Word: rko
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Battered old movie posters still flapped in the Hollywood breezes on the high walls of the old RKO lot last week. But towering above the lot, in huge black letters on the freshly painted silver water tower, loomed a new hallmark: Desilu Studios. Below it, cameramen were already shooting TV films on five of the lot's 14 stages, while an army of wreckers, carpenters, painters and plasterers exorcised the past for the arrival of the new owners: onetime Bongo Drummer Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y De Acha III, 41, and his round-eyed, henna-crested wife, Comedienne Lucille Ball...
...Desi and Lucy, the trip to the RKO lot was at once a sentimental journey and an ironic triumph. It is where they met, fell in love-and left in the early '40s under the shadow of Desi's dropped option. Since then, babyfaced. Cuban-born Desi has become not only half of TV's most popular comedy team, but the self-made boss of a company that produces, or takes a hand in producing, 27 TV shows.* This year on three different lots Desilu will grind out 270 hours of filmed television entertainment-more than twice...
Pile & Putter. While Lucy moves into the dressing room that Ginger Rogers once occupied as queen of RKO and keeps an eye on the commissary (she hates "bad studio food"), Desi will reign in an oak-and-leather throne room, surrounded by deep pile, a disappearing bar, and a putter alongside the desk. The new Hollywood tycoon is already awakening echoes of older ones. As workmen remodeled buildings for directors, producers and writers, he said: "Those cubbyholes were no good. Our offices are going to be twice that size. These are creative people, and creative people gotta have room...
Since he and Lucy are sole owners, there is no lag at Desilu when he decides to make a deal. He beat two major bidders for the RKO studios when he strolled off a Lucy set one day last fall and made a phone call nailing down the purchase from General Tire & Rubber Co., RKO's owner since 1955, for a bargain $6,150,000. Desi usually spends ten hours a day at work, chauffeurs himself in his black Thunderbird from the Beverly Hills mansion where he and Lucy live with their two children, Lucie Desir...
Stage Struck (RKO Radio; Buena Vista) is a vigorous second blossoming, this time in hothouse Technicolors, of Morning Glory, the sentimental success of 1933. First time out, the blooming little idiot of the title role was portrayed by a young comer named Katharine Hepburn, and the performance won her an Oscar and made her a star. This time around, the stage-struck heroine is played by a young (19) comer named Susan Strasberg-well known on Broadway for her work in The Diary of Anne Frank-and the performance seems sure to win her Hollywood stardom...