Dixon Q. Dern, the influential entertainment attorney who represented Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz and helped structure the business affairs of the iconic production company Desilo, has died. He was 97 years old.
A WME spokesperson announced that Dern died Sunday at his home in Los Angeles.
Dern has also represented Bob Hope, Jackie Gleason, the Jackson 5 and the Television Academy, among many others. As a founding partner of Dern, Mason, Swerdlow & Floum, he helped build a formidable legal practice in Hollywood.
In 1975, Michael Ovitz, Ron Meyer, Michael Rosenfeld, Roland Perkins, and Bill Haber contacted Derren and told him they were withdrawing from William Morris and forming a new agency, CAA.
They asked me “if I would represent CAA and more importantly serve as a sort of go-between for the clients from William Morris that would follow them,” he recalled in a 2009 interview with the Television Academy Foundation website. Interviews. He agreed to do so.
Dixon Quackenbush Dern was born on January 24, 1929, in Colorado Springs, and was adopted by a woman who was not yet married, a rarity at the time. In 1946 he enrolled at Stanford University, where he earned bachelor’s and law degrees, before arriving in Los Angeles and being admitted to the California bar in 1954.
His first job in Los Angeles was as in-house counsel for UPA Animation House, the studio behind it Gerald McBoing-Boeing SHow and Mr. Magoo. He moved to CBS, where he handled network programming and staffing, but left the legal department to work directly with series like… Perry Mason and Rawhide.
Dern exited in 1962 for a job as general counsel at Desilu Productions, home of Desilu Productions. I love Lucy It appears later including The outcasts, Star Trek, Manix and Mission: impossible. There, his work contributed to the growth of television syndication as an enduring economic model, radically changing how programming was financed, distributed, and evaluated for generations.
He left Desilu in 1965 to manage business and legal affairs at United Artists Television for two years before moving into private practice with Dern, Mason, Swerdlow & Floum.
Around that time, he also began serving as an arbitrator and mediator in entertainment and employment disputes, where his opinions were widely respected and cited within the industry.
Dern served as Vice President and a member of the Board of Governors of the California State Bar Association. as president of the Beverly Hills Bar Association; as a Trustee of the Los Angeles County Bar Association; and as president of the Los Angeles Copyright Association.
In 2009, the Television Academy honored him with the Sid Cassid Founders Award, which honors members who have made a significant positive impact on the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences through their years of involvement and service.
His family noted that he loved opera, books, politics, and square dancing and “was fiercely loyal to his AA community and proud of his 50 years of sobriety.”
Survivors include his children, Chelsea, Warren, Peter, Rosalyn and Greg Dern, five grandchildren and several great-grandchildren. He will be buried next to his wife, Lisa den Dearn (Chelsea’s mother, died in 2016), at Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills.
