Ball's Role in The Company
Ball's contribution was more on the artistic side. Ball had developed a sense for making many Desilu program proposals which would be popular to broad audiences and be successful in both their original broadcast and syndication re-runs. Before starring in I Love Lucy Ball had starred in many "B" movies before helping start Desilu Productions, and based on that experience, she had a good idea of what television audiences wanted.
High quality (i.e., high cost), original production concepts (such as The Untouchables or Star Trek) were approved by Ball for development into broadcast series. She assessed proposed projects based on how the public would enjoy the production and their potential for long-term acceptance and enjoyment. This ensured a profitable revenue stream from the programs through re-runs, which would recover the studio's initially high development and production costs. As a result, even decades after the absorption of Desilu Productions, and the production end of all of the original television series Desilu approved for development, the series have all achieved enduring success and redevelopment into feature length motion picture franchises in their own right, or both (e.g., Star Trek, Mission Impossible, and The Untouchables).
Read more about this topic: Desilu Productions
Famous quotes containing the words ball, role and/or company:
“We should burn all libraries and allow to remain only that which everyone knows by heart. A beautiful age of the legend would then begin.”
—Hugo Ball (1886–1927)
“The trouble is that the expression ‘material thing’ is functioning already, from the very beginning, simply as a foil for ‘sense-datum’; it is not here given, and is never given, any other role to play, and apart from this consideration it would surely never have occurred to anybody to try to represent as some single kind of things the things which the ordinary man says that he ‘perceives.’”
—J.L. (John Langshaw)
“The old idea that the joke was not good enough for the company has been superseded by the new aristocratic idea that the company was not worthy of the joke. They have introduced an almost insane individualism into that one form of intercourse which is specially and uproariously communal. They have made even levities into secrets. They have made laughter lonelier than tears.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)