All of these people are part of the reason *Star Trek* exists. None of them, individually, is the reason *Star Trek* exists. The story is a network of decisions, most of them made by people who were doing their jobs as best they understood them, some of them lucky, some of them prescient, most of them neither.
—
## What Desilu’s Studios Looked Like
The physical reality of the Desilu studio lots — where *Star Trek* was actually made — is a dimension of the production history that is easy to overlook in accounts focused on executive decisions and network negotiations.
The Gower Street studio in Hollywood and the RKO-Pathé lot in Culver City were both functional working studios of the kind that had been built in Hollywood’s studio era and had been operating continuously for decades. By the mid-1960s, they had the specific character of industrial facilities that had been used for decades of continuous production: sound stages that had hosted multiple generations of Hollywood products, backlot areas that had been redressed hundreds of times, facilities infrastructure that had accumulated the specific compromises and makeshift solutions of working studios.
*Star Trek* shot on these lots alongside other productions. The same stages that hosted the Enterprise bridge set might be used by other Desilu productions on different days or weeks. The backlot terrain that stood in for alien planets had previously stood in for other environments in other productions.
The specific atmosphere of a working production studio in Hollywood in 1966 and 1967 is documented in enough accounts from people who worked there to be reconstructed in general terms. It was industrial, loud, and busy; it smelled of paint, sawdust, and hot electrical equipment; it was crowded with people doing specific, skilled work under time pressure; it was occasionally glamorous from the outside and decidedly unglamorous from the inside.