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Within the new biography “Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television” (Simon & Schuster), Todd S. Purdum explores the influence on American tradition by the Cuban-born entertainer who (as husband and enterprise accomplice of Lucille Ball) modified the principles of TV.
Learn an excerpt under, and don’t miss Mo Rocca’s interview with Purdum on “CBS Sunday Morning” June 15!
“Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television”
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Prologue
He was adored as the person who beloved Lucy, the flamable Cuban bandleader whose spluttering Spanish and long-suffering straight man’s frustration on the comedian antics of his loopy spouse softened right into a loving embrace on the finish of every episode. However Desi Arnaz was a lot greater than Ricky Ricardo. If Ball’s good clowning—her magnificence, her mimicry, her versatile face and fearless ability at bodily comedy—was the creative spark that animated I Love Lucy, Arnaz’s pioneering show-business acumen was the important driving pressure be- hind it. He was, as NPR’s Planet Cash as soon as put it, the person who “invented television.”
“There’s a misconception that we—that Desi wasn’t all that important to the show,” Madelyn Pugh Davis, the founding cowriter of I Love Lucy, would recall years after his dying. “And Desi was what made the show go. And he also knew that she was the tremendous talent. He knew that. But he was the driving force, and he was the one who held it together. People don’t seem to realize that.”
At the moment, almost 4 many years after his dying, Arnaz the performer stays a extensively recognizable determine—”one of many nice personalities of all time,” as his buddy the dancer Ann Miller as soon as put it. A lot much less properly understood is the seminal position he performed within the nascent years of tv, serving to to remodel its manufacturing strategies, and remodeling himself, a profitable however second-tier Latin bandleader, and his spouse, a journeyman actress in principally forgettable B films, into cultural icons.
It was Arnaz (and I Love Lucy‘s head author and producer, Jess Oppenheimer) who assembled the world-class staff of Hollywood technicians who discovered the way to mild and movie the present in entrance of a dwell studio viewers, with three cameras in sync without delay—a then-pathbreaking methodology that quickly turned an trade commonplace for scenario comedies that endures to this present day. It was his potential to protect these episodes on crystalline black-and-white 35-millimeter movie inventory that led to the invention of the rerun and later to the syndication of long-running collection to secondary markets. This innovation additionally made it doable for the middle of community tv manufacturing to maneuver from New York to Los Angeles and created the enterprise mannequin that lasted unchallenged for the higher a part of seven many years, till the streaming period established a competing paradigm.
“I Love Lucy was a crucial part of entertainment in this country,” stated Norman Lear, the creator of the landmark scenario comedy All within the Household and lots of different reveals. “Lucy and Desi—I think it can be said they pretty much opened the door of Hollywood to America, and to the situation comedy. There was only one Lucy and one Desi, and between them, they knew what it took. He was a great businessman in the persona of a wonderful entertainer.”
Excerpted from “Desi Arnaz” by Todd S. Purdum. Copyright © 2025 by Todd S. Purdum. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
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“Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television”
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