When a Stranger Calls (2006)

“I did this show so Desi and I could be together.’  Nicole Kidman’s Lucy says toward the end of Being the Ricardos.  The series was a home for its star, never mind the 60 million viewers who tuned in every week.  But I Love Lucy was a work of fiction that required tremendous sacrifice from its leads to the very end.  

Behind the scenes simmered a highly tense early Hollywood power-couple in the Arnez’s.  This was a passionate, well-publicized interracial marriage.  Uncommon at the time.  But Lucille Ball was not any ordinary ‘B-movie actress’ and Desi Arnaz was more than just a refugee bandleader from Cuba.  

Being the Ricardos is an ode to hard work, creative genius, and adhering to one’s instincts in the face of mounting pressures and potential backlash.  Nicole Kidman embodies Lucille Ball.  She is determined, conveying both a warmth and a cool demeanor simultaneously to get what Lucy wants out of her actors, directors, studio executives, and husband Desi Arnaz, played with verve and panache by Javier Bardem.

It’s a dynamic, multi-layered screenplay, honed by Aaron Sorkin-who’s also the director-that uses a faux-documentary framework to introduce a 1950's workplace drama with adept, quick-witted characters and heavy stakes.  Actors play real-life crew members interviewed on camera to recount specific events from one select week in the production of I Love Lucy in its second season in 1953.  In this 1-week time frame, we’re confronted with at least four problems that Lucy, our central protagonist, must deal with: the direction of a particular episode’s intro, her suspicion of her husband Desi’s infidelity, her pending pregnancy and its effects on the show and the possibility of her entire professional career coming apart due to a recent news article that accuses her of being a Communist.  

In addition to all of these challenges, we follow the legendary comedienne and her handlings of numerous figureheads during her time as an actor under an RKO movie studio contract and as a frustrated radio performer leading up to her early years in broadcast television.