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00:00:00. Maury Thompson: I met Lucille Ball onstage a same day that she met Vivian Vance. And it was a cold morning. She was late to arrive. And when she came in, she has had a long, long cold...
Maury Thompson. Camera and Electrical Department: The Lucy Show. Maury Thompson was born on 30 August 1916. He was a director and assistant director, known for The Lucy Show (1962), The Mothers-In-Law (1967) and Vacation Playhouse (1963). He died on 7 August 2000 in Irvine, California, USA.
- Maury Thompson
- August 7, 2000
- August 30, 1916
- CBS Didn’T Think Americans Would Buy That Lucy Was Married to A “Foreign” Man.
- Lucy and Desi Had to Take Their Show on The Road to Convince The Network Brass.
- Only Lucy Was Allowed to Make Fun of Ricky’s Fractured English.
- Smoking Was Required On-Camera.
- William Frawley Was Far from The First Choice to Play Fred Mertz.
- Doris Ziffel Was Almost Ethel Mertz.
- The “Mertzes” Despised One Another off-camera.
- Desi Arnaz Had Lifts in His Shoes (and His Loveseat).
- Arnaz Flatly Rejected A Scene That Involved Ricky Cheating on His taxes.
- The Candy Lady Was A Big Dipper in Real Life.
When CBS approached Lucille Ball with the offer of turning her popular radio show My Favorite Husbandinto a television show, she was agreeable with one condition: that her real-life husband, Desi Arnaz, would be cast in the role of her spouse (played on the radio by Richard Denning). The network balked—there was no way that American viewers would a...
Arnaz had a successful career touring the country with his rhumba band, which was one of the reasons Lucille wanted him to get cast as her TV husband—to keep him off the road and close to home. In an effort to show the network (and potential sponsors) that they could work together as a comedy team, they crafted a sort of vaudevillian skit that was ...
After a few episodes were filmed, it became an unwritten rule that only Lucy would ever poke fun at her husband’s pronunciation problems. The writers had allowed other characters to make remarks, but in each case the “joke” was met with stony silence from the studio audience. For some reason, it seemed cruel when anyone other than Lucy “mucked” Ric...
I Love Lucyalmost never made it to the air because CBS had trouble securing a sponsor for the show. Finally tobacco giant Philip Morris signed on at the 11th hour. As a result, lots of smoking was featured in each episode, and the name “Philip Morris” was worked into the dialogue whenever plausible. There was, however, one small problem: Lucille Ba...
Lucille Ball was eager to have Gale Gordon, whom she’d worked with on her My Favorite Husband radio show, play crusty neighbor and landlord Fred Mertz. But Gordon, who had a steady gig at the time on the Our Miss Brooks radio program, asked for more money than Desilu had to offer. Character actor William Frawley knew Ball in passing (they’d met bac...
Lucille had worked with Bea Benaderet in radio and wanted her to play Ethel Mertz. But Benaderet had just signed on to play Blanche Morton on the TV version of The Burns and Allen Show and was unavailable. Barbara Pepper was a personal friend of Ball’s, and the two had worked in films together, so she was the next serious consideration for the role...
Vivian Vance was 22 years younger than her TV husband and resented having such an “old poop” play her spouse. Frawley responded in kind, referring to her variously as “that sack of doorknobs” or just plain “b*tch.” But all that animosity was strictly behind the scenes and known mostly only to the series’ writers and directors. Frawley and Vance wer...
Arnaz listed his height as 5’11” in most official biographies, but those who worked with him knew that in reality he was 5’9” and wore four-inch lifts in his shoes. Lucille Ball stood 5’7” in her stocking feet, and when she wore heels she seemed to tower over her husband. Desi Arnaz Jr. would later explainto an interviewer that his father “was a Cu...
Desi Arnaz was an unabashed believer in the American Dream and was very patriotic when it came to his adopted homeland. Desi was 17 years old when Fulgencio Batista overthrew the Cuban government and the Arnaz family fled to Miami with little more than the clothes they were wearing. The family lived in a warehouse with some other refugees and Desi ...
“Job Switching” (often referred to as “The Candy Factory Episode”) has long been a fan favorite, particularly the scene where Lucy and Ethel are stuffing their faces and clothing with chocolates while trying to keep up with a speedy conveyor belt. The previous scene featured Lucy hand-dipping chocolates with a real-life dipper that stage manager He...
Maury Thompson. On the afternoon of Oct. 28, 1884, about 800 people, many from out of town, listened in a drizzling rain in the park at Sandy Hill (now Hudson Falls, N.Y.) as third-party presidential candidate Benjamin Franklin Butler delivered a 90-minute speech.
May 14, 2020 · Maury Thompson. Maury Thompson has been quoted in The New York Times as an expert on the Glens Falls economy, in ELLE magazine as an expert on regional politics, and on the British sweater fashion blog Celtic-sheepskin as an expert on the luxurious feel of cashmere.
The Lucy Show is an American sitcom that aired on CBS from 1962 to 1968. It was Lucille Ball 's follow-up to I Love Lucy. A significant change in cast and premise for the fourth season (1965–1966) divides the program into two distinct eras; aside from Ball, only Gale Gordon, who joined the program for its second season, remained.
Oct 18, 2023 · Maury Thompson. Maury Thompson is a freelance writer and documentary film producer from Ticonderoga who specializes in the history of politics, labor organizing and media in New York's North Country. He previously was a reporter for The Post-Star of Glens Falls for 21 years.
