Desilu Productions

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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. It was home to such television series as Star Trek, The Andy Griffith Show, Mission: Impossible, The Untouchables, Mannix, The Lucy Show, I Spy and, of course, I Love Lucy. The studio was named after Arnaz and Ball's ranch.

The company was formed in 1951. For the first few years of "I Love Lucy," Desilu rented space at 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. As Desilu was a growing company, they soon outgrew their first space and bought their own studio 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 1956, the company also bought the nearby RKO Pictures lot, including the backlot known as Forty Acres, and moved most of its facilities there.

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" spelt backwards.)

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. (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) in 1968. Desilu/Paramount TV's holdings are currently owned by CBS Corporation, incidentally the eventual owner of the pre-1960s shows.