Dear Pat:
I'm not being sarcastic either, but this really has been a rough thread. I reported on something I saw, something that falls within my area of professional expertise, and I was answered with citations from books. As a writer and editor, I'd like to offer a couple of observations about books and articles:
People who write books have to research them. Research often depends on interviews. When people are interviewed, they are not under oath, and trust me, they sometimes say things that are not true. Here is one example: Some years ago, I was asked to write a magazine article about the house seen at the end of
North by Northwest - the one at the top of Mount Rushmore. So, I began researching. The first place I looked was at some books on Hitchcock. They all said the same thing - that Hitchcock had had a Frank Lloyd Wright house copied for his movie. Now, when a bunch of books all say the same thing, there's usually one source for it, one that all the books are taking their information from. Sure enough, there was such a book. It was a book of interviews Hitchcock did with French director Francois Truffaut back in 1967. In that book, Hitchcock says - flat out, no equivocation - that he
copied a Frank Lloyd Wright house.
Now, I frequently write about Wright, and know a pretty fair amount about his work, and I was fairly sure that the house seen in the movie wasn't a copy of any Wright house. But that was a supposition on my part, so I researched, and went over the info available for every single Frank Lloyd Wright house ever built. Not finding any match, I called a friend of mine who is very, very expert about Wright and has published several scholarly works about Wright's buildings. He confirmed that the house in the movie had nothing to do with any house Frank Lloyd Wright ever designed. It looked quite a bit like one of Wright's houses, but Alfred Hitchcock had not - definitely not - done what he had claimed in an interview that he knew jolly well was going to wind up in print. What Hitchcock himself said about the house
was not true. You can read the finished story here:
http://www.jetsetmodern.com/modatmovies.htm
Now, all this brings up why an interviewee might say something that wasn't true. I'm an editor and writer, and I interview people pretty often. Most of them are as truthful as they can possibly be, but I've learned to double-check
everything I'm told and verify it independently, because people do mis-remember, or they'd like to build up their reputation, or they don't really remember and make something up, or they're trying to throw the interviewer off the track about something they would like to hide. And sometimes they just don't know the whole story. There are lots of reasons.
The events surrounding the founding of Desilu and the beginning of
I Love Lucy are nearly sixty years in the past. Much of the writing that has been done is based on information in the first major book on the subject, Bart Andrews'
The 'I Love Lucy' Book, which, as you know, was endorsed by Lucille Ball herself. While I believe Andrews did some very fine research (and so has Steven Coyne Sanders), I have never thought that enough research has gone into other shows of the period, to compare and contrast them with
Lucy.
When I mentioned the
Burns and Allen episodes, I was reporting what I saw in three 1951 eps. They are:
Teenage Girl Spends the Weekend (original airdate 4/26/51),
Space Patrol Kids Visit (original airdate 8/16/51), and
Gracie Gives a Wedding (original airdate 9/13/51). These eps are widely available on DVD from several companies, since they're public domain, the company mine are from is Digiview.
In all three of these episodes, I saw the unmistakable hallmarks of a performance filmed in front of an audience. There is genuine, warm applause when the stars make their first appearance in each ep, and Gracie's hand is so big that she has to make that little hand signal that stars use to quell applause. The laughs sometimes run over the dialogue. The actors sometimes "hold", meaning they pause while the audience is laughing, and continue saying their line only after the laugh has died down (there is absolutely no need to do this if canned laughs are to be inserted). And the laughs for George Burns' stand-up jokes on the sidelines are often pretty feeble, not huge yuks as they'd have been if they were canned. The sets are small like
Lucy's, not spacious like
My Little Margie's, which was filmed like a movie under soundstage conditions. And most importantly, the
Burns and Allen eps are not kinescopes, filmed off a TV screen - they are obviously film as film, intended to be shown on TV. I have any number of kinescoped shows in my personal collection, and these ain't kinescopes.
I have no earthly idea why Desilu people have claimed - or had it claimed in their behalf - that they "invented" three-camera, live-studio-audience filming for sitcoms. What I
do know is that I have seen another show that appears to have used the technique prior to
Lucy. It is possible that being such busy people (filming a movie or TV show is all-consuming) that the Desilu people didn't know that Burns and Allen had used the same technique right down Romaine Street from them.
You've heard from someone else who has seen the first episode (
The Kleebob Card Game, original airdate 10/12/1950) that George Burns actually shows the audience the set and how the filming was going to work. What this means to me is that more research into how Desilu came to be known as the originator of something, when there is evidence to the contrary, is needed.
I am not trying to say that I know everything there is to know about Desilu, or
I Love Lucy, but I do know film and I do know research, and there is obviously more research needed into this issue.
