, especially back then, in the unenlightened 1950s. Perhaps because she was a female writer writing for a female star it was a little easier, but not much.
For the first three decades of the television business, white men wrote everything: they wrote for women, for African Americans, for Jews and Gentiles, for cowboys and Indians, for Martians and talking horses. It's only been in the past decade or so that female television writers have really stepped to the front, rewriting the rules of the boys' club that is the typical writers' room. I Love Lucy's Madelyn Pugh Davis was a very lonely pioneer.
She and Lucy and the team went on to work on a lot of subsequent television shows, but they'll always be remembered in perpetual reruns in hotel rooms, chaikhanas, and late-night television marathons for that first series, the Ur series, I Love Lucy.
It was a perfect marriage: Davis in the writers's room, and Lucy in that unforgettable set, the small New York apartment with the sofa downstage centre and the mantel stage right, waiting for Ricky to come home from the club.
Rob Long is a writer and producer based in Hollywood
