The Man Who Wrote Every “I Love Lucy” Script Dies In Hollywood
Posted January 30, 2007 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
You may not know the name Bob Carroll Jr.
But you’ll never forget what he created.
The man whose name was on every single “I Love Lucy” television script has died.
Carroll and his longtime writing partner Madelyn Pugh Davis were responsible for not only some of TV comedy’s pioneering moments but their most legendary.
It was Carroll and Davis who constructed the famous scene in which Lucy and Ethel worked in a candy factory, swallowing chocolates to cover up their ineptitude, until their boss tells the man behind the conveyer belt to “speed it up a little!” It was a variation on an old vaudeville classic, but it’s never been done better.
He also created the dialogue for Vita-Meata-Vega-Min, the concotion that gets Lucy drunk during a TV commercial.
And the rest of his contributions are legendary – Superman’s birthday visit, the John Wayne Grauman’s Chinese Theatre footprint heist, the Harpo Marx mirror scene re-creation, the bread baking scene, the grape stomping fight and of course, the ground breaking episode when Lucy – both fictional and real – gave birth to her son.
Carroll and Davis originally worked with the redheaded clown on her radio show “My Favourite Husband,” a gig they almost didn’t get because they were committed to another program.
“They actually conned Steve Allen into writing his own show one week and took the time off to write a spec script for Lucy,” family friend and writer Thomas Watson explains. “CBS and Lucy loved it, and they became the first permanent writers on ‘My Favorite Husband.”‘
Both essentially formed the character Lucy would carry with her the rest of her life on all subsequent shows, and wrote for “The Lucy Show, “Here’s Lucy” and the disastrous final attempt at a comeback “Life With Lucy”.
Ball died in 1989 and Carroll and Davis would appear on many tribute shows thereafter talking about the woman whose legend they helped create.
Both also penned the script for the 1968 film “Yours, Mine and Ours” – a move that Ball starred in with Henry Fonda.
Bob Carroll Jr. leaves a daughter and a legacy of incredible scripts behind.
He was 87.
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