How Lucille Ball Saved the ‘Mission: Impossible’ Franchise
We’re just a few months away from the release of Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, which is supposedly the last installment in the film series that began as a spy thriller about stealing floppy discs, then somehow morphed into Tom Cruise’s big budget take on Jackass.
But we would have never gotten any joy out of seeing Cruise routinely endanger his life for our amusement if not for the actions of one of the most famous comedic performers of all-time: Lucille Ball.
Ball’s production company Desilu produced a number of famous TV shows, including Star Trek and the original Mission: Impossible series. And Ball didn’t simply greenlight the pitch and walk away either. As one of the show’s stars, Barbara Bain, revealed in an interview, Lucy had the “final word on the casting.”
Bain had to meet with Ball after others became “concerned” about hiring her because she was both unknown and married to one of Mission: Impossible’s other cast members, Martin Landau. Bain opted to go in person rather than send a tape of her work because her only credit was on a comedy, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and she was too intimidated to show it to Ball.
And Ball was also uniquely poised to use her clout to ensure that Mission: Impossible would be a quality show free from network interference. According to The Complete Mission: Impossible Dossier by Patrick J. White, the show’s creator, Bruce Geller, insisted that CBS couldn’t see any footage until his “final cut was ready.” While this would have been an impossible request for most TV creatives, Ball had his back. As one former CBS executive recalled, “Lucille Ball had absolute autonomy. She laid down the rule to the network. Lucy didn’t want anyone to look at Mission: Impossible because Bruce didn’t want anyone to look at it.”
The Mission: Impossible pilot turned out great, but the network was still unsure about picking it up due to its high cost. Some have claimed that Ball changed their minds by threatening to quit her sitcom The Lucy Show, which she was able to do thanks to an atypical “year-to-year television contract,” and because the network “was willing to do almost anything to keep TV’s most popular star happy — and at CBS.”
During William Shatner’s induction into the Television Academy Hall of Fame, Ball’s daughter Lucie Arnaz recalled how Ball was routinely pressured into dropping Star Trek and Mission: Impossible because they were so expensive to make. “She used to always listen to everything the dyed-print suits said,” Arnaz explained. “But she said, ‘No, I like ‘em!’ And they said, ‘They cost too much!’ And she said, ‘But I like ‘em!’ So they left them!”
Although it’s hard to say if Ball would have liked the new Mission: Impossible stories, which are all about battling an evil psychic computer.