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Star Trek and Lucy


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I read it again, just a few days ago.  Loads and loads of Lucy mentions all through the book, I liked it, herb solow was not kind to Lucy sometimes and even harsher with gary.  The funniest thing I ever read about Star Trek though, not in this book, was that Lucy thought it had to do with old vaudevillians and their STAR TREK.  Can you believe it?  Basically, the story goes that Lucy had a development fund for pilots that she could have just pocketed, hundreds of thousands of dollars that she could just spend on herself but they asked her to use it to make these two pilots and save Desilu which was in very bad shape at that point, only renting space out to other shows and having only ONE hit show ion tv at that time, The Lucy show.  Lucy knew if she wanted to save her company, she had to take a chance.  If that lousy lawyer of hers, mickey rudin, had been concerned about doing right by her, he would have gotten Lucy a percentage of either Star Trek or Mission Impossible and she'd have died a lot richer.  No instead she let both programs go to Paramount when she sold out to them.  And got nothing for her initial investment.  I wish I knew how Desi could lose the I Love Lucy rerun money and then Lucy loses the Star Trek and Mission Impossible moolah.  What lousy advisors they must have had. 

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Yes, she thought it was all about these older stars.  The book also mentions how stupid gary's idea was to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a European street at the studio and according to herb, not one single show or movie ever used it for anything.  gary even tried to force them to use it for either Star Trek or Mission Impossible but because it was built like Disneyland at a reduced scale, herb answered how would all these stars like Peter Graves and others who are six feet or more look in this dwarfed down locale.

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True, AND her money of course.  This slush fund was given to her by CBS to keep her, same as Berle had with HIS network and Gleason also had with CBS.  600 thousand dollars a year is nothing to sneeze at but her not spending it on a train in Miami for Gleason but rather to keep the 3 thousand jobs at her studio is typical Lucy, always thinking of others before herself.

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No, I just said it was never used for anything according to herb.  When we see shots of Desilu/Paramount, there does seem to be a street of something in the back, wonder if that's Paramount's street that we sometimes saw.  The street showed for Friends sometimes, is that the same as I have no idea where friends was filmed.

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I finished the Solo Star Trek book over the weekend. I mostly was skimming for anything Lucy and studio related as I’m not a Trekie so I wasn’t all that concerned on the intricate creation details. There are some good stories in this. The picture I get of Lucy from this is she wasn’t involved all that much with Solo and his work at the studio but pretty much through advice just let that team alone to create. Seems similar to what was going on with Mission Impossible too. There is one story I have seen published in other sources and that was Solo’s pitch to Lucy directly to take a chance on the show and she did.

 

Now I know where a few stories that get repeated come from. The USO show story gets fully explained here and Solo really did handle it in a very nice way. He didn’t embarrass her and saw how she could think it was about some USO show in the South Seas. The green stamp book story, the Europe street story are the full story here. Another story I did not hear before was Rodenberry having wild parties in his office. Lucy got wind of this and didn’t want that going on as it reflected badly on the studio. I do like that in telling this story Solo mentions that after she got remarried that she turned into this prude. Apparently one unnamed exec commented how she was quite the wild one in the 30’s and early 40’s and now the fun had stopped.

 

I knew that Start Trek was not a big success off the bat but became one eventually. What I didn’t know was that the studio was losing money every year as Star Trek, Mission Impossible and Mannix were all running in the red. It’s been debated that Lucy sold the studio at the wrong time as these shows became big business for Paramount. But if they were critically good and had good ratings but were not turning a profit maybe she was right to sell. She did turn the place around from being just a rental place with 1 hit show (her’s) to actually having really good groundbreaking shows being produced.

 

As for how everyone comes off in this book. Lucy gets the good edit. She seems respected for her work and when she needed to make decisions she made good ones. I like that she just wanted to be thought of as the girl working on stage 12 and not the big studio exec. Micky Rudin I’ve heard a little about and everything has been this guy was tough as nails so I always thought he was probably a jerk, but Solo paints him as someone who really knew the business and could also control Lucy in a very good way. Of course we figured this but Gary does get the bad edit with pretty much nothing new to report here.

 

Are there any other books that don’t have anything to do with Lucy directly but contain this much about her or the studio? I’m surprised I just found out about this book.

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