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Aaron Sorkin – you got a lot of explaining to do.
Lucie Arnaz, the daughter of the late Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, is getting candid on the director’s 2021 film “Being the Ricardos.”
The 73-year-old still has a bone to pick about some of the plotlines in the film despite her and her younger brother, Desi Arnaz Jr., serving as executive producers on the Prime Video project that starred Nicole Kidman as the iconic Lucille and Javier Bardem as Desi.
“I tried to work on it and correct the incorrect parts, especially [my mother’s] relationship with the writers,” Lucie said while at a screening of the 1993 special “Lucy & Desi Home Movies” on Thursday. “Totally wrong, right? She adored those people. They got along so well; none of that backstabbing, crazy, insulting stuff.”
She said the storyline was “such a crock of poop” and “so wrong.”
Lucie had an problem with how the relationship between Vivian Vance and William Frawley, who played Ethel and Fred on “I Love Lucy,” was portrayed. In her words, the tension was “overly done.”
“You can’t talk to Aaron. He’s Aaron Sorkin,” Lucie said about trying to speak with the director over inaccuracies.
The actress noted that Sorkin told her he would be open to “meaningful consultation” but ended up responding, ” ‘Well, what do you know? You were 15 months old.'”
Keith Thibodeaux, who played Little Ricky, the son of Lucy and Arnez’s Ricky Ricardo on “I Love Lucy,” was also on the panel, telling the audience about Sorkin’s movie, “It’s well done and all that, I just didn’t get it.”
The Post reached out to a rep for Sorkin for comment.
“Being the Ricardos” was well received by audiences and critics, earning three Academy Award nods, with both Kidman, 57, and Bardem, 56, garnering best actor nominations.
In 2021, Lucie told Palm Springs Life that the “Babygirl” star was “extremely classy and first rate,” adding the cast were all “really great performers.”
“Nicole did a spectacular job,” she gushed. “What she did was astounding. She’s got such poise and class.”
However, at the same time, Lucie doubled down, stating that she saw “certain scenes” of the film that she “wished” Sorkin hadn’t included.
Lucie noted: “I couldn’t get my way and have them taken out, but they weren’t accurate. And I thought, ‘That shouldn’t be in there, because that never happened. That’s not true.'”
“And it’s not just theatrical license, it just wasn’t true,” she continued. “And the day they shot the scene, the sprinklers went off on the set and destroyed the whole set.”
That same year, Kidman told NPR, “So there was the ‘I Love Lucy’ show, and I just thought, well, if I can create literally a carbon copy of her in the show where I look like her, I move like her, I sound like her, all of those things — and I really studied that for months, like watching it, rewinding, starting again, getting the timing, working on it, working on it, working on the sounds with my dialect coach.
“If that can be accurate, that then gives me the license to do Lucille Ball, as Aaron said, with the sexuality, with messy hair, with all the things that do not make you go, oh, right, that looks exactly like her. There’s a feeling of her, but there’s a human being here.”
A year later, Bardem told People that he could feel Arnez’s spirit on set.
“When you play a character like him, you are invoking his spirit and essence, and you have to be respectful with that,” he explained. “Every time I would come back from the shoot, I would talk to him. I would look at the stars and let him know how the day went. And I would ask for his blessing and permission to go for the next day.”
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