Bob Carrol Jr. and Madelyn Pugh
The National Comedy Center’s Lucille Ball Desi Arnaz Museum has announced it will be preserving the archive of the creative team behind “I Love Lucy.”
The archive of acclaimed writer and producer Bob Carroll, Jr. and his writing partner Madelyn Pugh made up the legendary team along with producer Jess Oppenheimer.
The preservation of this collection – donated by Bob Carroll, Jr.’s daughter Christina – marks the first time that historians and archivists will be able to mine the inner workings of two of comedy’s greatest minds, as the Lucille Ball Desi Arnaz Museum showcases these creative papers, which were pivotal to the history of television comedy.
The collection features thousands of richly annotated creative papers and scripts written by Carroll and Pugh over five decades of radio and television, from Steve Allen’s radio shows and Lucille Ball’s My Favorite Husband radio program (the precursor to I Love Lucy) to multiple drafts of I Love Lucy scripts annotated by Carroll to scripts of Ball’s subsequent series: The Lucy Show, Here’s Lucy and Life with Lucy, representing a remarkable career-long creative collaboration between Ball, Carroll, and Pugh that spanned four decades.
Additional highlights include annotated scripts for Desilu projects written by Carroll and Pugh, including sitcoms The Mothers-In-Law and The Carol Channing Show, and feature films like Yours, Mine and Ours, as well as scripts for the Warner Bros./CBS sitcom Alice, starring Linda Lavin, produced and written by Carroll and Pugh. Among the most unique items in the collection are Pugh and Carroll’s personal correspondences, including concepts for unaired TV shows, many of which were possible vehicles for Lucille Ball, but also conceived for artists like Joan Rivers, Lily Tomlin, Diahann Carroll, Eva Gabor, and Suzanne Pleshette.
For more information about the Lucille Ball Desi Arnez Museum, visit https://lucydesi.com/
Leave a Reply