The *Star Trek* production occupied this environment and made it into the future. The Enterprise bridge was a set built in a sound stage on a lot that Desilu had bought from RKO Pictures a decade earlier. The alien planets were the backlot and the available set pieces and the ingenuity of Matt Jefferies and his team. The costumes were designed on a budget that required creative economy at every step. The phaser props were produced by a prop department that made them from scratch, working from design sketches that had to look convincing on camera while being made quickly and cheaply.
This is what the production of *Star Trek* actually was: skilled, hardworking people making a television show in a working studio under budget constraints, figuring out as they went how to realize a vision that exceeded the resources available to realize it. The executive decisions that made the show possible happened in offices and board rooms; the show itself happened on those sound stages, in those costumes, with those props, made by those people, week after week.
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## Ball’s Specific Style of Leadership
The documented instances of Lucille Ball’s direct involvement in production — sweeping a sound stage, overriding a board — suggest a specific leadership style that is worth characterizing more precisely, because it differs from both the visionary patron narrative and the uninvolved figurehead narrative.
Ball came up in the entertainment industry as a performer and a creative professional. She had decades of experience, before Desilu, with the specific practical demands of production — with what it meant to be on set, to be working against a schedule, to be solving problems in real time. Her instinct, when a production was in trouble, was not to send a memo; it was to show up.