Word: desilu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Despite the sophistication that underlay her slapstick and the respect she commanded as the first woman to head a studio, Desilu Productions, Ball said she saw herself as "not an idea girl but a doer." Like the silent comedians she studied (Buster Keaton, her onetime office mate at MGM, taught her how to handle props) and impersonated (her mirror-image confrontation with Harpo Marx and her Chaplin homage were priceless), Ball rehearsed every sequence obsessively. Yet when the cameras were rolling she made each gesture look spontaneous, each wisecrack seem an ad lib. Memorably, Lucy and her sidekick Ethel Mertz...
...Love Lucy was also the first program to be owned by its producers, Lucy and husband Desi Arnaz (who called their outfit Desilu Productions), rather than owned by the network. Today networks pay a show's producers for the rights to broadcast an episode a limited number of times. After a few years, the producer can then sell his series as reruns to stations across the country and make millions more. Lucy started all this, and has made up to $100 million in the process...
...what have they got? Let's start at the beginning of Western civilization. First came Sumeria. Then Star Trek. On September 8, 1966, after four million years of cranial evolution, man (and Desilu Studios) produced a television series about "Space, The Final Frontier," an NBC show featuring a starship called the USS Enterprise that could on a good night travel quite a few times faster than the speed of light, and a crew of 430 human and other beings ("carbon-based units" as they came to be called) determined to "explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life...
...tank called Field Experiment No. 1. His task, to decode a series of radio pulses being received from the vicinity of a G dwarf designated as Ratner's Star. Billy is soon accosted by a parade of scientists and deep thinkers. Their names (Shlorno Glottic, Grbk, Orang Mohole, Desilu Espy, Hoy King Toy) seem to peg them as refugees from Thomas Pynchon's Central Casting. Their inevitable behavior - alternately cerebral and cloacal - confirms the identification...
...from U.N.C.L.E. in its prime. Bruce Geller, 37-year-old film, TV and off-Broadway writer who conceived the whole enterprise, concedes that his original script was basically a paste-up of Topkapi and several other favorite movies. When Hollywood wouldn't buy it, he turned to Desilu. When Desilu proposed a series, he turned nervous, fearing he would run out of ideas-his own or other people's. But he tried, and made it. M:l won four Emmys last year, and now in its second season it ranks as a solid favorite in the Sunday evening...