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Annaleigh

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I've never read Desi's book. Worth a read?

:lucywow:  Seriously?? And with this crowd...you have to ask?! Yes, read it! It's as pivotal a "'sperience" as reading Lucy's book, given you can actually almost hear them while you read their respective tomes.

 

Too bad they didn't do audio books back then....wouldn't it be great to have both of these "as read by the author"??  Whoa! :HALKING:

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Harry, I agree with you -- I don't believe Viv  wanted to come back either. Besides being in her 50s, she had worked her whole life & never had kids in an era where that was the norm for women. After a bad marriage with Phil Ober, she finally found happiness with John Dodds. She was on a game show with Lucy as a surprise guest & mentioned that she had wanted to be introduced as Mrs. John Dodds & gushed about how happy she was being a homemaker.

 

I just finished watching Season 1 of TLS & just started on Season 2 & noticed that the intro goes from the stick figures of Lucy AND Viv in Season 1 to a montage of all Lucy pics (with one little Viv pick inserted into the collage at the end) in the Season 2 intro. I wonder if Viv was at all miffed about that?

 

Oh & Lotus Bud -- I echo everyone else here who says to read Desi's book! It's a great read. You'll hear his accent in your head with every word :) . I was lucky -- my mom(who saved so many books) had a paperback copy of it. Someone here once posted that they found a signed copy for a few dollars at a Goodwill store.

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It has long been speculated that Vivian deliberately made unrealizable demands because she wanted to be let out of her contract. It just wasn't important to her anymore. She wanted to be with her husband back east full time.

 

Don't KNOW about the last part; but, truly believe she did want to be with husband back east!  That's a believable theory; the rest is speculation;  Only she and Lucille (and their agents) knew the truth about the $$ demands.

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One thing I find particularly interesting in Desi's  A Book... is when he talks about how a TV set will be hung on a wall like a picture.  Hmmmm...  We do that now don't we... (I don't cause I can't afford a new tv) but it is a part of our reality and when Desi wrote about it, it was a goal of the television industry.  Just another interesting tidbit form his autobiography and of course being a big time television producer he would be privy to the new and wonderfuliy exciting world of tv. 

 

And of course tidbits like this always make me wonder what is cooking now that will be a reality someday???

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One thing I find particularly interesting in Desi's  A Book... is when he talks about how a TV set will be hung on a wall like a picture.  Hmmmm...  We do that now don't we... (I don't cause I can't afford a new tv) but it is a part of our reality and when Desi wrote about it, it was a goal of the television industry.  Just another interesting tidbit form his autobiography and of course being a big time television producer he would be privy to the new and wonderfuliy exciting world of tv. 

 

And of course tidbits like this always make me wonder what is cooking now that will be a reality someday???

Those wall size TV's, though still quite small were 24,000 dollars each when I first saw them in a store.  Now you can get a 70 inch one for a few thousand.

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I just finished watching Season 1 of TLS & just started on Season 2 & noticed that the intro goes from the stick figures of Lucy AND Viv in Season 1 to a montage of all Lucy pics (with one little Viv pick inserted into the collage at the end) in the Season 2 intro. I wonder if Viv was at all miffed about that?

 

It is odd how Viv really started taking a backseat in the second season. Once Mooney was introduced and more and more plots started focusing on Lucy outside the home, Viv became much more of a supporting character than she was in season 1, where she and Lucy were truly equals. She had her moments, of course, but her role was definitely diminished. I read somewhere that she was unhappy at being used less later during her run, and that it was one reason she started tiring of doing the show.

 

It's unfortunate there weren't more episodes like "The Loophole in the Lease" that utilized all three of them equally. All too often it was either Viv or Mooney.

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  • 2 weeks later...

We’ve discussed the unevenness of ILL’s first season.  Mainly that it was a new medium and many new things were getting worked out.  How to do a show in this new style, how to take radio writing and make it work for TV, and just the actors finding their characters.  With all that said many episodes are very good and I know some people here rank this season as their favorite.

 

I frequently pull season one episodes to watch but don’t rate it as my favorite season.  I got to thinking.  Would this season been worse off if My Favorite Husband never existed?  Many scripts were rewritten for TV thus the writes already had some footing to work off of.  In that same vein Lucy had done these similar scripts before, some even with the same lines, so when she did them again she was able to work on getting a bigger laugh or a new way to play it.

 

The format of the radio show also gave Lucy an arena to further hone her talent.  Even though she might not have realized she worked better in front of an audience, it gave her experience with it.  I’ve read that once she was told to be more physical with the acting you could hear it in how she played the role. 

 

So with this “practice” I think there were many elements that didn’t need to be created from new, the basics were there.  Had Lucy and the writers never had this prior experience what would these first episodes been like?  Would they have been as funny, would Lucy have been as good as she was.  I think that maybe they would not have been as good, but the talent was there in all so it may just have taken longer to show up, but it would have shown.  It might have taken longer to get the ratings it did, but at least TV back then gave you time to find an audience.

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  • 11 months later...

When Lucy died she was in the process of working on her memoirs. What if she had lived and finished this book? How would it differ from Love Lucy that was done in 1963/64?

 

I love Love Lucy but in subsequent rereadings it really comes off as pretty censored. What struck me from reading the Harris book is she is far more candid in the interviews for that book then she was in writing her own book 10 years later. I think that with age and much more of her career behind her she not only would have a lot more to write about but her reflection on the past would have come from much more life experience. When Love Lucy finished she was only 3 years into a new marriage, 2 years into a new series, and the kids were teenagers. By 1989 the kids are grown, the ex is dead, the career would still be going on, she’s been married for quite awhile. Would she be as concerned about hurting anyone with what she says or tarnishing her image? Lucy was asked in the early 80’s in a People magazine interview about writing a book and said that you shouldn’t do one until you were able to tell the absolute truth, which she thought was at about age 85.

 

Love Lucy covers her early life and childhood fairly well so I don’t think much really would change in this part. Then we get to the NYC years. I know we all want to know the real stories of life in NYC. I don’t think we are going to get some sort of big scandalous revelation that she was really a high class call girl for the mob and had some botched abortion. I do think there is stuff that went on in NYC though that may have not been as PG as she made it sound though.

 

Early Hollywood Years. From the little bit of the seminars I have heard it sounds like she talks very heavily and candidly about these years as it is very relevant to show how she started out and learned about her profession to influence the new up and comers. I think this section might have some new stuff in it and be based a bit on what she talked about in those seminars.

 

1940s. She really details out her film roles and supplies reviews throughout this decade which I think is nice but really generic. The Harris book glasses over this to talk more about her personal life. The 44’ divorce has way more details in the Harris book and feels more candid then how it comes across in Love Lucy. I want to know more personal stuff in this decade as I feel so much of what was covered was career.

 

1950s- What really new information are we going to get on the show that hasn’t already been published a dozen or more times. She covers it fine. I was actually surprised in Love Lucy to find out they went to counseling. First time I ever heard about it. You have to look at the time frame of Love Lucy being only a few short years after the divorce and it was still pretty fresh. Give it more decades and we might get some different insights into it. One thing she says in Love Lucy is that (at the time of writing) she came to realize Desi never really loved her. I also came across her saying this in a magazine article around the same time. I truly believe that at this mid 60’s point this is what she had to tell herself to more on. I also think she has got some pretty juicy stories from the last years of the marriage. The type of stuff that was worse then what made the gossip columns at the time.

 

Post 60’s- Ah the years that we never get much of. Lots of career stuff to talk about here. The series, the movies, the projects that never got off the ground, what it really was like running the studio and her true feelings on if she hated it, the failure of Life With Lucy. Tons of personal stuff too. The Gary years and what it was like being married to him, how she felt about the kids as they grew, married, and started their own careers. Having grandkids and would she talk about the comments where she kept saying she didn’t want to live to be a certain age. What it was like after 26 years of series TV to not have it anymore and how it affected her. I want more from the 80s as we have such little information and what we do have comes from others and their opinions of her in that decade. Getting awards and being honored is great but how at her age and with the best days behind made her feel? I really want to know how Desi’s death affected her and if she ever recovered from it.

 

So much to elaborate on and write about. How candid would she really have been?

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You can clearly see in some interviews that nothing is off limits for her, she is often brutally candid and speaks in a very NO NONSENSE sort of way which I now LOVE about her.  If she was around today, I dun't thin she would put up with any of those five minute FLUFF interviews that say absolutely nothing that we get from talk shows.

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