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The golden age of television is echoed in Amazon’s Being the Ricardos, which follows Lucille Ball (played by Nicole Kidman) and Desi Arnaz (Javier Bardem) during one week of production on the iconic ’50s sitcom I Love Lucy. “We wanted to pay homage to the era,” says cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth — a two-time Oscar nominee for The Social Network and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo — of his early conversations with writer-director Aaron Sorkin.
For production designer Jon Hutman, who won an Emmy for Sorkin’s political drama The West Wing, research also included stops at the Hollywood Heritage Museum in L.A. and the Lucille Ball Desi Arnaz Museum in Jamestown, New York (where Ball was from). “This was a combination of authentic research, but reproduced through the filter of the drama that we were trying to tell,” he says of his approach, which included delivering the sitcom’s sets (filmed at Sunset Gower Studios) as well as dressing rooms, offices and writers room (lensed at the Wilshire Ebell) and Ball and Arnaz’s ranch in Calabasas (exteriors were filmed at the Hummingbird Nest in Simi Valley). “The story that he’s telling is really from Lucy’s emotional point of view,” Hutman adds, explaining that viewers will see “this glamorous Hollywood life, and then appreciate what’s going on emotionally for her, which is how hard she worked to get it and how she’s afraid of losing it.”
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To “create a look that had some of the elements of that era,” Cronenweth chose a Red Ranger camera system with an 8K sensor, combined with ARRI’s DNA lenses “that has some interesting artifacting and imperfections built into it.” He also took a cue from I Love Lucy‘s innovative cinematographer Karl Freund, who created a then-new approach of shooting episodes simultaneously with three film cameras (he used Mitchell BNC cameras on Lucy) in front of a live audience with “flat” lighting that accommodated the simultaneous camera angles while enabling quick changes between shots. “That hadn’t been done before,” explains Cronenweth. “In a way, we did use their methodology to some degree. … We used a lot of Big Eye 10K, SkyPanels, and they had built these soft boxes, which are interesting for that era because not a lot of people were using soft light.”
The set decoration included period BNC film cameras and lighting; set decorator Ellen Brill and prop master Trish Gallaher Glenn worked with prop house History for Hire to obtain the gear. Hutman adds that cinematography also incorporated “actual period lighting fixtures, some of which we helped reproduce.”
On re-creating this period and story, Cronenweth says, “I thought it was very exciting and daunting because we knew that it means a lot to so many people for different reasons.” He notes his personal interest in capturing the era: “My grandfather [Edward Cronenweth] was a [Hollywood] still photographer in the same time. My dad [Jordan Cronenweth, of Blade Runner fame] was a camera assistant in that era. It was wonderful.”
“What was very moving and satisfying for me was to explore the roots and history of what we do today,” adds Hutman. “And, specifically, what was smaller-scale. The business was much smaller. The relationships were much more intimate. And that’s what I think you really get.”
This story first appeared in the Dec. 1 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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