It was hours and hours of things. One of our producers was on [Ball’s daughter] Lucy’s house, and she pointed to the box, like, “What’s in it?” It was a real genie in a bottle when I found all these audio recordings. When you make a documentary, you understand that you and your editor [Robert Martinez, whose credits include “The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart”] like two people on a life raft. There was so much material and this was by far the most overwhelming. One day we decided to listen to Lucy and Desi tell us their story. [via the recordings]everything changed because not only did it make them feel alive and human, but we were able to age them as the movie progressed. While I strongly believe that most people are unreliable narrators, I think you learn a lot from what people don’t say, and that’s just as important as what they say. I was always very touched by the way they talked about each other.
The film gives you the feeling that, on the one hand, they support this very version of the 1950s happily ever after, but behind the scenes, at least later in their marriage, they struggled. Sometimes it’s hard to reconcile that with the Lucy and Ricky we see on TV.
Television is an intimate medium that you often watch with your family and they were the first to invent the idea of break and restore, i.e. maybe Lucy baked too much bread, or Ricky forgot his birthday, or something like that. and you think there’s no way they’re going to fix it and they fix it in the end and that’s okay. There is a deep desire, especially in post-war America at the time, to think, “Can anything be fixed? Will we be ok? Will the family stay together? And what really fascinated me was that they went through very human, difficult things that most people experience with success and marriage. You know everything that happens in a person’s life.
Have you discussed their marriage with the producers or your editor or why their relationship might resonate with today’s audiences?
Yes, we did try to break down the idea of partnership and ask questions about what makes a marriage successful. What Lucy and Desi do in their lives is work hard on themselves and their craft. They create this beautiful music together. And they continue to create separately, respecting each other and finding ways to work together. So the question always arises, what is a successful partnership? Their marriage falls apart, but they become parents and find new love. I enjoyed talking to Laura Laplaca. [director of the Carl Reiner Department of Archives and Preservation at the National Comedy Center] because she said America just didn’t accept their divorce. America was the same as not. But they showed what it’s like to get a divorce and show respect for each other. They paved the path. You know, if I had the privilege of talking to any of them, they would probably just live their human, complicated lives. They didn’t try to do any of that.
Desi passed away in 1986. Their daughter Lucy tells the touching story of how they got together to watch old episodes of I Love Lucy, which is, in a way, a bit happy but very bittersweet. What did this story mean to you, and what do you think it says about their marriage and this idea of a long and happy life?