The decision to shoot *I Love Lucy* on 35mm film before a live studio audience was Arnaz’s. The standard practice for situation comedy in early television was live broadcast, which was cheap but could not be rebroadcast outside the region of initial transmission. Arnaz insisted on film, which cost more but produced a durable product that could be broadcast anywhere at any time. The network resisted the additional cost; Arnaz absorbed the difference by accepting lower talent fees for himself and Ball.
The subsequent negotiation over ownership of the film prints was equally consequential. CBS wanted to own the prints; Arnaz wanted to retain them. The compromise — CBS paid $1,000 per episode for the right to repeat each episode once — was structured to benefit the network’s initial broadcast interests. What it did not capture was the future value of the print ownership. When reruns became standard practice and the domestic syndication market developed, Desilu owned 180 episodes of one of the most popular shows in American television history. The resulting revenue was substantial.
This same economic logic — film production, ownership of content, deferring immediate income against future syndication value — was what gave Desilu the financial foundation to build a studio operation and to absorb the deficit financing of new series in the 1960s. Arnaz’s business innovations in the early 1950s were still generating the institutional capacity that made *Star Trek* and *Mission: Impossible* possible more than a decade later.
Arnaz left before the payoff of the 1960s programming strategy arrived. He sold his Desilu shares in 1962; Ball took sole ownership. The specific decision to fund *Star Trek* and to override the board’s vote to cancel it was Ball’s. But the economic architecture within which she made that decision was substantially his.