In early 1966, the board of directors of Desilu Productions sat down to vote on whether to continue funding a science fiction television series that had already burned through one rejected pilot and was about to require the financial commitment of a full season of production. The studio was running three expensive new shows simultaneously and had no large film library to cushion the losses. The vote was nearly unanimous: cancel the science fiction show and preserve the studio’s finances.
One person in that room had the authority to override the vote. She was Lucille Ball — comedian, actress, the woman the whole world knew as Lucy Ricardo from *I Love Lucy* — and she was also, by 1966, the sole owner and Chairwoman of the Board of one of Hollywood’s most consequential independent production companies. She turned to her Vice-President of Production, Herbert Solow, and gave a slight nod.
The show was *Star Trek*. The nod saved it.
That the survival of one of the most culturally durable franchises in American entertainment history should have turned on a nod from the star of a domestic comedy is a story that the entertainment industry has been processing for more than half a century. What actually happened at Desilu in 1964 and 1965 and 1966 — and what Ball’s specific role in those events was — involves more complexity and more corporate history than the simple version of the story suggests.
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## Lucy and Desi Build a Studio
The story of *Star Trek* at Desilu is impossible to tell without understanding what Desilu was and how it got that way. By the mid-1960s, Desilu was not simply a production company in the ordinary sense. It was a small television empire built on a foundation of comedy and business acumen that had no real precedent in American entertainment.