They Live Lucy : Television: The producers said they wanted unknowns to audition for ‘Lucy and Desi: Before the Laughter.’ Redheads came running.

Hello friends.

I’m your Vitametavegamin girl.

Do you poop out at parties?

Hello friends.

I’m your Vitametavegamin girl.

Hello friends . . . .

Kymberly Tucker came all the way from Dallas, clutching a Lucille Ball biography and photographs of herself impersonating the great comic actress. A landscaper who bears a terrific resemblance to Ball, she even brought a mock People magazine cover with a shot of herself smiling as Lucy.

Denise Harrington flew in from Boston. She bought a “Lucy” dress at Time After Time on Melrose and hired the store’s resident make-up artist to do her red lips, false eyelashes and Peter Pan dress. Harrington’s was the third Lucy dress sold at Time After Time last week.

Tucker and Harrington were among 238 unknown and mostly unknown actors--and teachers and engineers and landscapers--who on Monday answered an open casting call put out by CBS for a television movie about the courtship and early marriage of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.

Together, they formed a pre-dawn procession of redheads and pompadoured Latino men, singing the “I Love Lucy” theme, exchanging Lucy trivia and occasionally belting out an “Ethel!” or a mumbled line of beleaguered Spanish.

“I think they’ll pick an unknown to do the part,” said Tony Rael, who had been waiting since 5 a.m. for a chance to audition as Desi. “To show that it can still be done.”

The Cuban-born Rael, who teaches art at an elementary school in Bel-Air, earned a callback by singing, “I love Lucy and she loves me/We’re as happy as we can be”--which he had learned while waiting his turn in the CBS parking lot--for producer Larry Thompson.

Thompson, whose Larry Thompson Organization is producing “Lucy & Desi: Before the Laughter” for CBS, said Monday’s cattle call, along with similar sessions in Miami and New York later this week, are part of an earnest effort to find unknown actors to play the famous pair.

“In light of the fact that so many people in America and around the world have such an image of what these people look like, we’d like to cast people who don’t bring their own fame to the role,” said Thompson. A well-known face “would get in the way” of audience acceptance of the cast, he said.

He acknowledged that the glittery, choreographed audition process might engender a little publicity, but insisted that the purpose was really to discover the perfect Lucy and Desi.

“I have been getting calls from everything from a woman who said she was Lucy incarnate and had to play the part, to a woman from Australia who wanted directions to my office,” Thompson said.

By noon Monday the producer had sat through dozens of renditions of the “Vitametavegamin” skit from the “I Love Lucy” episode in which the star auditioned for a TV commercial for an alcohol-laced health serum.

“I am learning what I don’t want,” Thompson said with a tired smile.

During the auditions, Thompson and his casting director, Holly Powell, were all politeness and encouragement, answering each “Do you poop out at parties?” with such Hollywood expressions as “That was very exciting” and “You certainly are well-prepared.”

If the Lucys were selling bottles of peppy pepper-upper, Desis tended to audition with a song.

They call me Cuban Pete

I’m the king of the rumba beat

Every night I go chick chickaboom, chick chickaboom, chick chickaboom.

Randy Aguirre, an engineer/actor, wasn’t disappointed when his version of Cuban Pete didn’t merit a callback.

“I came today hoping to get a souvenir,” Aguirre said. He held up a yellow ticket with his audition number, 13, printed on it. “I got this. I was kind of hoping it would say, ‘The great Lucy and Desi search’ on it, but it just says 13.’ ”

No one in the crowd looked more like Desi than Bill Reyes, a manufacturing engineer/drummer from Oceanside who prepared the scene in which Desi explained to a judge why Lucy wrapped up a hunk of cheese as if it were a baby.

Outside, in the lot, Reyes had led a half-dozen Desis, posed like a line of old-fashioned soul singers, in the “Lucy” theme for clicking photographers and whirring TV cameras.

Even Roberto Lopez, better known as El Vez, the Mexican Elvis, showed up. “I’m a natural,” he declared with his usual bravado. “I figure, I didn’t get to play little Ricky as a kid, so I should at least have a shot at playing Desi now, right?”

The life of Desi Arnaz is the subject of another production currently in the works, a stage musical by the daughter of the comic duo, Lucie Arnaz.

The younger Arnaz expressed displeasure that CBS was planning to air Thompson’s movie, saying that “the climate is wrong” to do the story of her parents’ romance. She said that she had extremely mixed emotions about the film, despite CBS insistence that it will not be exploitative.

And while the scene at CBS could have easily been taken from one of Lucy’s own skits, with hopeful actresses tripping over themselves to get a crack at stardom, the crowd at Monday’s audition was not nearly the size Thompson’s public-relations representatives had hoped for. Press releases sent out by CBS and the Thompson Organization had invited reporters and photographers to witness a spectacle involving an anticipated 1,500 redheads and Cuban bandleaders.

Besides the open calls, Thompson has scheduled private interviews for 29 better-known actresses who have expressed a desire to play Ball.

The actresses are mostly very famous, he said, and all hungry for the part.

But he wouldn’t say who had auditioned, or whether their Vitametavegamin girl was any better than the ones seen Monday.

He was still looking.

“Meryl Streep hasn’t called,” he said.