Unseen I Love Lucy Photos and Pilot Draft Join National Comedy Center
The National Comedy Center has acquired hundreds of never-before-seen behind-the-scenes photographs and other production materials from I Love Lucy, in a deal announced 75 years to the day after the show first aired.
The haul includes 35mm film prints, meaning cinema-grade film copies, once owned by stars Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, according to The Hollywood Reporter. It also holds an original draft of the pilot script, described as the earliest known set of revisions to the first episode.
That draft shows how different the comedy almost was. The early version was titled The Lucille Ball Desi Arnaz Show. The central couple were called Lucy and Larry Lopez, not Lucy and Ricky Ricardo. The draft came from the personal collection of original series writer Bob Carroll Jr. and was provided by his daughter, Christina Carroll.
I Love Lucy premiered on CBS on 15 October 1951 with the episode 'The Girls Want to Go to a Nightclub'. It ran for six seasons through May 1957, a run that made the multi-camera sitcom, meaning a comedy shot with several cameras in front of a live audience, the standard for American television comedy.
The collection is now being digitised and preserved in collaboration with Desilu, Too, the company led by the couple's daughter Lucie Arnaz. Work includes scanning photographs, scripts and film elements for long-term storage.
The public will not have to wait long to see results. The Center plans to unveil selections from the collection for the first time next year at its Lucille Ball Desi Arnaz Museum in Jamestown, New York. Jamestown was Ball's hometown.
The museum, at 203 West Second Street, is run alongside the main Center under a Dual Admission ticket covering both sites, according to the National Comedy Center. To mark the anniversary, the Lucy Desi Museum will also share 75 artefacts from the collection on social media over the coming months.
One of those pieces is Ball's 'Professor' costume from the stage tour she and Arnaz performed together in 1950, a year before the series began.
What makes this stand out is the paper trail. Photos tell fans how the show looked. A writer's draft shows how it was built, name by name and joke by joke.
