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Desilu Productions
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Desilu Productions was a Los Angeles, California based company jointly owned by American actors Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. The name is a portmanteau of their first names. The studio was named after Arnaz and Ball's ranch in Chatsworth, California, located about 25 miles northwest of Hollywood in the San Fernando Valley.
Desilu Studios was home to I Love Lucy, and additionally, such television series as Star Trek, The Andy Griffith Show, Mission: Impossible, The Untouchables, Mannix, The Lucy Show and I Spy.
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The company was formed in 1950, initially producing Ball's CBS radio series My Favorite Husband, while developing a television version that eventually became I Love Lucy.[1] For the first few years of I Love Lucy, Desilu rented space at General Service Studios (what is now the Hollywood Center Studios), on Santa Monica Boulevard and Las Palmas Avenue in the Hollywood section of the City of Los Angeles.
Desilu soon outgrew their first space and in 1954 bought their own studio: the Motion Picture Center on Cahuenga Boulevard in Hollywood,[2] 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, and 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. (Forever Darling was produced at Desilu, but under the banner of Zanra Productions, "Arnaz" spelled backward.)
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.) Pilots for a comedy with Carol Channing and an adventure series with Rory Calhoun 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 scrubbed.
In 1960, Desi Arnaz sold the pre-1960s shows to CBS. After Arnaz and Ball's divorce in 1960, the two attempted to continue to run Desilu together, but soon realized that they could no longer work together, and that one of them needed to buy the other's stake in the company. 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 1962, Arnaz resigned as president and sold his holdings to Ball, who succeeded him as president.[3] This made her the first woman to head a major studio, and one of the most powerful women in Hollywood at the time.
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 other production company (and Desilu's next-door neighbor) Paramount Pictures and renamed it Paramount Television (now called CBS Paramount Television) around December 1967. As a result, Star Trek was no longer a Desilu production but a Paramount production.
Desilu/Paramount TV's holdings are currently owned by CBS Corporation, incidentally the eventual owner of the pre-1960s shows. Desilu Productions Inc. was reincorporated in Delaware in 1967, and still exists as a legal entity.
The name is spoofed in the television show The Simpsons as Krusty The Klown's "Krustylu Studios".
In the Saturday Night Live spoof "Fear Factor Junior" one of the answers the host tells a little girl is "Desilu Productions".
People can still see Lucy's old dressing room on the former Desilu Gower property, by taking the Parmaount Studios tour; along with a fish pond, she and Desi had built for their children Lucie Arnaz and Desi Arnaz Jr.
- ^ A.H. Weiler, "Team of Ball and Arnaz Will Make Own Movies," New York Times, June 18, 1950, p. X4.
- ^ 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.
- Desilu: The Story of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, by Coyne Steven Sanders & Tom Gilbert, William Morrow, 1993.