For his film about I Love Lucy’s famous on-screen/off-screen couple, Aaron Sorkin compresses real-life events into a week of high drama. The writer/director of Being The Ricardos talks to Screen about telling the truth differently.
By his own admission, Aaron Sorkin can take some persuading when it comes to signing on for a new project. “I start out just looking for reasons to say no,” he explains. “Just trying to talk the producer out of wanting to hire me.”
Two ideas eventually got the playwright-turned-filmmaker to say yes to producer Todd Black and to Being The Ricardos, the third feature — after 2017’s Molly’s Game and 2020’s The Trial Of The Chicago 7 — that Sorkin has both written and directed.
One was to compress the story of Hollywood TV icon Lucille Ball and her Cuban-American husband Desi Arnaz into a single week of work on their 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy, a week in which they face personal and professional crises including their network’s panicked reaction to Ball’s pregnancy and a threat to put the star on the anti-communist blacklist.
“I like those claustrophobic situations,” says Sorkin of the limited timeframe, “and when I thought of that, suddenly I stopped trying to talk Todd out of hiring me.”
The other idea — which occurred during one of the stress-relieving drives in his car that are part of Sorkin’s creative process — was that a famous catchphrase from the show reflected Ball’s craving for domesticity and Arnaz’s waywardness. “It struck me that the most iconic line of dialogue from the most iconic television series ever was ‘Lucy, I’m home’,” Sorkin recalls, “and that if I set the table just right, ‘Lucy, I’m home’ could be the punchline for the whole movie.”
The resulting behind-the-scenes drama — produced by Black’s Escape Artists, acquired by Amazon Studios and given a limited theatrical release before its late-December Prime Video streaming debut — covers events that all happened. However, Sorkin shows them happening over five days rather than two years.
The technique can raise questions about historical accuracy. Ball and Arnaz’s daughter and the film’s executive producer Lucie Arnaz, for one, “took a moment or two” to accept the construct, Sorkin concedes.
But the approach, the writer/director insists, “gets to the difference between accuracy and truth, or a photograph and a painting”. According to Sorkin, who has argued the point in regard to previous fact‑based work such as his script for The Social Network, journalists produce a figurative photograph of real-life events and characters, while dramatists are always doing a painting. The script becomes a painting, he says, “as soon as you write ‘fade in’ and make up a line of dialogue. People don’t speak in dialogue, their lives don’t play out as a series of scenes that form a narrative. That’s what a dramatist does.”
Building the characters
Being The Ricardos lead actors Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem got the message from the get-go, in a Zoom call that preceded the rehearsal period (made brief due to the pandemic) before a shoot that was conducted under Covid-compliant conditions. “The very first thing I said to them was, ‘I am not looking for an impersonation of the real people,’” Sorkin recalls of the online meeting. “‘This isn’t Las Vegas, you’re not Elvis impersonators. I want you to play the characters in the script.’”
The direction, he adds, “seemed to free them up” to deliver a drama that is driven as much by emotion as by Sorkin’s trademark pithy dialogue and political manoeuvring (Kidman and Bardem are both SAG-nominated for their performances).
“It is not a movie about the blacklist, even though the blacklist plays a big role in it,” Sorkin says. “It’s about why these two people who are plainly so in love with each other, who respect each other, adore each other, protect each other, why can’t they get it together and make this marriage work?
“Desi grew up in a culture with a very narrow definition of manhood, so it’s difficult for him to be second banana to a woman. And for Lucy it was this need for domesticity, which she can’t get from Desi.”
When it does deal with the 1950s blacklist, however, Being The Ricardos inevitably brings to mind the ‘cancel culture’ of the last decade. That is a subject that has recently touched Sorkin due to his association with producer Scott Rudin.
Rudin produced or executive produced Sorkin projects The Social Network, Moneyball, Steve Jobs and HBO series The Newsroom, as well as Sorkin’s hit stage adaptation To Kill A Mockingbird, currently running on Broadway but on a pandemic hiatus. Last April the producer left the Mockingbird team and announced he would likewise “step back” from film and streaming projects after allegations surfaced of abusive behaviour — for which Rudin said he was “profoundly sorry” — towards his staff and others.
After initially avoiding public comment, Sorkin recently told Vanity Fair he is “furious” about the behaviour and feels Rudin “got what he deserves”.
Sorkin still describes Rudin as “a fantastically talented producer” but insists he is not defending the once-powerful New York film, TV and theatre figure. “I was unaware there was any kind of physical violence in his office,” Sorkin says. “Most of us were, or we wouldn’t have worked with him.”
The airing of such allegations, Sorkin adds, could help end the workplace abuse and other problems that have lately roiled the film and TV industries: “Sunlight being the best disinfectant,” he suggests, “I hope things are going to get better for people who are victimised by this.”
Workplace abuse and cancel culture might end up being subjects for a future project from a writer/director who has always displayed a keen sense of how people and work interact. But right now, Sorkin reports, “For the first time in a long time I don’t know what I’m doing next.”
There is a stage play in early preparation for New York’s Lincoln Center, which would give the one-time aspiring actor another billing in the field where he got his first big break with the 1989 stage production of A Few Good Men — which also, with its 1992 film version, gave him his first big script sale and screen credit.
Television, the medium for his early hits Sports Night and The West Wing, still has its attractions. “I love coming to work with the same people every week and I love the kinds of stories you can tell in that format,” Sorkin says. But the hard deadlines mean that when the work is not going well “you have to keep writing and you have to put that script you didn’t write well on a table for the cast and crew and then you have to point a camera at it. That’s a very tough pill to swallow.”
He has writer and director credits on his last three film projects. But in all three cases, directing was a task he only took on at the suggestion of producers who had read his script, and he still sees the possibility of writing a script and then handing it over to another director. “I really enjoy directing and I want to do much more of it,” he says, “but I’m also not done wanting to work with great directors.”
So the next move in film will probably be determined by what he chooses to write about. And on that subject, Sorkin is not giving much away.
“I’m not looking for a theme, I’m not looking for a genre,” he says. “I’m just looking for something where I have a chance — not a guarantee, just a chance — of writing a good screenplay. That’s what I want.”
No comments yet