‘Yours, Mine’ and hers...

One afternoon in 1967, when she was a student in college, Lynne Joiner decided to drop in on her father while he was at work. Her dad, Mel Shavelson – who passed away in 2007 at the age of 90 – was a successful Hollywood producer-writer-director. At the time, he was directing the Lucille Ball-Henry Fonda comedy, “Yours, Mine and Ours,” which he’d also co-written.

The film, a critical and box office hit when released in 1968, will be screened this Monday, Jan. 16, as part of the Vintage Film Series at the Sebastiani Theatre. Joiner herself will be on hand to introduce the film, and to tell a few stories.

Including, most likely, this one:

“They were shooting an outdoor scene that day, I think, probably outside of the house,” Joiner recalls, as she carefully settles her recently-broken leg – it’s a long story, and it involves her cat – on a nearby stool after taking a seat at her west Sonoma home. “My dad was busy,” she says, “always the man in the middle whenever he was directing a film. But there was his director’s chair, with his name on it, ‘Mel Shavelson.’”

Nearby, she says, was another chair, with the name “Lucille Ball.”

“My dad was working with the actors, so I sat down,” she says, with a smile. “I sat in Lucy’s chair. And Lucy immediately sent someone over to ask me to please not sit in her chair. She wasn’t sitting in it. She was working a scene. But she wasn’t about to have anyone else sit in any chair that had her name on it.

“And that,” Joiner says, with a laugh, “is what I remember the most about Lucille Ball.”

She affectionately adds that her father was always proud of the work Ball did on that film, which many critics consider the actress’s finest non-television performance.

“My father believed that Lucille Ball was the finest comedian in show business,” she says, “but like a lot of successful people in Hollywood, she needed a lot of strokes and confidence building.”

In fact, while shooting one iconic scene in the film – a scene in which Ball was required to simultaneously be drunk, embarrassed, cautious, silly, sexy, and 100 percent in love with Henry Fonda’s character.

“My father described shooting that scene in his autobiography,” Joiner says, referencing Shavelson’s 1990 memoir “How to Succeed in Hollywood, Without Really Trying, P.S., You Can’t.”

In the book, he relates how Ball approached him, asking for the scene to be cut, claiming that no actor could make all of that work.

“You’re right,” he told her. “There’s no one who can do it, Lucy. No one but you.”

The scene became one of the film’s most memorable moments. Based on the true story of Frank and Helen Beardsley, who between them had 20 children, 18 from previous marriages, the film was remade in 2005, but the result was a box-office flop. The real-life Frank Beardsley, Joiner says, lived the last years of his life in Santa Rosa, where he passed away in December of 2012. Helen died in 2000.

Starting out as a joke writer for the legendary comedian Bob Hope, Shavelson worked his way up from radio to television, and eventually became one of the industry’s most dependable writer-directors. Along the way, he directed such A-list actors as Clark Gable, James Cagney, Danny Kaye, Frank Sinatra, Robert Duvall, Lee Remick, Jack Lemmon, Charlton Heston, Barbara Harris, Sophia Loren, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Yul Brynner, Jason Robards and many more. In addition to writing the screenplays for all-but-one of the movies he directed, he crafted dozens of scripts for other directors, putting words in the mouths of such luminaries as Doris Day and Groucho Marks.

His films as writer-director include Hope’s 1955 classic “The Seven Little Foys,” “Houseboat” (1958) – that one is Joiner’s personal favorite – plus “The Five Pennies” (1959), “Cast a Giant Shadow” (1966), and “The War Between Men and Women,”

“I remember when Thurber came over to our house for dinner,” Joiner says. “He was almost completely blind, and he ate by feeling around with his hands on the plate. But after a minute of noticing that, I forgot all about it, he was so interesting, and his stories were so wonderful.”

In 1990, Shavelson co-wrote Bob Hope’s autobiographical “Don’t Shoot! It’s Only Me!” The book was just one of several Shavelson wrote, a remarkable output that included the novel, “The Eleventh Commandment.” The book, which Joiner keeps on a shelf along with many of her dad’s others, features a back-cover blurb from none other than Lucille Ball.

Wrote Ball, “Only Mel Shavelson could mix politics, religion, sex and the world oil crisis in this outrageously funny book.”

Of all of her father’s accomplishments and honors – including two Oscar nominations and many other awards – Joiner says she’s proudest of one in particular.

“The library at the Writers Guild of America is named for my dad,” she says. “He has president of the Writers Guild three different times, and led them in two successful strikes. Now his name is on the library. My father worked hard his whole life. He was a very funny man, but he had a very serious commitment to his work.”

Asked about the number of films he made about large families, from “Seven Little Foys” to “Yours, Mine and Ours,” Joiner laughs.

“He loved making movies with kids,” she says. “And I don’t mind admitting that I sometimes hated some of those kids, especially the Foys, because when he was working on a film, he saw them more than he saw me. But by the time he made ‘Yours, Mine and Ours,’ I was old enough to understand. By then, I was just proud of everything he’d done.”

Email David at david.templeton@sonomanews.com.