Lucy and Desi had been struggling to find time together. Lucy’s work kept her on a soundstage in Hollywood while Desi’s work had him in nightclubs all across the country. When the two found time together at Desilu -- the name of their ranchito in Chatsworth -their reunions were marred by quarreling. Lucy suspected Desi was being unfaithful while on the road and his temper did not tolerate such accusations. Now the tension in Lucy’s real life gave her an idea to turn off-screen drama into an on-air comedy. She told CBS that she would do the television series, provided Desi was cast to play her husband. To prove to the network that a widespread audience could embrace the real life mixed-couple, Desi and Lucy formed Desilu Productions and embarked on a summer vaudeville tour. They were a hit and My Favorite Husband was immediately earmarked to become I Love Lucy. There was still one last hurdle to clear: Desi and Lucy needed to find a way to originate the show from Hollywood, California. They were told it was not possible.
TV History 101: The cheapest way to do television series in the early 1950s was to broadcast live from New York, then delay the programs for the West Coast through the technical wizardry of kinescope -- a crude procedure in which television programs were literally filmed off a TV set at the network’s studio on the West Coast where the East Coast live-feed was monitored. This film was then rushed through processing and aired three hours after the East Coast broadcast. But in these early analog days, making a film of a video picture resulted in greatly diminished picture and sound quality.
Desi had a better idea. He had watched the way live sitcoms from New York, such as The Honeymooners, were being shot before studio audiences with three video cameras running at once, each aimed at a range of wide and close-up shots. His idea was to use the same approach but substitute film cameras for those which fed out a live video signal. By shooting the script in its actual chronology, filming before a live audience remained feasible and, unlike the editing of feature films, the post-production requirements could be greatly reduced since the program had been filmed in sequence. With two copies of the edited half-hour film, one on each coast, both East and West would be able to air first-generation masters. Although the net production cost would be considerably higher, Desilu was offering to cover this -- in exchange for an unknown commodity that Desi called “rerun rights.” To the network men’s thinking, CBS was giving up nothing and gaining everything.
I Love Lucy went on the air in October 1951, produced by Desilu Productions. After six months it was a Top 10 hit. Six months later, the No. 1 rated show on television. Suddenly, other TV producers came knocking at Desilu’s door hoping the production company would share its magic formula with them. For the fall of 1952, Eve Arden and Our Miss Brooks went from radio to TV, and Desilu was paid to do the moving. The following year, The Danny Thomas Show began production and, one year after that, December Bride became the third concurrent hit Desilu was hired to produce for its competitors.
Desi Arnaz had proven he could produce series, now he wanted to own them too. Over the next few years, Desilu retained ownership of the series that sprang from the pilots it produced. Line Up, in the mode of Dragnet, premiered in the Top 20 and enjoyed a six year run; Whirlybirds, a half-hour action series about a helicopter service, stayed air bound for three seasons, and The Untouchables, Desilu’s first hour-long series, became the production company’s biggest hit not to feature Lucille Ball. Fueled by this success, Desi and Lucy decided to get into the studio business.
By 1957, with over 200 filmed episodes in the can and I Love Lucy still at the top of the prime time ratings, the CBS executives saw there was indeed a market for that thing Desi called “reruns.” The network wanted the rights back and a deal was quickly made. Desi sold the I Love Lucy rerun rights to CBS for a cool million and then set out to buy a studio, ending Desilu’s need to rent space and materials.
RKO, one of the top motion picture factories from the 1930s, the maker of the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rodgers musicals, plus classics such as King Kong and Citizen Kane, had fallen on hard times and was up for sale. There were three facilities: one in Hollywood adjacent to Paramount Pictures and two in nearby Culver City, which included a large backlot filled with western towns, Army barracks, an Arabian fortress, and even the remains of Tara, the mansion from Gone with the Wind. The buyout cost was $6,000,000, with Desi and Lucy using the money from CBS as a down payment. For this price, they got all physical assets, including 26 sound stages, 457 furnished offices, camera equipment, lighting equipment, anything and everything needed to produce television and film, and that included the headaches.
Lucy and Desi, studio moguls (Courtesy of Gerald Gurian)
Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball were now indisputable TV moguls.
Over the next few years Desilu Studios rented out its facilities, its equipment and its personnel to over a dozen network TV series including such hits as The Andy Griffith Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Real McCoys, My Favorite Martian, The Ann Sothern Show, My Three Sons, Wyatt Earp, Lassie, Ben Casey and The Millionaire. But as the 1950s came to a close, the pressures of producing and starring in a hit series, as well as running a studio, had taken its toll on Desi. His drinking increased, as did his infidelity, and in 1960 Lucille Ball shocked the world by filing for divorce. I Love Lucy, or The Desi-Lucy Hour as it was being called in its eighth season, would be no more ... except in reruns.
Although their marriage was over, the couple remained tied through their mutual ownership of a studio. Desi ran Desilu while Lucy concentrated on acting, including work on stage and films. In 1962, Desi beckoned Lucy to return to weekly TV and to the CBS Monday night schedule. The new series was called The Lucy Show. Desi directed the pilot and served as executive producer.
All seemed well again, until November 9, 1962, when Daily Variety broke the news that television’s “oldest partnership ended yesterday when Lucille Ball bought out Desi Arnaz’s stock interest in Desilu Productions, Inc. for a sum estimated at $3,000,000.” As part of the deal, Desi also relinquished his position as executive producer of The Lucy Show. The official word from him: “I quit the business because it got to be a monster. At the beginning, it was fun. But when you are in charge of three studios, with 3000 people and 35 soundstages working all the time, the fun is long gone.” (6)
The real story was darker. After a few stays in the hospital, Desi was diagnosed as an alcoholic. He no longer wanted to come in to work, so Lucy reluctantly became the boss.
During the first year that Lucy ran Desilu, The Untouchables was cancelled. Two new studio properties -- Glynis and The Greatest Show on Earth -- failed to find an audience and, lasting only one season each, ended up costing the studio money instead of making it. Suddenly, the only current series Desilu owned was The Lucy Show, beginning its third season and already looking tired. And then the exodus began. Madelyn Martin and Bob Carroll, Jr., long time I Love Lucy writers who had guided the first two seasons of The Lucy Show, departed, as did executive producer Elliot Lewis, producer-creator-writer Cy Howard, and Desilu Vice President in Charge of Production, Jerry Thorpe.
Fred Ball, Lucy's brother and a Desilu employee, said, “When Desi left, everybody was apprehensive. There was so much at stake for everybody. The whole structure, because of Desi’s absence, started to break down and deteriorate.” (8)
The legend “Filmed at Desilu” was still featured in the end credits of a dozen current network series. And, as a rental facility, Desilu appeared to be doing fine. But in reality the financial forecast was bleak. In that first year without Desi, the studio lost over $650,000. That would be like losing $5 million in 2013, a huge hit for a “ma and pa production house” that had experienced rapid growth and was suddenly drowning in red ink. Lucy needed help. It would come from an unlikely source: CBS.
Hollywood’s lone female studio mogul, circa 1964 (Desilu publicity photo).
The Columbia Broadcasting System had a vested interest in Lucille Ball, so any problem that Lucy had was also a problem for William Paley, the fo
under and owner of the network. Paley was determined to see Lucy and her studio stabilized. Ed Holly, Paley’s top Financial Officer, was the first CBS man sent to Desilu’s rescue. Next, Paley found someone to oversee the running of the entire facility.
Oscar Katz, like Holly, was a network man. He was highly regarded by the brass at CBS and served as Vice President of Network Programs. In 1963, with the blessing -- and even some armtwisting -- of the CBS top dog, Katz resigned his position at the network and packed his bags for California. The task awaiting him: run the studio, unburden Lucy and try to appease the “old guard,” Desilu's less-than-happy Board of Directors. Variety said it best: “His job is to restore Desilu’s place in the sun as supplier of network prime-time merchandise, the studio’s only such series now being the one starring the ex-network man’s boss.”
Katz had a challenge ahead, but he wouldn’t face it alone.
Herbert F. Solow, a young network executive, soon came on board as Katz’s right hand man. Katz knew Solow from CBS, where the latter had served as the head of Daytime Programs. Solow also had worked for NBC at the network’s Burbank offices, as their Director of Daytime Programs. In April 1964, Lucy’s instruction to Katz and Solow was: “Get some shows for the studio.” (9-2)
Alden Schwimmer arranged for meetings between Desilu’s two new execs and a pair of his favorite clients, the spacey Gene Roddenberry and the more down-to-earth Bruce Geller. Geller was easy for Katz and Solow to “get.” He was a Yale graduate, a political liberal and the son of a New York State Judge. He had just finished producing the last season of Rawhide, had served as a writer on numerous westerns, including The Rifleman and Have Gun -- Will Travel, and his idea for a series was appealing to the studio men: a spy show called Mission: Impossible.
Roddenberry was a different story. Dorothy Fontana once remarked, “Somebody said you could dress Gene in a tailored suit and five minutes later he’d look like a saggy, baggy elephant.” (64-2)
John D.F. Black said, “Gene’s suits always came with stains.” (17)
Mary Black, who worked at Star Trek as John D.F.’s assistant/secretary, added, “Bruce Geller, who had his office upstairs, came in and said he had one question: ‘Did G.R. buy his suits with the cigarette ashes already on them?’” (17a)
Solow’s first impression of Roddenberry was “this tall, unkempt person [who] recently learned to dress himself but hadn’t yet quite gotten the knack.” (161-3)
Then Roddenberry, a “mumbling exotic,” according to Solow, handed the Desilu exec a piece of paper with a crumpled corner -- his abbreviated presentation for Star Trek. What followed was the “pitch,” which Solow remembered as being awkward. The former network man thought Roddenberry was the most ineffective pitchman for a series he had ever met in the television business. He later said:
The one thing I thought was really very, very good that Gene had done was to make science fiction familiar to an audience by handling it like the United States Navy. It invited the audience into something they knew about. They knew the terms like “Captain” and “Admiral,” “starboard,” “port” and the U.S.S. Yorktown, which later became the Enterprise. Also, I think I said “yes” because Desilu was down in the depths and needed shows that would quickly make Desilu important again. I didn't think that would happen if we did normal, average shows. That’s why I ended up, my first year, developing both Star Trek and Mission: Impossible. (161-5)
Solow offered Roddenberry a contract. The next task was to find a network for Star Trek. The best bet was ABC because the “alphabet network” was targeting kids. But ABC already had a sci-fi series called The Outer Limits and, for the fall of 1964, a series set onboard a futuristic atomic submarine. Star Trek had been beaten by Irwin Allen and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. The next best bet was CBS, which had tried its hand at science fiction only once, with The Twilight Zone, just ending a five-year run. Katz had a relationship with the network, as did Lucy, and Lucy’s current series was a hit. William Paley’s people would not refuse a meeting.
Oscar Katz accompanied Roddenberry to the CBS pitch meeting and recalled the mood as being not only formal but “frosty.” He said, “We were in a dining room with six or seven executives, one of whom questioned us rather closely about what we were going to do with the show. We answered his questions and it turned out that his interest was due to the fact that they were developing a science fiction show of their own.” (96-1)
Roddenberry seethed over it for years, ranting, “You S.O.B.s, if you wanted technical advice and help, hire me and pay me for it! It's like calling a doctor and having him analyze you for two hours and then telling him, ‘Thank you very much for pinpointing what’s wrong, I've decided to go to another doctor for treatment.’” (145-4)
Roddenberry’s loss was Irwin Allen’s gain. He had caught the eye of CBS first with Lost in Space and was now two for two.
Herb Solow, not present for the CBS meeting, was brought up to speed afterwards. Based on his assessment of Roddenberry as a public speaker, he was certain that the writer who didn't know how to dress had nervously mumbled his way through the meeting, pushing his “Wagon Train to the stars business.”
Roddenberry defended his pitch to this author, saying, “You know how I said that -that ‘Wagon Train to the stars’ thing. It was about finding a means for them to see that it wasn’t that impossible to tell those kinds of stories. Technically, of course, we had challenges -- more than any other series, certainly. But the first thing to get them to see was that the stories we would tell could appeal to a broad television audience. If a family can watch a western, a story set a hundred years in the past, why not something a hundred years in the future, or two hundred years in the future? And that is the primary thing they [the network] are going to think about; are going to question -- can this appeal to a mass audience, meaning, a broad audience. Not just men, not just women, not just teenagers, not just those crazy science fiction people, but a broad enough audience to have 15, 20 million households tuning in. So I made those comparisons, intentionally so.” (145)
Regardless of the intentions, the execution is equally important. Robert Justman said, “When Gene [first] attempted to get Star Trek on the air, he didn't succeed. In part because he was, at times, almost tongue tied. He didn’t learn to be glib and didn’t learn to be voluble until sometime after we began the series and he became accustomed to dealing with the press and with others than himself.” (94-2)
Solow not only lacked confidence in Roddenberry but in Katz. He felt “there wasn’t a nicer or brighter man than Oscar Katz.” But nice and bright didn’t always get the job done. Oscar didn’t speak the local language -- West Coast TV-speak; West Coast TV-attitude.
Losing CBS represented a major blow. Lucy’s clout with William Paley was of no use to Star Trek now. Once a network says “no,” the answer never changes. Licking his wounds, Katz agreed to stay in the background and turn Star Trek over to Herb Solow. In a time before the existence of Fox, or HBO and Showtime, or TNT, A&E and SyFy (aka Sci-Fi Channel), there was only one place left to go and that was Solow’s old turf: NBC. Herb Solow later said he spent a great deal of time with Roddenberry, grooming him and helping to develop the perfect pitch for NBC. One month later, in May of 1964, he arranged to meet with his former boss, Grant Tinker, Vice-President of West Coast Programming, and Jerry Stanley, NBC Program Development Vice President.
The odds against Desilu were monumental. NBC and Star Trek were an impossible match. In 20 years of broadcasting, the network had never aired anything even remotely resembling science fiction. After all, this was the network of Bob Hope, Andy Williams, Mitch Miller and The Bell Telephone Hour. In most science fiction there is a beast, a demon, a monstrous alien. In the story of Star Trek, according to Gene Roddenberry, the monster was always NBC.
It is ironic Gene Roddenberry would see television networks as unreasoning monsters. After all, Star Trek didn’t tell standard monster stories. In the classic episode “The Devil in the Da
rk,” the Horta, a tunnel-boring silicon-based creature, turned out to be anything but a monster. It was a mother and she was protecting her children. In 1968, Roddenberry said, “What's been wrong with science fiction in television and motion pictures for years is that whenever a monster was used, the tendency was to say, ‘Ah, ha! Let's have a big one that comes out, attacks and kills everyone.’ Nobody ever asked ‘Why?’ In any other story, if something attacks -- a bear, a man or whatever -- the author is expected to explain, ‘Here is why it is the way it is, here are the things that led it to do this, here is what it wants.’” (142-2)
Yet the criticism he often voiced against NBC signaled a lack of understanding or effort to co-exist with the network beast, only to hate and fight it. The beast, then, hated and fought back.
Jerry Colonna and Bob Hope, pitchmen for a network (NBC publicity photo, 1940)
Every beast has a back-story.
The National Broadcasting Company had been America’s first radio network, beginning operation in 1926. General Electric and Westinghouse, both manufacturers of radios, and American Telephone and Telegraph -- better known as AT&T -- got together with an unlikely fourth partner, the United Fruit Company, and set up the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). This entity focused on the manufacturing of radios and records. Shortly after that, NBC was formed as a means of selling more RCA radio receivers and promoting the company’s record albums.
CBS -- the Columbia Broadcasting System -- soon followed, started by Columbia Records, later sold to William Paley, a Philadelphia-based cigar manufacturer. But NBC dwarfed CBS in those early days and actually had two separate radio networks -- NBC “red” for entertainment programs, and NBC “blue” for news. Each consisted of five company-owned stations, plus numerous affiliates spread across the nation. In 1944, the U.S. government and its Federal Communications Commission shook up the network with a ruling that, while NBC could have two different networks, RCA would not be allowed to own ten broadcast stations -- only five, the same limit that had been set for CBS. The radio pioneer was given a matter of months to rid itself of 50% of its holdings. NBC “blue” was quickly put on the market. The buyer, for $8 million dollars, was Edward Noble, owner of Life Savers candy and the Rexall drugstore chain. The new network, brought to life at the sacrifice of NBC “blue,” was called the American Broadcasting Company, or, more simply, ABC.
These Are The Voyages, TOS, Season One Page 7
