“Lucy and Desi,” a new documentary from director Amy Poehler, tells the true story behind the television trailblazers who changed the landscape of Hollywood.
In the first trailer, which dropped on Monday, icons like Bette Midler, Carol Burnett and Norman Lear attempt to put into words the impact that Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz had on the entertainment industry.
“They established their own studio. That’s an enormous operation,” marvels Lear. “She was fearless,” says Burnett, who counted Ball among her mentors. Midler adds, “You realized, women can do this, too!”
“Lucy and Desi,” which premieres March 4 on Amazon Prime Video, explores how Ball and Arnaz met, fell in love and created a TV empire that would cement their legacy in showbiz. As one of the industry’s most prolific power couples, Ball and Arnaz founded Desilu Productions, the company behind “I Love Lucy” and countless other popular shows, like “Mission: Impossible” and “Star Trek.”
The trailer gets into the good, the bad, and the ugly (the couple eventually divorced because of Arnaz’s adultery) of their near-mythic story. In short, as the couple’s daughter Lucie Arnaz says in the trailer, there was a cost to their success. “Work became our whole life,” Ball admits through archival footage.
Poehler says she was drawn to direct the documentary in an effort to give audiences a better sense of Ball and Arnaz as real people.
“Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, over the years, have been kind of flattened out and made two-dimensional,” Poehler told Variety before the movie premiered at Sundance Film Festival. “I was really interested in seeing the people behind the images.” She added, “People use words like ‘genius’ and ‘icon’ and ‘trailblazer,’ but those aren’t human words. [Laughs] Those were words for machines and astronauts, which — they were both astronauts, for sure, and they were ahead of their time. But they were also people.”
In Variety’s review, chief film critic Owen Gleiberman called the documentary “nimble” and “fascinating.”
“‘Lucy and Desi’ is a captivating record of how they turned a sitcom into a national dream,” he wrote.
