Desilu Productions

Company name	Desilu Productions
Company logo
Fate	Purchased by Gulf+Western in 1967, who renamed the company Paramount Television
Successor	Paramount TelevisionLucille Ball Productions (in part) Desilu, Too, LLC (in part)
Foundation	1950
Defunct	December 1967
Founder	Lucille BallDesi Arnaz
Location	USA
Products	Television Production
Parent	Gulf+Western (1967)

Desilu Productions was a Los Angeles, California-based company jointly owned by actors Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, who were married to each other from 1940 to 1960.

Desilu Studios was home to I Love Lucy, and additionally, such hit television series as , The Andy Griffith Show, , The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Lucy Show, My Three Sons, Family Affair, Make Room for Daddy, The Untouchables, I Spy, Whirlybirds, 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. Some of these programs were created and owned outright by Desilu; others were other production companies' programs that Desilu filmed or to which Desilu rented production space.

Its successors were Paramount Television, Lucille Ball Productions (a result from sales of Ball's portion of Desilu to Paramount) and Desilu, Too LLC (a result of Arnaz's share of Desilu after his death).

History

Origins

The company was formed in 1950. The name is taken from a combination of "DESI Arnaz" and "LUcille Ball", and named after their ranch in Chatsworth, California, located about northwest of Hollywood in the San Fernando Valley.

Desilu was initially created to produce Lucy and Desi's vaudeville act that was conceived 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.

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.

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. 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.

Through the use of orthodox Hollywood filming and production techniques, the content and quality of Desilu productions displayed a high standard from the very outset. Moreover, they were readily adaptable to either comedy or drama formats and were able to handle special effects or feature interior or exterior sets and locations with equal ease.

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. 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).

Peak years

Desilu soon outgrew its first space and in 1954 bought its own studio: the Motion Picture Center on Cahuenga Boulevard in Hollywood, 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.)

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 when his holdings in the company were bought out by Ball, who succeeded him as president. 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, and from his remaining share of Desilu formed his own company, Desi Arnaz Productions, based at Desilu. As it turned out, its only series was a co-production with United Artists Television, 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.

Closure and resurrection as Desilu, Too

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 February 1967 Ball eventually was talked into a deal with Charles Bludhorn of the giant conglomerate Gulf+Western to sell the company, 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 series on television at the time, , Mannix, The Lucy Show and changed packagers to Paramount.

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. Desilu, Too also partners with MPI Home Video and Lucille Ball Productions (which was formed by Ball and second husband Gary Morton after the original Desilu company's sale) on the video releases of Here's Lucy and other material Ball and Arnaz made independently of each other. Recently, Desilu, Too worked with MPI Home Video for the home video re-issue of The Mothers-In-Law. Incidentally, Paramount/CBS DVD continues to hold DVD distribution rights to the CBS library. Meanwhile, syndication rights for Here's Lucy would be sold by Ball to Telepictures, which later merged into Warner Bros. Domestic Television Distribution, the show's current distributor (though MPI now holds video rights under license from Ball Productions and Desilu, Too).

References

Further reading

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

Category:Defunct media companies of the United States Category:Companies established in 1950 Category:Companies disestablished in 1967 Category:Television production companies of the United States Category:CBS Corporation subsidiaries Category:Companies based in Los Angeles, California Category:CBS Paramount Television Category:Defunct companies based in California