There’s very little Amy Poehler can’t do. She serves as an executive producer on four projects that are currently on the air, including Emmy contenders “Russian Doll” and “Making It”, which she also co-hosted. She also performed the voice of two main characters in the animated series “Duncanville” from Fox, which she co-created.
Although she’s been behind the camera multiple times over the course of her career, this year has come with a whole new challenge: directing an Amazon Prime documentary about Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, titled “Lucy and Daisy.” Fortunately, the timing was perfect.
“Working on a documentary for the past few years has been very fortunate because a lot of it is research, interviews, and time with your editor, so I didn’t have a lot of experience on the site,” she says. diverse From filming during the COVID-19 pandemic. “I am very proud to work in an industry where a bunch of different unions came together very quickly to say, ‘We’re all going to do something that’s really going to be uncomfortable and unpleasant, and we’re going to hate it and we’re going to keep doing it to keep working. I think there is an incredible lesson to be had. There’s a lot of different people working on a movie, and they’ve all said alright, we’re going to do it so we can keep working so there’s still a little magic in it.”
Speaking of magic, Poehler chose some of the biggest names in the industry to take part in the document. Her goal was to show the off-screen side of the legendary duo, diving deeper into the lesser known aspects of their careers and Ball’s pioneering career as studio head.
“They set up their own studio. It’s a massive process,” producer Norman Lear says in the document. Carol Burnett refers to the ball as “courage,” while Bette Midler notes it has changed the game for women.
“We really wanted to try and just interview the people who knew Lucy and Daisy because the idea was to try to keep them alive or bring them back to life, to make them people rather than Halloween costumes,” Poehler explains. “Once that happens and you have people talking about how fun they are or how special they are, you kind of forget the flesh and blood part.
Once the team decided to focus on the relationship as the focus, “everything started falling into place” for the 102-minute document. “We really wanted to tell a love story. It’s a very long love story they’ve had. It’s going through a bunch of different changes publicly, in person and privately, and it really, I think, begs the question of what a successful partnership is? What does it look like? Who do you want with you at the end of your life?” Buehler says.
Although Paul and Arnaz were married from 1940 to 1960, and the heyday of “I Love Lucy” (1951-1957) was more than 60 years ago, the couple’s story “sounded very modern” to Poehler.
“It’s two outsiders, two turbulences, people who weren’t always invited into the room and made their way into the room, made decisions and the things they created, which they made decisions about is still the way we make television. Not much has changed,” she says. “The downside of that coin is that not much has changed.
Amy Poehler did hours of research to find the untold story.
Courtesy of Amazon Prime Video
“Lucy was a woman who ran a studio when no one was around, and Daisy is a Cuban-American immigrant, who comes to this country and decides he’s going to try to figure out the system and work within it, so it’s very, very objective and up-to-date, so we really wanted to make sure she felt that way.”
Bowler, like many, remembers watching the sitcom with her family or home sick from school. Then, as she got older, she began to realize just how pioneering and out-of-the-ball she was, then and now, and how laid-back the sitcom she had laid the foundation for today’s television.
“I think what this show did and what Lucy and Daisy did, is that they came up with the idea of rip and fix. We talked a lot about the movie — that feeling, in post-war America, that you’re going to sit down with your family and watch a problem get solved,” says Bowler. “This is what we see today in most sitcoms: How are we going to fix this?”
Paul’s real-life pregnancy coincided with Lucy being pregnant on the show, which was one of the first times this happened. At the time, CBS didn’t allow the word “pregnant.” Instead, consider “expectation” as more appropriate. It was nice, though, that CBS scheduled the 1953 episode to air on the same day as Desi Jr.’s reality ball delivery. By caesarean section, hoping to improve classifications.
“Just thinking about what it was like to be worried that your pregnancy would be something America wouldn’t accept, or that the networks wouldn’t want to film it, or that you’d have to dance around, it sounds funny and silly now, but that was definitely the case at the time,” As Buhler says.
PMC
Plus, Ball worked on all of it – just one of the many qualities he amazed the director with.
They did 41 episodes in 40 weeks. They were already three writers. It was Jess Oppenheimer, presenter and writer, Madeleine Pogue Davis and Bob Carroll Jr. I mean only three people wrote 41 episodes and that was tough work,” she says. “I think about it a lot when I specifically watch Lucy, who had two children at the height of Her career has been doing well. Work was really important to her. It is what you are most proud of. She had a lot of self-esteem about how hard she worked, and I think comedy and music have that thing, if you do it well, it sounds easy. People think they can do it and I’ve always been really impressed by how hard she’s working and how important it is to her that people know that.”
One of those people is her daughter, Lucy Desiree Arnaz, who was heavily involved in the document — which Bowler refers to as “a very special unicorn.”
“She has, in my opinion, a very healthy perspective towards her parents. Her parents are very, very famous and she has spent her whole life in fame and in the public eye and she also has to very fiercely protect their legacy. So there’s this interesting dance. I imagine working with someone like that can be really frustrating, Because they want a copy of their parents’ lives to stay intact, and I found it a real open book,” Bowler tells us. “It gave us an incredible amount of access to photos and videos as well as audio recordings, which was huge for us, because we really tried to tell the movie [in]Lucy and Daisy sound as often as we can. We want to hear from them.”
This wasn’t an easy task—”in that generation, the word shock wasn’t discussed, feelings weren’t discussed,” Bowler points out—but thanks to Lucy, they were able to fill in the blanks.
“She was this emotional hub that helped us give some context to what her parents were and what he was feeling,” she says. “Why I think she was so great in the movie is that she, like us, cared so much about her parents’ marriage. Children of divorce have their own view on their parents’ divorce. However, Lucy and Daisy were a husband to America, so it was really surprising that she gave us such a tender look and let us in and she was pretty weak about that because it was what we needed to make us feel connected to the story.”
Michael Schneider contributed to this story.
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