Today in Star Trek history: Gulf + Western buys Desilu Studios

Gulf + Western bought Desilu Studios, turning it into Paramount Television

JULY 27, 2022 - The year was 1967. Star Trek had been on the air for one season, under the control of production company Desilu Studios. But things were about to change and soon Trek would be under new management.

At the time, comedienne Lucille Ball was starring in a radio comedy opposite Richard Denning called My Favorite Husband in which Ball and Denning played married couple Liz and George, “two people who live together and like it.” Most episodes followed a particular format: Liz would get a funny idea, which would develop into a crisis that would get solved by the end with Liz closing out the program saying, “Thanks, George. You’re my favorite husband.”

Does the premise of the show sound familiar? It should. Lucy and her husband Desi Arnaz decided that the radio show would make a good program on the burgeoning medium of television. As a result the pair began a production company, combining their names to create Desilu, and producing the TV show I Love Lucy, based on the premise of the radio program, but with Lucy starring opposite her real-life husband instead of Denning.

In the first few years of the company’s existence, they rented space at General Service Studios, but by 1954 it had outgrown the space and moved to its own studio. Desi acted as producer, inventing a unique multi-camera setup that allowed for live studio audiences that became the standard for sitcoms. The process, which required the use of film rather than the common kinescope method of filming a program, meant that there were no lost episode of I Love Lucy and that the show could take a hiatus for its stars to rest, showing the first reruns in television history.

Lucy was in charge of the artistic side, giving new shows like The Jack Benny Program, Make Room For Daddy, The Eve Arden Show, and The Real McCoys. But all good things must come to an end and in 1960, just as Desilu was producing The Andy Griffith Show and My Three Sons, Lucy and Desi divorced. By 1962, Desi resigned from the company and Lucy bought him out, becoming the sole owner. It was after this that she produced Mission: Impossible, Mannix, and Star Trek (which, legend tells us, she at first thought was about a celebrity USO tour.) It’s possible that without Lucy’s support, our favorite franchise would never have left spacedock.

Five years after Lucy bought the company, she was ready to move on.. Gulf+Western, which had begun as a manufacturing and resource conglomerate, had in 1966 decided to dip its toe into entertainment. Pursuant to this, they bought a number of companies, including Paramount Pictures. Lucy sold them her company, Desilu Studios, lock, stock, and barrel, signing on the dotted line on July 27, 1967 and walking out of the building, never to return.

A year later, Lucy was producing again, with a new company she called Lucille Ball Productions. The production company immediately began producing Here’s Lucy, a program that was on the air until 1974, and in the 1980s produced Life with Lucy (I’m starting to notice a pattern here.) Lucy and Desi’s daughter, Lucie Arnaz, eventually created Desilu Too, a licensee for I Love Lucy merchandise.

As for Star Trek, we all know what happened there. It ran for two more years before going off the air, never to be heard of again. Wait, that’s not right. Trek is still owned by Paramount, although sometimes part of it has been owned by Viacom or CBS or Viacom CBS or all of the above. But never forget that the very first series in the franchise began as a Desilu Studios production.