Star Trek was originally produced by Desilu, the studio owned by I Love Lucy star Lucille Ball — who personally approved the show and played a big role in keeping it alive after the first pilot was rejected. But in July 1967, Desilu was bought by Gulf+Western, which had just purchased Paramount Pictures in 1966. That put Paramount in charge of Star Trek. According to producer Herb Solow, "Paramount didn't want Star Trek because it was losing too much money each week and didn't have enough episodes to syndicate." So Paramount offered to sell all of its equity in Trek to Gene Roddenberry for $150,000 — or about a million dollars today. But Roddenberry couldn't afford to pay that much money, so the rights stayed with Paramount. (In his original deal, Roddenberry had agreed his own Norway production studio would share net profits with Desilu, NBC, and William Shatner himself.)
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