Todd Purdum
speaker
82 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Todd Purdum’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
cameraman carl freund who had started out in the 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 and then as a sheer intellectual challenge for and said but let me see if we can figure something out so he devised an innovative system of so-called flat overhead lighting and
that would light the set adequately for all three camera angles at once. And then, because a motion picture studio is a working factory floor with all kinds of dangers, cables and electricity and fire hazards, they had to figure out a way to get an audience in there to watch it. So they built a set of wooden and metal bleachers, had about 300 people come into this soundstage.
They had to cut a special door in the street side of the of the soundstage so that people could have adequate fire exit. And that became the method that with, you know, a few changes is still used today was used for shows like Friends, The Big Bang Theory. Most sitcoms today are still shot using this same basic technique.
Well, because television in those days was a bland, sponsor-driven mass medium that to some degree, the way it does now, except it depended on the most innocuous fare to offend the fewest number of people. And if you had a pregnant woman on the air, especially a really pregnant actress, it would betray the way that you get pregnant, which is by having sex.
And sex did not really appear on television in those days. So, Lucy and Desi fought hard with CBS to do this, and they thought, Desi particularly thought there could be a whole series, and the head writer and producer, Jess Oppenheimer, thought there could be a series of very tasteful, very charming episodes that would show what happens when people have a baby.
And, uh, finally, uh, ultimately Desi only found out a couple of years later, he'd, he'd gone over the heads of the network executives to the chairman of Philip Morris and written him a letter saying, we've given you the number one show on television.
If you don't want us to be responsible for writing it anymore, then you'll have to figure out how to get the number one show on television and we can't be responsible anymore. And he later learned that the chairman of the, of the company had sent a memo to his staff, basically saying in the very pungent terms that I'm not going to say on the radio that Don't mess around with a Cuban.
So they were allowed to do the episodes. And they were so concerned about doing it in good taste that they hired a tripartite panel of a priest, a rabbi, and a Protestant minister to vet the scripts and be on the set when they were filming to make sure that everything was done in good taste.
It's incredible. It's incredible.
Well, in future years, Desi recalled in a years later interview with David Letterman how you couldn't say the word pregnant on television.
No. So he said in his wonderful accent, had to say spectin. And the audience in David Letterman's show laughed out loud, of course. And Desi took a beat in a classic deadpan, you know, and then said, spectin was better anyway. And Letterman's like, it still is because you can't get a laugh with the word pregnant. Whereas, you know, spectin is pretty funny.
She probably would have been approaching like five months or something. And one of the things apparently about her pregnancies, she showed early and large in her pregnancy. She she she tended to balloon up, which is why they they couldn't hide the pregnancy. They would have had to stop producing the show if they couldn't have pregnancy be part of the plot.
And so, of course, the episode then continues from that wonderful scene you just played. She finally goes down to the nightclub and devises a ruse to tell him there in public. And it's a charming scene when he realizes that he's going to be the father.
The show and they were meta before meta was meta, you know, and the synergy of their real life relationship, the relationship on the show, it all played into each other. And the episode in which the baby was born on television had been filmed weeks before the baby was born in real life.
And then because Lucy had had a C-section with her first child in those days, if you'd ever had a cesarean section, you had to cesarean section for all subsequent children. So her surgeon happened to do his operations on a Monday. So she pre-scheduled the birth of the real life Desi Jr. for Monday morning. So Desi Jr.
was born on Monday morning in real life at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles. And that night on the air, millions of Americans saw little Ricky born on the air. But they weren't actually happening in real time.
Yes. Well, Jim Bacon, the Associated Press reporter, was sitting with Jesse outside the delivery room. And within seconds of the word that the baby, the real life baby had been born, the news was flashing all over the world and was worldwide headlines in Japan and Europe and every place in the world.
Absolutely. And I think it's also another proof, Terry, that the public is so often ahead of the leadership in these kinds of questions. People prove totally capable of accepting the fact that these people had a baby without being horrified.
I think it was. From the moment they met each other, it was a classic case of love at first sight or, you know, very powerful attraction. They got married within six months of meeting each other. They were each pretty seriously involved with other people when they met and they promptly dumped those other people and saw only each other.
The problem was from the very beginning that Desi had an idea that he could stray sexually and it shouldn't matter to his wife because his wife was his wife and that's all that mattered.
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