How Todd Black Teamed With Aaron Sorkin To Make 'Being the Ricardos'

Aaron Sorkin Nicole Kidman Being The Ricardos — Aaron Sorkin and Nicole Kidman on the set of "Being the Ricardos" Amazon

UPDATED: Ever since Todd Black got into the film business as a producer, he wanted to work with Aaron Sorkin.

“I remember early on seeing things he wrote, even plays, and going ‘Wow, this guy has a voice like nobody’s business,'” says the Oscar-nominated producer of Fences.

However, Black says “I never had anything good enough to bring to him.” This goes back to some sage advice Black received from Denzel Washington years ago.

The two were having lunch at the Columbia Pictures commissary shortly after Washington took home a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Glory. The budding producer was eager to make a movie with Washington, but the actor told him, “‘When you read a script that keeps you up at night and makes your heart pound and you can’t get it out of your mind because of the characters and the story, call me. Otherwise, don’t call me again'” remembers Black. “And that’s kind of the way I felt with Aaron,” says the producer.

Long before Escape Artists, when Black was running Mandalay Pictures, he was trying to get the rights of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, except the estate wasn’t ready at the time. In recent years, the development of such a project raised its stakes when creative executive Jenna Block walked through Black’s door. Block had written her Wellesley College senior thesis on Ball’s film career, something which fascinated Black as he wasn’t that familiar with it.

“Todd asked me if I was interested in writing a movie about Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz,” says Sorkin on Crew Call who mentions he had a cursory knowledge of the early sitcom couple initially.

At NYC Contenders, Sorkin told Deadline, “the courtship” with Black and Block “was about a year and half” of meetings.

“They were just telling me stories, one of which was at that first meeting, and there would end up being six or eight of them over a year and half, was that Lucy was accused of being a communist, which I never knew,” said Sorkin.

“Nobody knew that,” Sorkin says, which prompted him to use that as a jumping-off point for his behind-the-scenes story about the married couple. Of most importance for the Oscar-winning screenwriter of The Social Network, he didn’t want to write a typical biopic about them.

“The biopic structure tends to be familiar to audiences, kind of like a greatest hits album,” Sorkin tells Crew Call.

Sorkin hammered out a spine whereby we’d get to know the Ricardos in the wake of Ball being hit with this scandal, and how Lucy and Desi weathered and thrived through a five-day production week of I Love Lucy.

Coming away from development meetings with Black and Block, Sorkin explains, “I was far from seeing the whole film in my head, but I was seeing how these points of friction between Desi and Lucy could become scenes, between Lucy and Vivian Vance, between Lucy and Jess Oppenheimer, Lucy and Bill Frawley. There were very interesting things there, stuff that makes them not at all like the people we think they are from I Love Lucy.”

At the Being the Ricardos first Q&A awards screening on Nov. 13 in Westwood, Sorkin described meeting Ball’s daughter, Lucie Arnaz, “She had said to me at this lunch, ‘Listen, take the gloves off, my mother wasn’t an easy woman. Go for it.’ That was the moment that tipped me toward something I should commit to.”

Listen to our chat with Sorkin and Black below on the making of Amazon Prime’s Being the Ricardos: