The National Comedy Center has acquired a collection of I Love Lucy production materials that includes hundreds of previously unseen behind-the-scenes photographs and 35mm film prints of the show owned by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, it was announced Thursday.
The news comes on the 75th anniversary of the I Love Lucy’ premiere on Monday, Oct. 15, 1951, with the episode “The Girls Want to Go to a Nightclub.”
Also among the treasures is an original script draft representing earliest known revisions to the I Love Lucy pilot, back when the comedy was called The Lucille Ball Desi Arnaz Show and the main couple on the sitcom went by Lucy and Larry Lopez.
From the personal collection of original series writer Bob Carroll Jr. provided by his daughter, Christina Carroll, the script is part of a broader Carroll collection that features thousands of papers documenting his partnership with Madelyn Pugh and their decades-long collaboration with Ball, from My Favorite Husband through Life With Lucy.
Images in the collection capture Ball and Arnaz; Pugh, Carroll and fellow Jess Oppenheimer; cinematographer Karl Freund; and audience members, execs and family who visited the Hollywood set during the CBS series’ six-season run through May 1957.
The collection is being digitized and preserved in collaboration with Desilu, Too, the company led by Ball and Arnaz’s daughter, actress Lucie Arnaz.
“These photos and negatives have been sitting in boxes for many years,” Arnaz said in a statement. “Like the Lucy & Desi — The Love Letters book we recently published, we are glad that Lucy and Desi fans and historians of the early days of television alike will finally get the opportunity to see them.”
The National Comedy Center plans to unveil selections from this collection publicly for the first time at its Lucille Ball Desi Arnaz Museum in Jamestown, New York — Ball’s hometown — next year.
The Lucy Desi Museum will also spotlight 75 artifacts from the collection on social media over the coming months to mark I Love Lucy’s anniversary, sharing the story behind each object. Artifacts will include Ball’s “Professor” costume, worn during Lucy and Desi’s 1950 stage tour; the original I Love Lucy pilot and first-season episode “The Audition”; and a blue polka dot dress worn by Ball and a straw hat worn by her husband.
