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Desilu Productions
Fate	Purchased by Gulf+Western in 1967, who renamed the company Paramount Television
Successor	Paramount Television; Lucille Ball Productions
Founded	1950
Founder(s)	Lucille Ball; Desi Arnaz
Defunct	December 1967
Headquarters	USA
Products	Television Production
Parent	Gulf+Western (1967)

Desilu Productions was a Los Angeles, California-based company jointly owned by couple and actors Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball.

Desilu Studios was home to I Love Lucy, and additionally, such hit television series as Star Trek, The Andy Griffith Show, Mission: Impossible, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Make Room for Daddy, The Untouchables, I Spy, Harrigan and Son, Mannix, Wyatt Earp, Our Miss Brooks, The Real McCoys, Gomer Pyle, USMC, That Girl, and, after 1960, The Jack Benny Program . Some short-lived programs also came from Desilu, such as Frank Lovejoy's 1957-1958 detective series, Meet McGraw.

Its successors were Paramount Television and Lucille Ball Productions.

[edit] History

[edit] Origins

The company was formed in 1950. The name is taken from a combination of "Desi" and "Lucille", and named after their ranch in Chatsworth, California, located about 25 miles (40 km) northwest of Hollywood in the San Fernando Valley.

Desilu was initially created to produce Lucy and Desi's vaudeville act that was created so the couple could prove to CBS executives, who wanted to adapt Ball's CBS radio series My Favorite Husband to television, that the American public would accept Cuban Desi as married to Scotch-Irish American Ball. The TV project eventually became I Love Lucy, films of which the Arnazes retained ownership of in return for taking reduced salaries.^[1]

For the first few years of I Love Lucy, Desilu rented space (Stage 2) at General Service Studios (now the Hollywood Center Studios), on Santa Monica Boulevard and North Las Palmas Avenue in the Hollywood section of the City of Los Angeles. Stage 2 was named "Desilu Playhouse" and a special entrance was created on Romaine St. on the south side of the lot.

[edit] Technological innovations

Desilu is often mistakenly credited with being either the first television studio to shoot on film instead of making a live broadcast, or as the first television studio to shoot on film with a multi-camera setup. However, neither is true. Earlier filmed series included Your Show Time, The Stu Erwin Show, and The Life of Riley; and Jerry Fairbanks had developed and was using multi-camera film production for television in 1950.^[2] Desilu's innovation was to use a multi-camera film setup before a live studio audience.

To this end, Desilu began the creation of its productions using conventional film studio materials, production and processing techniques. The use of these materials and techniques meant that the 35 mm negatives (the source material for copyright purposes) were immediately available for production and distribution of prints when the Lucy series went into syndication at local stations around the country. As such there are no "lost" episodes of programs, or programs recorded by kinescope from the television broadcast.

By using conventional Hollywood filming and production techniques the content and quality of Desilu productions was immediately of high quality and was easily adaptable to different forms comedy or drama, indoor sets, outdoor sets, or special effects.

[edit] Ball's role in the company

Ball's contribution was more on the artistic side and was equally important to the success of Desilu. By the late 1940s, Ball had spent most of her previous 20-year motion picture production career in "B" motion pictures in all forms: comedy, variety, drama, action/adventure, and westerns. By then, her nickname had become "Queen B", i.e., Queen of the "B" movies. This experience made her knowledgeable of the public's taste for continuing this form of entertainment in the medium of television.

By the time Desilu was reviewing and developing the content of proposals for new television entertainment productions, Ball had developed a sense for which of the many programming proposals offered to Desilu would be popular to a broad audience (like the "B" motion picture); and be successful in both their original broadcast and syndication re-runs.

Ball grasped that while the content or flavor of the "B" pictures was narrow, the public's appetite for (and satisfaction with) them was undiminished.^{[citation needed]} In understanding this, her ideas about production content were in complete harmony with the production financial model for television pioneered by her husband.

In that model, high quality (i.e., high cost), original production concepts (e.g., The Untouchables; Star Trek) were approved by Lucy for development into broadcast series, based upon her judgment and assessment that the proposed project would have the public's long-term acceptance and enjoyment, thus ensuring an immensely profitable revenue stream from the program through post production broadcast re-runs, which would more than recover the studio's initially high development and production costs.

As a result, even decades after the absorption of Desilu Productions, and the production end of all of the original television series Desilu approved for development, the series have all achieved enduring success in post production re-runs, redevelopment into feature length motion picture franchises in their own right, or both (e.g., Star Trek, Mission Impossible, and The Untouchables).^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Peak years

Desilu soon outgrew its first space and in 1954 bought its own studio: the Motion Picture Center on Cahuenga Boulevard in Hollywood,^[3] at the site of what is now the Ren-Mar rental studio; most of I Love Lucy was filmed there.

In late 1957 (taking possession in 1958), the company also bought the RKO Pictures properties, including its main lot in Culver City, with the backlot known as Forty Acres, and another lot on Gower Street in Hollywood. These acquisitions gave the Ball-Arnaz TV empire a total of 33 sound stages — four more than Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and eleven more than Twentieth Century-Fox had in 1957.

Much of the studio's early success can be traced to Arnaz's unusual business style in his role as producer of I Love Lucy. For example, lacking formal business training, Arnaz knew nothing of amortization, and often included all the costs incurred by the production into the first episode of a season, rather than spreading them across the projected number of episodes in the year.

As a result, by the end of the season, episodes would be nearly entirely paid for, and would come in at preposterously low figures. In addition, Arnaz took the unprecedented step of buying the episodes of I Love Lucy for an astoundingly low cost from CBS, realizing, as the network did not, the potential of the rerun.

The studio's initial attempt to become involved in film production was the 1956 film Forever, Darling, Arnaz and Ball's follow-up to their highly successful The Long, Long Trailer (1954), but it failed at the box office. It was produced at Desilu, but under the banner of Zanra Productions, "Arnaz" spelled backward. Most subsequent attempts to bring projects to the big screen were aborted, until Yours, Mine and Ours (with Ball and Henry Fonda) in 1968. This film was a critical and financial success.

Another Desilu loss was Carol Burnett, who declined to star in a sitcom for the studio in favor of a weekly variety show that ultimately lasted eleven seasons. (Burnett and Ball, however, remained close friends, often guest-starring on one another's series.)

[edit] Ball as sole owner

In 1960, Desi Arnaz sold the pre-1960s shows to CBS (Desilu retained ownership of those shows which premiered before 1960, but were still in production). Contrary to popular belief, Desi Arnaz did not sell his share of Desilu due to his divorce with Lucille Ball. Since Desilu had already begun producing Ball's follow-up series The Lucy Show by that point, it was decided that Ball should be the one to assume full ownership.

In November 1962, Arnaz resigned as president and sold his holdings to Ball, who succeeded him as president.^[4] This made her the first woman to head a major studio, and one of the most powerful women in Hollywood at the time. Ball later founded Desilu Sales, Inc (now part of CBS Television Distribution).

After leaving Desilu, Arnaz left television production for a few years but returned in 1966 as head of "Desi Arnaz Productions", based at Desilu, to produce The Mothers-in-Law for NBC. Other Desi Arnaz Productions pilots included a comedy with Carol Channing and an adventure series with Rory Calhoun, which were shot but never sold. Arnaz was determined to create a law drama entitled Without Consent, with Spencer Tracy as a defense attorney, but after several attempts at developing a suitable script failed, the project was abandoned.

[edit] Closure

For a number of years, Ball served as President and Chief Executive Officer of Desilu, while at the same time starring in her own weekly series. Eventually tiring of the stress, in 1967 Ball sold the company to Gulf+Western, which merged it with its film studio (and Desilu's next-door neighbor), Paramount Pictures, and renamed it Paramount Television (now called CBS Television Studios) around December 1967.

As a result, Desilu's six series on television at the time, Mission: Impossible, I Spy, Mannix, The Andy Griffith Show (which was co-produced by CBS), The Lucy Show and Star Trek changed packagers to Paramount (CBS would buy back the rights to The Andy Griffith Show and The Lucy Show soon after each series ended, both series would eventually be distributed by Viacom Enterprises; while NBC bought back the rights to I Spy after that show ended, the show was later distributed by National Telefilm Associates).

Desilu/Paramount TV's holdings are currently owned by CBS Corporation, incidentally the eventual owner of the pre-1960s shows. Desilu Productions Inc. (a/k/a Desilu Too L.L.C.) was reincorporated in Delaware in 1967, and still exists as a legal entity, mostly as a licensee for I Love Lucy-related merchandise. Paramount themselves continues to hold DVD distribution rights to the CBS library.

After the sale of Desilu, Ball formed, with then-husband Gary Morton, "Lucille Ball Productions" to produce her next show, Here's Lucy, the first season of which was co-produced by Paramount Television. PTV sold its share after the first season (with the series moving off its Paramount soundstage, relocating to Universal Studios in the fall of 1971), and Ball later sold syndication rights to Telepictures, later merged into Warner Bros. Domestic Television Distribution. Here's Lucy's current distributor is Paul Brownstein Productions.

[edit] References

^ A.H. Weiler, "Team of Ball and Arnaz Will Make Own Movies," New York Times, June 18, 1950, p. X4.
^ "Flight to the West?" Time, March 6, 1950.
^ Louella Parsons, "Lucille and Desi Eye Real Estate," Washington Post, May 22, 1954, p. 37.
^ "Arnaz Quits Presidency Of Desilu; Former Wife, Lucille Ball, Gets Post," Wall Street Journal, Nov. 9, 1962, p. 18.

[edit] Further reading

Desilu: The Story of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, by Coyne Steven Sanders & Tom Gilbert, William Morrow, 1993.

[0] A.H. Weiler, "Team of Ball and Arnaz Will Make Own Movies," New York Times, June 18, 1950, p. X4.

[1] "Flight to the West?" Time, March 6, 1950.

[2] Louella Parsons, "Lucille and Desi Eye Real Estate," Washington Post, May 22, 1954, p. 37.

[3] "Arnaz Quits Presidency Of Desilu; Former Wife, Lucille Ball, Gets Post," Wall Street Journal, Nov. 9, 1962, p. 18.

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