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The "Desilu" logo, used in the 1960s. This version came from 1967, after Paramount's acquisition of Desilu.
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, , The Untouchables, Mannix, The Lucy Show and I Spy.

History

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.

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.

References in Popular Culture

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".

The Studio Today

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.

References

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

Further reading

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

External links

City of Los Angeles

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Nickname: The City of Angels, L.A.
Location within Los Angeles County in the state of California
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Motto
"In God We Trust"   (since 1956)
"E Pluribus Unum"   ("From Many, One"; Latin, traditional)
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Lucille Ball

Pin-up photo of Lucille Ball in Yank, the Army Weekly.
Birth name Lucille Désirée Ball
Born July 6 1911(1911--)
Jamestown, New York, USA
Died
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Desi Arnaz

Birth name Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha III
Born March 2 1917(1917--)
Santiago de Cuba, Cuba
Died November 2 1986 (aged 69)
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A portmanteau (IPA: /pɔərtˈmæntoʊ/) is a word or morpheme that fuses two or more words or word parts to give a combined or loaded meaning.
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ranch is an area of landscape, including various structures, given primarily to the practice of ranching, the practice of raising grazing livestock such as cattle or sheep for meat or wool.
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Chatsworth may refer to the following:

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Australia
  • Chatsworth, Queensland
Canada
  • Chatsworth, Ontario, a township
  • Chatsworth, Ontario (town), located within above township
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Hollywood is a district in Los Angeles, California, situated west-northwest of Downtown Los Angeles. Due to its fame and cultural identity as the historical center of movie studios and movie stars, the word "Hollywood" is often used as a metonym for the Cinema of the United States.
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San Fernando Valley or The Valley is an urbanized valley located in the north-western section of the city of Los Angeles, California, United States.

History


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I Love Lucy is a television situation comedy, starring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, also featuring Vivian Vance and William Frawley. The series originally ran from October 15, 1951, to May 6, 1957, on CBS (181 episodes, including the "lost" Christmas episode and original
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The Andy Griffith Show is an American television series humorously depicting life in a fictional southern community. The show stars Andy Griffith as Andy Taylor, the sheriff of Mayberry, North Carolina.
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The Untouchables is the name of a television series that ran from 1959 to 1963 on the American Broadcasting Company. Based on the memoir of the same name by Eliot Ness and Oscar Fraley, it dealt with the experiences of Eliot Ness, a United States Treasury agent, as he fought
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Mannix was a television detective series that ran from 1967 through 1975 on CBS. Created by Richard Levinson and William Link and developed by executive producer Bruce Geller (who also created ), the title character, Joe Mannix
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The Lucy Show was Lucille Ball's follow up show to I Love Lucy. It began in 1962 and ran until 1968. The premise and the cast changed frequently, with only Gale Gordon lasting most of the run of the show (he joined the cast during the second season).
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I spy is a guessing game usually played in families with young children, partly to assist in both observation and in alphabet familiarity. I spy is often played as a car game.
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Radio Version

My Favorite Husband began as a radio sitcom on CBS Radio, with Lucille Ball and Richard Denning as Liz and George Cooper (Cugat in a very few early episodes, until bandleader Xavier Cugat was said to be edgy about the radio couple sharing the
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Hollywood Center Studios is a company based in Los Angeles, California which provides stage facilities to television and movie production companies. Its sound stages, located at 1040 N. Las Palmas Avenue in Hollywood, California, are steeped in Hollywood history.
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Hollywood is a district in Los Angeles, California, situated west-northwest of Downtown Los Angeles. Due to its fame and cultural identity as the historical center of movie studios and movie stars, the word "Hollywood" is often used as a metonym for the Cinema of the United States.
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City of Los Angeles

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Nickname: The City of Angels, L.A.
Location within Los Angeles County in the state of California
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Hollywood is a district in Los Angeles, California, situated west-northwest of Downtown Los Angeles. Due to its fame and cultural identity as the historical center of movie studios and movie stars, the word "Hollywood" is often used as a metonym for the Cinema of the United States.
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Ren-Mar Studios is a rental studio located in Hollywood, California, on premises which were formerly the home of Desilu Productions. It was first built in 1915 as Metro Pictures Back Lot #3, and has been used for a wide variety of film and television production.
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RKO Radio Pictures Inc.

Corporation
Founded 1929 (as Radio Pictures Inc., subsidiary of Radio-Keith-Orpheum Corp.)
Headquarters 1270 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY

Industry Motion pictures
Dissolved 1959 (de facto)

RKO (
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City of Culver City

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Motto: The Heart of Screenland
Location of Culver City in Los Angeles County, California
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Forty Acres, or "the back forty"[1], was an industry nickname for a studio backlot that belonged to RKO Pictures and Desilu Productions, located in Culver City, California.
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Amortization is the distribution of a single lump-sum cash flow into many smaller cash flow installments, as determined by an amortization schedule.
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CBS Broadcasting, Inc. (CBS)

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A rerun or repeat is a re-airing of an episode of a media (usually television) program. The invention of the rerun is generally credited to Desi Arnaz. Some viewers find reruns annoying, although many viewers appreciate the opportunity to re-watch a programme they enjoyed or
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