Did you know that Star Trek® almost didn't make the network? After a failed pilot, Lucille Ball not only advocated for a second pilot but circumvented the board of her production company, putting up her own money to ensure that the show had another chance.
Desilu Productions, Inc. (/ˈdɛsiluː/) was an American television production company founded and co-owned by husband and wife Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball. The company is best known for shows such as I Love Lucy, The Lucy Show, Mannix, The Untouchables, Mission: Impossible and Star Trek.
Star Trek coming to Fridays this fall on NBC. Contrary to any internet memes that you may have read, though, Lucy did not come out of pocket. to finance either pilot with her own money. That really wasn't necessary, but she did approve the financing of both pilots.
Have an account? Log in . Lucille Ball kept the Starship Enterprise in flight. The comedy icon's company, Desilu Productions, was responsible for Gene Roddenberry's original "Star Trek" series.
Army Air Corps Veteran Gene Roddenberry flew over 80 combat missions during World War II and later went on to create the hit science fiction series “Star Trek.” Eugene Wesley Roddenberry was born in El Paso, Texas, in August 1921.
What is the connection between Lucille Ball and Star Trek?
Did you know that Star Trek® almost didn't make the network? After a failed pilot, Lucille Ball not only advocated for a second pilot but circumvented the board of her production company, putting up her own money to ensure that the show had another chance.
In creating Star Trek, Roddenberry was inspired by C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower series of novels, Jonathan Swift's 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels, the 1956 film Forbidden Planet, and television westerns such as Wagon Train.
Ball had risen to prominence thanks to I Love Lucy pioneering the rerun on broadcast television, and so to make a name for her studio she wanted a show that could do equally successfully with rerun rights. Star Trek was to be that show.
She also made a few more movies including Yours, Mine, and Ours (1968), and the musical Mame (1974), and two more successful long-running sitcoms for CBS: The Lucy Show (1962–68), which costarred Vivian Vance and Gale Gordon, and Here's Lucy (1968–74), which also featured Gordon, as well as Lucy's real-life children, ...
Lucy believed in Gene Roddenberry's vision for Star Trek
Thankfully, Lucille Ball insisted the project go ahead — despite not understanding what the show was about (according to Business Insider, Ball thought it had something to do with traveling USO performers).
Did the actors who played I Love Lucy get along in real life? Aside from the marital difficulties of Lucy and Desi, the actors who played the Mertzes, Vivian Vance and William Frawley, hated each other. For one thing, there was the 20-year age difference.
Desilu Productions, also credited as Desilu Studios, was the production company that started the Star Trek franchise with the production of the, initially, unaired 1964 pilot television episode "The Cage", and the Star Trek: The Original Series television series which began airing in September 1966.
Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz outside the gates of Desilu. Four years later, Roddenberry came to Desilu with an idea for a pilot that would grow into Star Trek. Ball bought the series, even if she didn't quite understand it; allegedly, she thought the title referred to a group of traveling USO performers during WWII.
Roddenberry had sold his interest in Star Trek to Paramount Studios in return for a third of the profits but this did not result in any quick financial gain; the studio was still claiming that the series was $500,000 in the red in 1982.
She moved forward with it, and during the second season, she had to sell Desilu to Paramount Pictures. Lucille Ball gave up the studio that she and her husband built, it's all she had left of her marriage, and she sacrificed that for 'Star Trek. ' It's worth noting that Paramount has owned "Star Trek" ever since.
Lucille had an estimated net worth of $60 million at the time of her death at age 77 in 1989, according to Celebrity Net Worth. The Emmy winner, born to Henry Durrell "Had" Ball and Désirée Evelyn "DeDe" Ball in 1911, earned her first credited acting role in 1935's I Dream Too Much.
Lucille Ball died April 26, 1989 of a ruptured aortic aneurism at the age of 77. She was in 113 movies and famously stared, with her then husband Desi Arnaz in the TV show “I love Lucy” from 1951-1957.
Desi Arnaz—whom she divorced in May 1960—was worth $20 million at the time of his death, according to Celebrity Net Worth. Arnaz, a regular cigarette smoker, died three years before Ball on December 2, 1986, from lung cancer.
According to Bart Andrews' 1985 book, The I Love Lucy Book, Ball and Arnaz were paid a joint salary of $4,000 per episode ($2,000 each) for I Love Lucy. The book reports that the couple originally asked for $5,000 per episode, but CBS and Arnaz agreed to $4,000 for complete rights to the show.
The Lucille Ball statues are located in the Lucille Ball Memorial Park in Celoron, New York. “Scary Lucy” is located just to the west of “Lovely Lucy.” Celoron is a village that sits on the western boundary of the city of Jamestown in southern Chautauqua County, New York.
The cancelation machine NBC's biggest concerns were ratings, but it was also concerned with demographics. Star Trek actually performed well with what would now be considered key demographics; however, these were not considered quality demographics of the era, resulting in less faith in the network.
Not only did Shatner take inspiration from Roddenberry's suggestion of Hornblower, but also from Alexander the Great – "the athlete and the intellectual of his time" – whom Shatner had played for an unsold television pilot two years earlier.
While on NBC, Star Trek's Nielsen ratings were low and the network canceled it after three seasons and 79 episodes. In the United Kingdom the series was not broadcast until July 12, 1969, coinciding with the Apollo 11 mission to land the first humans on the Moon.
