The Million Dollar Idea
by Jess Oppenheimer
(from "Laughs, Luck...and Lucy")
"THE AGREEMENT that Lucy's agent, Don Sharpe, had made with CBS called for an audition program to be delivered to the network in less than six weeks, but we still had no series concept. Don sent me the material that had been written by outside writers earlier that fall. I read and rejected all of it, just as Lucy and Desi already had. I preferred to stick closer to the flavor of 'My Favorite Husband,' which was working so well for Lucy. But we couldn’t simply take the radio series and move it to the screen--even Lucy admitted that the public would never buy the notion of Desi as a small-town banker.
We held a series of brainstorming meetings at CBS Columbia Square, trying to come up with an acceptable premise for a TV series for Lucy and Desi. We were all asking ourselves, 'What do you do with a comedienne and a Cuban orchestra leader?' Then one day, at one of the meetings, I hit upon an idea that I thought might work. I turned to Harry Ackerman, who was seated next to me at the conference table, and said 'Why don’t we do a show about a middle-class working stiff who works very hard at his job as a bandleader, and likes nothing better than to come home at night and relax with his wife, who doesn’t like staying home and is dying to get into show business herself?' That was the nucleus. CBS liked the idea, and, best of all, so did Lucy." |
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