A Great Hollywood Writer is Dead - A long, long post to bring us trekkies up to speed . .

Subtitle =
"There were T.V. scriptwriters around before Gene Roddenberry; there were Big Studios before Paramount Pictures.")

Screen & Script T.V. Writer Died on Saturday

'"I Love Lucy' writer Bob Carroll dies"

By JOHN ROGERS
Associated Press Writer

NOTA BENE: Blogaulaire - Bob Carroll worked with some of Hollywood's greats. He was there at the beginning of television, as vaudeville morphed into the electronic media.

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Bob Carroll Jr., a pioneering television writer who worked on all of Lucille Ball's TV shows, including "I Love Lucy," has died. He was 87.

Carroll, who had been in failing health for the past month, died Saturday, family friend and fellow TV writer Thomas Watson told The Associated Press on Monday.

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When the show moved to television in 1953, Ball took her writers with her, changing the name to "I Love Lucy" and adding real-life husband Desi Arnaz to the cast.

Carroll and Pugh went on to work on every episode of the long-running show, Watson said, as well as many episodes of "The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour," "The Lucy Show," "Here's Lucy" and "Life With Lucy." The latter show went off the air in 1986, three years before Ball's death.

Many of the shows had essentially the same premise: Lucy gets involved in some routine function and, often through well-intentioned deviousness coupled with incredible clumsiness, manages to turn it into a pratfall-filled disaster.

Carroll and (Madelyn Pugh) Davis also collaborated on several other projects, including the 1968 film "Yours, Mine and Ours" and the Arnaz-produced sitcom "The Mothers-In-Law."

© 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

----------------------BELOW SEE: The Museum of Broadcast Communications

Desi Arnaz with Lucille Ball


DESI (Desiderio Alberto, III) ARNAZ. Born in Santiago, Cuba, 2 March 1917. Attended Colegio Delores, Jesuit Preparatory School, Santiago, Cuba. United States Medical Corps., 1943-45. Married (1) Lucille Ball, 30 November 1940 (divorced, 1960), children: Lucie Desiree, Desiderio Alberto, IV (Desi, Jr.). Began entertainment career as singer, with Xavier Cugat Band, 1935-36; formed own band at The Conga Club, Miami, Florida, 1938, height of the "conga craze"; Broadway musical debut, Too Many Girls, 1939; RKO film version of the musical, 1940; music director for the Bob Hope radio show, 1946-47; performed with Ball in radio show, My Favorite Husband, 1947-50; produced pilot for I Love Lucy with own funds, 1951; performed as Ricky Ricardo, I Love Lucy, 1951-57; president and co-founder, Desilu Productions, 1951-62. Recipient: Best Performance of the Month, Photoplay Magazine, 1943, for Bataan.

Died in Del Mar, California 2 December 1986.

TELEVISION

1951-57 I Love Lucy (actor, producer)
1958-60 Westinghouse Playhouse (producer)
1962-65, 67 The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour (actor, producer)

FILMS

Too Many Girls (1940); Father Takes a Wife (1941); The Navy Comes Through (1942); Four Jacks and a Jill (1942); Bataan (1943); Holiday in Havana (1949); Cuban Pete (1950); The Long, Long Trailer (1954); Forever Darling (1956); The Escape Artist (1982).

PUBLICATIONS

A Book by Arnaz Desi. New York: William Morrow, 1976.

BOOKS: FURTHER READING

Anderson, Christopher. Hollywood/TV. Austin, Texas: The University of Texas Press, 1994.

Andrews, Bart. The "I Love Lucy" Book. New York: Doubleday, 1985.
(for sale on this CPE site)

Andrews, Bart, and Thomas J. Watson. Loving Lucy. New York: St. Martin's, 1980.

Brady, Kathleen. Lucille: The Life of Lucille Ball. New York: Hyperion, 1994.

Firmat, Gustavo Perez. Life On the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1994.

Harris, Warren G. Lucy & Desi: The Legendary Love Story of Television's Most Famous Couple. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.

Higham, Charles. Lucy: The Life of Lucille Ball. New York: St. Martin's, 1986.

Sanders, Coyne Steven, and Tom Gilbert. Desilu: The Story of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. New York: Morrow 1993.

Schatz, Thomas. "Desilu, I Love Lucy, and the Rise of Network TV." In, Thompson, Robert, and Gary Burns, editors, Making Television: Authorship and the Production Process. New York: Praeger, 1990.

Desi Arnaz

(H)e was one of Hollywood's most perceptive, and powerful, producers in television's early years. His shrewd business skills and his realization of particular combinations of the television's technological and cultural connections enabled him to develop aspects of the medium that remain central to its economic and cultural force.

(In the early 1940s) Lucy and Desi set out on a nation-wide stage tour to designed to gauge public reaction to their working together in a comedy act. CBS was im-pressed with the positive public response to the couple as well as with a sample script for a TV series developed by the writers from My Favorite Husband.

The basics were there, including Desi as Ricky Ricardo, a struggling band leader, and Lucille as Lucy, a housewife with little talent but a giant yearning to break into show business. This homey battle-of-the-sexes premise for the show convinced the network that viewers could relate, and a pilot version of the program impressed the Philip Morris Company, which agreed to sponsor thirty-nine programs for the 1951-52 season on the CBS network Monday nights at 9:00 P.M

The Desilu Empire

Desilu logo as it showed in the ending credits of Star Trek. Desilu was a production company formed in 1951 by Lucille Ball and her husband, Desi Arnaz. The success of the television show "I Love Lucy" enabled Desilu to grow and expand, producing such programs as The Andy Griffith Show. (The downtown Mayberry set was sometimes later used for location shots for Star Trek.)

After the breakup of the Ball-Arnaz marriage Desilu remained successful. In 1961, Ball bought out Arnaz and became the first woman ever to run a major Hollywood studio. Desilu later brought forth shows like Mission: Impossible and Star Trek. Her success continued unabatedly until 1967 when Ball sold Desilu to Gulf+Western which merged it with its other production company (the studio's next-door neighbor), Paramount.

The name "Desilu" comes from Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball. Desilu had a first-refusal agreement with CBS, which is why Star Trek was first pitched to that network. When CBS passed on the show, NBC was then approached.

The World's Largest Studio

From Memory Alpha, the free Star Trek reference.
(Redirected from Desilu Studios) via Anwers Com (A. C. ripped it from Wikipedia and gave proper credit.)

Carroll discussed the fact that he and his writing partner Pugh do not receive ANY compensation for the I Love Lucy re-runs, as would be standard for writers today. He has, however, kept his sense of humor over the situation telling a reporter: "Do you think I'd be sitting here if I'd had residuals?" Carroll asked. "I'd have flown you down to Cuba for this interview if I had."