Ebook excerpt: “Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Tv”
Simon & Schuster
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Within the new biography “Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Tv” (Simon & Schuster), Todd S. Purdum explores the impression on American tradition by the Cuban-born entertainer who (as husband and enterprise accomplice of Lucille Ball) modified the foundations of TV.
Learn an excerpt beneath, and do not miss Mo Rocca’s interview with Purdum on “CBS Sunday Morning” June 15!
“Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Tv”
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Prologue
He was adored as the person who liked 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 power be- hind it. He was, as NPR’s Planet Cash as soon as put it, the person who “invented tv.”
“There is a false impression that we—that Desi wasn’t all that necessary to the present,” Madelyn Pugh Davis, the founding cowriter of I Love Lucy, would recall years after his loss of life. “And Desi was what made the present go. And he additionally knew that she was the super expertise. He knew that. However he was the driving power, and he was the one who held it collectively. Folks do not appear to understand that.”
At present, practically 4 a long time after his loss of life, 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 nicely understood is the seminal position he performed within the nascent years of tv, serving to to remodel its manufacturing strategies, and reworking himself, a profitable however second-tier Latin bandleader, and his spouse, a journeyman actress in principally forgettable B motion pictures, into cultural icons.
It was Arnaz (and I Love Lucy‘s head author and producer, Jess Oppenheimer) who assembled the world-class workforce of Hollywood technicians who found out the way to gentle and movie the present in entrance of a dwell studio viewers, with three cameras in sync without delay—a then-pathbreaking technique that quickly grew to become an trade customary for state of affairs comedies that endures to today. It was his skill 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 potential 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 a long time, till the streaming period established a competing paradigm.
“I Love Lucy was an important a part of leisure on this nation,” stated Norman Lear, the creator of the landmark state of affairs comedy All within the Household and lots of different exhibits. “Lucy and Desi—I believe it may be stated they beautiful a lot opened the door of Hollywood to America, and to the state of affairs comedy. There was just one Lucy and one Desi, and between them, they knew what it took. He was a fantastic businessman within the persona of a beautiful 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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