Word: schwartz
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...Schwartz, who grew up in Brooklyn and has a master's degree in biochemistry, wrote for such early TV comedies as The Red Skelton Show and Ozzie and Harriet before creating his two biggest hits. Since then he has overseen a cottage industry-producing cartoon shows and TV movies based on Gilligan and the Bradys. He also has produced the occasional TV pilot, like 1982's Scamps, starring Gilligan himself, Bob Denver, as an unemployed television writer...
...Brady Bunch Movie was in some ways his most trying project. In one version of the script, the naive-to-their-knee-socks Bradys were turned into foulmouthed hellions. "It was vulgar," says Schwartz. "Instead of making it a gentle satire, it was written with an ax." Schwartz, who has four children and has been married to his wife Mildred for 54 years, fired off memos to Paramount chief Sherry Lansing, threatening to campaign against the film should it contain racy scenes or base language. He won. The film, which transports the Formica-loving clan to a '90s world...
...modern, sparsely appointed Beverly Hills home, Schwartz keeps balsa-wood replicas of all the Gilligan's Island characters, as well as leather-bound volumes of scripts for both his fabled sitcoms. Schwartz has always been his shows' most earnest defender. When comedy writer Merrill Markoe once asked him why the theme songs for Gilligan's Island and The Brady Bunch lay out their premises so explicitly ("Here's the story/ Of a lovely lady ."), he replied, "Because puzzled people cannot laugh...
...being too short when he wants to be taller, going to the prom with zits on your face." Not long after the show went on the air, he recalls, he began getting letters from despondent children who wanted to move to California to live with the TV Bradys. Schwartz replied with a letter to their parents, telling them to talk to their kids about it. "I hope my letters did some good," he says, "but I was puzzled that not a single parent wrote back thanking me or telling me that things were...
...Schwartz remembers CBS chairman William Paley turning pale as Schwartz called Gilligan's Island a "social microcosm" when he pitched the idea for the show. Schwartz still calls it that. "I knew that by assembling seven different people and forcing them to live together, the show would have great philosophical implications," he says. "On a much larger scale this happens all the time. Eventually, the Israelis are going to have to learn to live with the Arabs. We have one world, and Gilligan's Island was my way of saying that." Gilligan and the Skipper as Arafat and Rabin...