Todd Purdom
speaker
44 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Todd Purdom’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, no, Terry, they weren't. First of all, they were very concerned that he was different, that he had a thick accent. And they just did not believe that widespread American audiences would believe him as the husband of an all-American girl like Lucille Ball. Of course, the irony is they had been an all-American couple for 10 years already in real life.
He said at one point his ambition was to be the Cuban Mickey Rooney. And he really was a little bit like Mickey Rooney. He could do comedy. He could do music. He could play the drum. He could sing. And he struggled to find a workable niche in Hollywood. He was always a little bit off. He never quite fit into Hollywood's stereotype of what a Latin performer should be.
Yes, and he was apparently in person a very, very compelling entertainer, a wonderful showman who could hold the audience in the palm of his hand. He wasn't a classically great musician. He was self-taught. He never learned how to read music. He wasn't a spectacular drummer. His Latin music, his Cuban music was, by the lights of authentic Cuban music fans, not the most pure version.
It was a kind of popularized American version that brought those Cuban musical forms to American mass audiences. But apparently the whole package was pretty overwhelming when you saw him in the flesh.
Yes, he was an adequate singer, but he was not an incredible vocalist. There's no doubt about that.
No, she'd been working steadily in movies since 1933. This is 1950, 51, when they're trying to get the show on the air. She was approaching the age of 40, which then, as now, was a very dangerous age for a female actress in Hollywood.
She had worked steadily, but she'd never really broken through as a major A-list star, and she was beginning to be known as the Queen of the Bees, the second-tier movies that rounded out double features.
Yes, what happened was she was in the last gasp of really big network radio. It was a sitcom about a zany wife and her fifth vice president of a bank husband called My Favorite Husband. And CBS realized that television was catching on and the Lucy show had been successful. So they wanted to transfer to TV. And the only way she was willing to do it is if Desi played her husband.
But he himself realized he could not plausibly be the fifth vice president of a bank. Richard Denning, who was the actor who played her husband on the air, was a blonde, waspy, jut-jawed kind of actor. So they were struggling to have a different concept and one that CBS, which was running My Favorite Husband, would accept. Finally, Desi said, I have an idea. We'll go on a vaudeville tour.
We'll take my band on a tour of movie houses around the country in big cities. And you can perform comedy and we'll perform comedy and music together and prove to the suits at the network that the public will accept us as a team. And in the summer of 1950, that's what they did. And it was a spectacular success all over the country. And finally, CBS and the sponsor, Philip Morris, agreed.
No, they were these charming little animated stick figures drawn by the Hanna-Barbera animation team, the people who created Tom and Jerry, the cat and mouse. And Lucy and Desi were frolicking on top of a package of cigarettes and dancing around as the show began. And the velvety-looking heart logo only came later in reruns.
Well, in 1950-51, television was almost completely a live medium, and it was centered almost completely in New York because it was dominated by the advertising agencies who were there. The challenge for broadcasting across the whole country was it wasn't yet possible to beam a television signal all the way from New York to California.
So if a show was produced in New York, it was seen live in the eastern two-thirds or so of the country to around maybe St. Louis, Kansas City, something like that. And then in order to broadcast it in the West Coast, they had to film using 16 millimeter film off a television monitor. And they produced a very poor duplicate called a kinescope that videotape had not yet been invented.
So the problem was shows that were produced in one place and shown in another had a very poor visual quality. One of the challenges that you can't, even now you'll notice probably sometimes if you watch a movie and a television screen appears in the background, it vibrates and has a kind of a jiggly moiré quality. Because the speed of film is different from the speed of the video image.
Digital has changed some of this. But in any case, Lucy and Desi, the whole goal of the show was to work together, live in Los Angeles, where they were about ready to have their first child, their daughter, Lucy Desiree Arnaz. And the sponsor and CBS wanted them to come and do it in New York. And they said, no, no, no, we don't want to do that. And that's when CBS said, well.
We're certainly not going to have you do it live in Los Angeles and make the most important markets in the country watch a blurry kinescope. So you'll have to film it. And that will cost more.
His basic idea was, let's film it on 35mm film stock, just like a movie. But because CBS and the sponsor also realized that Lucy performed best in front of a live audience, as her radio show had demonstrated, they wanted to film this television program also in front of a live audience.
Well, as you probably know, a movie is filmed most of the time with a single camera set up over and over again for each shot. Every close-up of a reaction, it involves a separate camera setup. And to try to film a half-hour situation comedy like that would have been in those days very cumbersome. It would have also wrecked the spontaneity.
It would have been complicated to capture the laugh and reaction. So they came up with this notion of using three cameras at once in synchronicity, filming the show like a play. And while a game show, the Ralph Edwards' Truth or Consequences had been experimenting with that technique, no one had ever really done it for a play, you know, like a sitcom.
So, Desi went around talking to various cinematographers, including the Academy Award winning cameraman, Carl Freund. who had started out in German expressionist cinema in the 20s and 30s and come to Hollywood like so many emigres from Europe. And he said, you can't do it. And Desi said, why? He said, because you have to light separately for the close-ups, for the medium shots, for the long shots.
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