“I didn’t know that she had been accused of being a communist,” he recalls. “After that first meeting, I just wanted to find out if I was the only one who didn’t know that she was accused of being a communist. I asked around and it seemed like nobody knew, and that was kind of interesting. So we would meet maybe once a month, once every two months and at each of these meetings, he would give me more information about them that I found interesting.”
Sorkin says that what surprised him the most about Ball and Arnaz “even though it shouldn’t have” was “how different the two of them were from the iconic characters that they were playing.” He continues, “I discovered that there are many, many people who are intensely passionate about not Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, but Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, and think they’re the same people. When we’re asked to think of Lucille ball, we think of Lucy Ricardo, just like when we’re asked to think of Charlie Chaplin, we think of the Little Tramp, even though Charlie Chaplin didn’t look anything like the Little Tramp.”
It was the assistance of Lucie Arnaz, the real-life daughter of Ball and Desi Arnaz, who provided Sorkin with private home movies of the family’s life, which fully committed Sorkin to writing and eventually directing the project.
“In these home movies, they’re sitting around the pool and Lucy is barely recognizable because she’s a knockout, she’s a Rita Hayworth-level knockout,” he says. “In the 1950s, a woman couldn’t have any hint of sexiness on TV. But it wasn’t just the physicality. It was their personalities. I think what really hooked me in is that the two of them were so deeply in love with each other and yet couldn’t make it work, that there were these kind of hairline fractures built into both of their biographies and personalities that were going to prevent them from living happily ever after.”
Even with the wealth of material at his disposal, from the Arnaz family home movies to the books, to the extensive documentation of the show and its production, Sorkin says he wasn’t interested in writing a standard biopic: “I didn’t want a cradle to grave story where this happened and this happened, and this happened, and this happened–kind of a greatest hits album of Lucy and Desi.”
He continues, “I got it into my head that if I could tell a story that took place entirely during one production week of I Love Lucy, Monday table read to Friday audience taping, there might be something there. I had basically collected enough points of friction between Lucy and Desi, between Lucy and Vivian Vance, between all the characters that I felt like I had enough to write a good screenplay.”