In 1962, Lucille Ball was sitting at the head of a Hollywood studio when her board of directors told her two pilots on her desk would bankrupt the company. She’d heard worse. In 1935, she was making $50 a week at that same studio, getting small parts in other people’s movies. She’d started as a Goldwyn Girl — a chorus dancer in the big musical films — and worked her way to RKO, where Ginger Rogers and Katharine Hepburn were the stars, and Ball was the one holding scenes together while the camera pointed somewhere else. They called her the Queen of the B movies. She was there for seven years. Nobody at RKO would have predicted what came next.
In 1940, while she was still there, she appeared in a film called Too Many Girls. One of her co-stars was a Cuban bandleader named Desi Arnaz. They got married that November. A decade later, they built I Love Lucy from scratch — insisting on owning the show outright when CBS didn’t want to pay for filming in Los Angeles.
CBS paid them more than $4 million for the right to rerun shows they’d already paid for once. Arnaz used that money to buy the building. In late 1957, Desilu paid $6 million for the entire RKO lot. They now had 33 sound stages — four more than MGM. The studio that’d paid Ball $50 a week to appear in movies nobody remembered was now hers.
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Ball and Arnaz divorced in 1960. In November 1962, she paid him $2.5 million for his shares and became the first woman to run a major Hollywood studio on her own. Then her board voted against those 2 pilots. One was a science fiction series that NBC had already rejected — they’d said no to the pilot, and Ball had paid for a second one anyway. The other was about an elite spy team that got self-destructing mission briefings. Her board said both would bankrupt her. She greenlit them both. Star Trek and Mission: Impossible both hit television in September 1966. Both are still going today.
She Ran It Alone
By 1967, both shows were on the air, and Desilu was back in the black. The woman who’d appeared in B movies nobody remembered had greenlit 2 of the most enduring franchises in American entertainment. Ball sold the studio to Gulf+Western for $17 million. Gulf+Western folded it into Paramount Pictures. The studio that’d called her the Queen of the B movies at $50 a week became part of one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world. Lucille Ball died on April 26, 1989. She was 77. She’d gone from $50 a week to owning the whole lot. She ran it alone. She never lost a dime.
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