Without Sherwood Schwartz, television history would be missing two key programs – "Gilligan's Island" and "The Brady Bunch." Schwartz created those two programs, which prompted a series of spin-offs, and made stars of their casts.

He also created the short-lived program "It's About Time," which today is best known for its theme song than for its plot about astronauts who land on a planet still in the Stone Age.
Schwartz was good with theme songs. He needed a quick way to introduce the basic storyline of a show to his audience, thus was born such permanent additions to our repository of lyrics as "the millionaire … and his wife" and "they knew they were much more than a bunch."

Not to mention the connection between Hamlet and the opera "Carmen."
Schwartz reflected on his many accomplishments during a 2001 interview with TVParty contributor L. Wayne Hicks.

TVP: I read your book, "Inside Gilligan's Island." It was a fascinating account of the show, but I can't get over the fact that they wanted to make it "Gilligan's Travels."

SS: Yeah.

TVP: That was their bright idea?

SS: It was a gentleman — and I use the term loosely — named Jim Aubrey. That was his idea. And I kept saying to him, "Jim, that's an idea for a show but that's not my show. That's an idea for travel fun. My idea is a serious topic, but I do it in a funny way. It's how seven strange people can learn to live together. It has a very strong reality base. Yours is a different show." He said, "Well, I like mine better." I said, "Well, that's up to you."I'll tell you how he told me that the show was sold. He called me from New York. His official title given to him by everyone, he was the smiling cobra. That's what they called him in Time magazine. His greatest delight in life was to fire somebody, and he always had a smile on his face when he was doing it. He called me from New York. He said, "Sherwood I hate your fucking show, but I just have to put it on the air." There's other ways to say that. [laughs]

TVP: It was not an easy sale, I gather from reading your book. Your agent didn't like it. The network brass didn't like the idea.

SS: There was an interview on one of these shows that tells the background of a show. Perry Lafferty, the then-president of CBS West Coast, was interviewed and he said, "I thought it was a stupid show. Nobody liked it." And then they interviewed Mike Dann, who followed Jim Aubrey: "I don't even know why Jim put it on the air because it was a terrible show." Everybody agreed it was a terrible show and it's still running every night everywhere.

TVP: So why did they put it on the air if no one at the network liked it?

SS: The audience. The audience put it on the air. They test pilots. I don't know if you know that.

TVP: They test pilots on an audience.

SS: Yes. They did it -- as a matter of fact, they did it twice with this one. There was a basis for his argument. I'll give him that. Because he didn't understand what I was talking about. The basis was there would have to be, in his opinion, and other people's opinion, so much exposition explaining what the hell these seven people were doing on the island and it would be so dull before you ever got to the comedy. I used to say to Jim that will not be a problem. I will have a song written that will take care of all the exposition in one entertaining minute. That's all you were allowed in those years. Sixty seconds was your limit. I said in 60 seconds I will tell the whole background story so there won't be any exposition. I myself have a saying: "Exposition is the enemy of entertainment." That's the truth. If you have to keep explaining what people are saying and doing, and why they're where they are, you never get to the story. So that was his objection. He liked the Skipper and Gilligan and they go off on a different adventure every week, so you don't have to explain everything. Different people get on the boat and they have a different adventure. I said to him, "Jim, that's not my show." I said, "You want to do that show, do your show." Which he did. He did that show. It was called "The Baileys of Balboa." It lasted 13 weeks. But my show is still running.

TVP: At that point, theme songs to TV shows weren't used to explain anything about the shows?

SS: No. That's why he didn't understand what I was talking about.

TVP: And now you have one of the most famous theme songs in history.

SS: Probably the most. Probably.

TVP: That and of course your other one, for "The Brady Bunch."

SS: Yes. And I'm not even a songwriter. [laughs]

TVP: Your first agent didn't like "Gilligan's Island."

SS: No.

TVP: The network didn't like it.

SS: Well, I don't know if my first agent didn't like it. He said, "Sherwood you're out of your fucking mind" [laughs].

TVP: What kept you going? Why didn't you just give up?

SS: I thought I had a great idea. And it's still a great idea. It's people. Here's a serious show. It's serious in that Arabs and Jews have to learn to live together for they're stuck together. North Koreans and South Koreans, they have to learn. If you don't learn, you'll all die. So there's this philosophic basis -- this is not an afterthought, this is in the show. When the show first came on the air I got with regularity bachelor's degree, master's degree thesis from people in the theatrical area explaining what's the basis for "Gilligan's Island." Like I didn't know. It was carefully thought out, these seven people. That took me like a year to figure out who should be on the island. And it was all with a view towards the respect that people have to learn for each other because nobody is the same as anybody else. When would a billionaire sit down and have lunch with Gilligan, except if he had to? The same is true of a movie star and a professor. There's miles between them, but when they're stuck in the same place they have to learn to live together. That's what the show is about, people learning to live together.

TVP: How did you decide on seven as the magic number for the characters?

SS: I don't know. A lot of people have written to me saying they understand that's the seven deadly sins. That was never in my mind, but they've explained it to me [laughs]. It could have been eight. It could have been six. I couldn't see 12 people. As a matter of fact, if I were to create the show now, I would not have seven white people. In order to accommodate the progress of the world, which is all for the good, I'd have to have like a black or two blacks. I would have to have a Chicano, a young Mexican-American. I would have to have an Asian. I would have to have a different mixture of people if I was staying with what my idea was to begin with. Because seven very unlikely people have to learn to live together. So I'd have to rearrange the characters in that sense.

TVP: You were pre-med in college, right?

SS: Yes. As a matter of fact, I have a master's degree in biological sciences.

TVP: So how do you go from that to Hollywood and being a writer?

SS: You want to know all this?

TVP: Yes.

SS: I'll tell you. My aim was to be a doctor. I came through at a time, which was the mid-'30s, when the AMA in its infinite stupidity believed that your religion had a lot to do with things. I'm Jewish. The AMA used to tell medical schools how many Jewish students were allowed in a class. If you were in North Dakota where there aren't hardly any Jews, maybe one would get in. If you were in New York, which I was at that time, out of an entry class of 100 they would allow 10 Jews. But 90 percent of the people trying to become doctors in the New York area were Jewish. As a result, if your father was a doctor, that was OK. If your father was the head of a hospital in the area, that was OK. If it was just grades, you have major problems. I had major problems. I wasn't summa cum laude. There was only one summa cum laude in my graduating class at NYU where I took my bachelor's degree, and he never became a doctor. But he was Jewish. Now that didn't mean if you were non-Jewish you would automatically get in. It just meant that you had to have very good grades to get into a medical school. But you could have very good grades and be non-Jewish and get in. If you were Jewish you had other trouble. So I was advised to change my name from Sherwood Schwartz to Sherwood Black because Schwartz is like a German word for black and where it says religion because in those years you to had to put down your religion, instead of saying Jewish they advised me to put down Unitarian, which is like the mildest of Christian beliefs, at least that's what I'm told. I said, "Look, I'm Jewish. I'm not ashamed of that. My name is Schwartz and I'm not ashamed of that. I'm not going to be changing anything to get into medical school." So as a result I didn't get into medical school.

TVP: Who was advising you to change your name and change your religion?

SS: It was the people in the offices at NYU. It was an accepted fact that you were going to have problems. I could have gone to Canada and gone to a medical school. I could have gone to Scotland. I could have gone to five places where if you had good grades you could get into school. But then when were you were limited to where you could practice. You couldn't automatically be able to take your medical degree and open an office in New York. You couldn't, as a matter of fact.

TVP: A foreign medical school wasn't as good as an American medical school?

SS: In their opinion. So I didn't want any of that so I had to said to heck to that. Now at the same time I was doing this I had an older brother who was a writer. And he was a writer on the "Bob Hope Show." He was, as a matter of fact, the head writer. I had no money in those years. Nobody had money. This was 1934, ‘35, it was the depths of the Depression. My brother, Al was a wonderful guy and had this job with Bob Hope and he had a room that I could take, he had a big apartment in Hollywood.

While I was getting my master's degree I was living with my brother, Al. Then I finished my work on my degree and there were still six or seven episodes of the "Bob Hope Show" to be done. This was radio. And so I said to him, because it didn't seem to me to be very hard to write jokes. I said to Al, what if I write some jokes? Would you show them to Bob? If you tell me the topic the show is about I'd like to write some jokes. And if Bob likes them maybe you could give me five dollars, 10 dollars a joke. For 10 dollars you could eat for a week, in those years.

TVP: Did you think you were a naturally funny person?

SS: I had written jokes like in high school. On amateur night I had a friend who was kind of a comic guy and I used to write material. But I had no real hope or desire really to be a writer. I thought I could do it. But with the arrogance of youth I thought I could do anything.

Anyway, I thought I could write material. I wrote some jokes and my brother gave them to Bob and Bob used some of them and they got big laughs. I did it a second week. And meanwhile Bob didn't give me any money so I said hey I thought I was going to get some kind of money from Bob. He said, "Well, let me talk to Bob."He talked to Bob and the next thing I knew I get a call from Bob's agent, a guy named Jimmy Saphier. And Jimmy says, "Bob likes the material you've written very well. Why don't you come on the show as a regular writer for fall?" I said I'm trying to get into a medical school. He said, "That's important to you?" I said yeah. I went to pre-med and gotten a degree in biological sciences. That's what I really want to do. He said, "Let me talk to Bob." Bob was very, very nice. He said, "I tell you what. I like the way he writes. I want him on the show. But I respect his wishes. And if he doesn't get into a medical school I would like him to join the staff." So Jimmy calls me and says that's what Bob said. That's a terrific offer to make. All he ever saw was the four pages of jokes that I wrote and he wanted me on the staff so I guess he must have liked those jokes.

TVP: Do you recall what any of those jokes were?

SS: No. I have no idea. It's buried in my mind.

TVP: How many medical schools were you sending applications to?

SS: Too many. Too many.

TVP: And when did you realize you weren't going to get in?

SS: When I was sitting on the steps of the library at NYU. There was a congregation of young men who had just spent four years breaking their asses. Pre-med is a very tough discipline. And all of them are sitting there reading their rejections to all these medical schools and 90 percent of them are Jewish. Not the medical schools, the boys. We're all just sitting there looking at a blank wall. I didn't believe that my religion or my name would matter if I got good enough grades. I could not comprehend that. When things are so terrible you can't believe it, it's the truth. That's a generality that applies. So we didn't believe it. We worked hard, got our degrees and we got good grades and we were faced with looking for other work. Well mine just fell into my lap. I was very fortunate because Bob wanted me on his show.

I was with Bob for almost five years until I was drafted. Off the show and into the Army, where I continued to write. Those command performances and a lot of Army shows. I worked with about everybody you ever heard of, and probably some people you never heard of but who were famous stars at that time. Because the Army had access to all stars and they all did it for nothing, so you'd do shows with anybody and everybody. And we did.

And after the war was over I went back to civilian life and Bob assumed I would go back to his show. Because I was happy there. But you have to be realistic. I faced the facts and this was one of the hardest things to tell him, because I didn't want to keep writing that kind of variety comedy. I wanted to do story shows. I wanted to do situation comedy. I thought that there was more stuff.Bob said, "You were happy on the show." I said yeah. He said, "I assumed you'd join." I said, "Bob I like you. I love you because you gave me a tremendous start but I just want to do other things now." He could never understand that. Usually when you leave a comedian, any star, comedians in particular, they get angry with you and they don't want to talk to you any more because you have now ruptured that relationship. But Bob and I remained friends.Then I went to work for -- this was still radio, I did "Ozzie and Harriet" in radio. That was what I wanted to do was situation comedy. Then I did "I Married Joan," with Joan Davis. Very similar to "Lucy." I was unsatisfied until I developed my own shows and I created "Gilligan's Island." That was what I wanted to do. I wanted to say something important but in very comic terms. And I think that show did it.

TVP: What did working for Bob Hope show teach you about comedy or comedy writing?

SS: Well, it taught me a great deal. It taught me brevity. I forget who said it originally but maybe it was Shakespeare, brevity is the soul of wit. When you wrote for Bob Hope, you didn't worry about adjectives and pronouns. You just wrote the bare bones joke because that was the only thing that counted. There were no flowery words. There was no description. It was just jokes. He had a monologue, that was his pride and joy, was the monologue, and he would tell 16 jokes. He would do a preview in which there were 30 jokes and then he would do the 16 that got the best laugh. Bob put those together himself. He didn't write them. He put them together. So I learned brevity.

I learned you don't have to have 16 lines getting to a joke. You can do it in three. So that you could hit fast and go on to the next one. Nowadays they carry that to an extreme. If you look at the situation comedies that are on now, there's just one line. A guy comes in the room and says something funny. Another guy comes in the room and says something funny. Another guy comes in the room -- or a woman or whoever it is – and says something funny. There are no straight lines anymore. Well, straight lines also destroy character. If you're just doing punch lines, you can't develop character. I think that's wrong with today's comedy. But nobody asks me so I don't tell them.

TVP: You wanted to do your own show. You didn't want to keep working on other people's shows and you created "Gilligan's Island."

SS: Right.

TVP: But you weren't discouraged after the pilot was rejected again and gain.

SS: No. I have belief in what I do. We're living in a real world, so most writers have to write what they're asked to write because they have kids, they have a mortgage on their house, they have dental bills, they have all kinds of problems. Writers are people. It's common, I think, for people to blame writers for what they see on television and that's unfair because unless writers write what they're asked and changes to the way the network or production company tells them to change it they're not going to work. And if they're not going to work, their wives are not going to buy clothes, their kids are not going to be fed. They have to work. The problem is writers have to do what they're asked to do unless they want to face the long battle of trying to get their own idea on the show they want it to be. Those are battles. You read a whole book about my battles.

TVP: A lot of battles. Then once the show finally got on the air, the critics weren't too kind.

SS: I never care about critics. Critics are not people. They're trying to show off how smart they are by playing everything down, unless it has a so-called intelligence background, like "West Wing." But my shows never seemed to be intellectual. So they always complained. They complained about "The Brady Bunch" too. They didn't like that.

TVP: I saw in your book that people were writing letters to the Coast Guard saying rescue these people from "Gilligan's Island."

SS: Yes.

TVP: People actually thought this was a documentary of some sort.

SS: That's right. It's hard to believe. I don't know where they thought the music came from, and the laughter, and the commercials. But people believe. I have some absolutes in my writing. Even though certainly "Gilligan's Island" was a very broad show, nevertheless no idea was ever permitted to go through, it never was allowed to start unless I could explain -- I'm now talking particularly about shows that had a guest star -- unless I could be comfortable with getting the guest star off logically. Some reasons, it's stretched because it's comedy, but it had to be logical up to a point. There's a certain amount of logic that forms the basis for comedy.

TVP: Were the guest stars always part of the idea for the show?

SS: No.

TVP: When did they come into the picture?

SS: After about six or seven shows. Again this was prompted to a certain extent by CBS executives, Hunt Stromberg in particular. "It's just going to be dull if nothing ever happens except these same seven people."I said I can get somebody on the island but I want to get rid of them because I want this show to be about the seven people I have chosen. He said, "Well, just keep it fresh." I promised him. I promised the network. I said the minute you see it going stale, tell me and first of all, I won't do the show. I fortunately never believed that money was the end-all. Money never meant anything to me except I wanted it but I had to get it my own way. I wasn't going to do a show that I think is going to be unsuccessful just because they give me a lot of money to do. I would not do it. I was offered that many times. They told me an idea and they said would you want to do this? I said no. I don't want to do it.

I had an interesting experience with Red Skelton. CBS wanted me to take over the show, which was dramatically falling. I said I didn't want to do it because I had heard about the head writer who was then on the show. And Red was kind of crazy. So the story goes, the head writer had given him a script, which he didn't like. So he went out to discuss the script with Red. What I was told, was that Artie, the head writer, he went to a meeting with Red. Red always had guns around. He took this gun and was shooting at Artie's feet. He said to him maybe this will teach you to write funnier. I don't know how that would make you write funnier, but that was Red. He was a nut.

CBS said, "Do you want to take over the show?" I said I don't want to take over the show. I said I have 10 toes. I like every one of them. I'm not going to do the show. They said to me, "What would make you do the show?" I said I can't imagine anything. As I say money was not the issue. I thought he was a hilarious comic. He was in my estimation the greatest pantomime comic that ever lived. He's doing the wrong show, in my estimation. That's what I told CBS. Which meant to them well we'd better give this guy a lot of money if he wants to do a whole new show with him. But it didn't. It just meant I thought he was doing the wrong show.

They said did I think I could fix it? I said yeah. They said, "What would make you come on the show?" I said if I could just do the script. I don't want any meetings with Red. I said that's the condition. I did the show for seven years and never had a meeting with him. I just would write the scripts. And he never even knew what character he was playing from week to week. He would do 90 percent of it or 40 percent of it and he would always throw in stuff from things he remembered, but the show became immediately successful and at the end of the year when I was on the show it was No. 1.

TVP: What had he been doing wrong up to that point?

SS: It was really so simple if they stopped to analyze it. He was doing a show where he did bits and pieces of all his characters. He would do his Freddie the Freeloader, then he would do the Mean Little Kid, then he would do Deadeye, the sheriff. He had about six characters and he would do three or four minutes of them in every show. I said he's kicking away his audience who wants to see one of those shows. I said he should star one of his characters in each of the half-hour shows. So he would do a half-hour show with Freddie the Freeloader. And a half-hour show with Clem Kadiddlehopper and then you would do a whole show about a whole character and then he in effect would become his own guest star from one show to the next. And then people would say gee I'd like to see Freddie again and by that time Freddie was again there. So he wouldn't kick away all of his characters every week in these three-minute bits.

TVP: So you got to keep your toes.

SS: Yes. I got to keep my toes. And he got to keep his show. That made it very successful. I didn't make it successful. He made it successful. I just gave him the framework in order to make him as good as he could be, which is the best. I did a show, which to my knowledge is the only show in the history of the writer's guild that didn't have a single word in it. Not a single verbal word. It was all description, about Freddie the Freeloader in one of those half-hour shows, for which I won a writer's Guild Award. For a show that didn't have a word.

TVP: But it had to be written.

SS: Oh yeah. It was some 30, 35 pages of directions.

TVP: Is it easier to write for a character you invented yourself or for someone like Freddie the Freeloader who is the creation of someone else?

SS: That was not the issue. I could write just as well for one as the other. What creating the shows did for me was to let me present ideas. The easiest show I ever developed was not "Gilligan's Island." That took a long time. "The Brady Bunch" was very simple. That was based on four lines I read in the Times, the LA Times, It was a filler item in the paper that said that that year some 29 percent of all marriages had a child or children from a previous marriage. And that's all I needed. Two sentences, three sentences gave me "The Brady Bunch" because I realized when you're talking about a third of all marriages, you're talking about a whole new sociological phenomenon.

I was so sure there would be 900 writers writing ideas based on that, that I raced to the typewriter and wrote the premise for "The Brady Bunch" and wrote the script as quickly as I could. And much to my surprise, nobody else even saw that item or it never meant as much to anybody else as it did to me. To me, it opened a new door in situation comedy. The premises were much easier to come by; they had not been done before.

TVP: With "Gilligan's Island," when you were plotting out your original story ideas, were you planning on them always being on the island or did you have an episode where maybe in six years they would get off?

SS: No. Never did.

TVP: They were always going to be on the island.

SS: Yeah. That was the idea of the show. I remember vividly. I wasn't working at home then. I had an office. For some reason that escapes me now I had started to list different ideas I had. I knew that everybody would say the same thing, every executive. Well can you keep this thing going? And how many stories can you get with the same seven people? So I decided. I got a roll of this butcher's paper and I circled my whole room -- it was not a big room -- and with a felt pen I wrote these ideas all around the room. There were 31 stories. I rolled it up and took it with me. Anybody who said can you get enough stories, I would unroll this 31 stories and I said that's just a result of a week or two's work. There's a lot more stories available, not only stories about the elements about storms coming or the threat of a volcano, or just different battles that they had with the elements. When I had all those stories I felt confident to answer any questions about the longevity of the show. We did 99 episodes and we were only canceled by mistake.

TVP: Because of "Gunsmoke" not being on the schedule.

SS: Exactly. If not for "Gunsmoke," we'd have another year. But I'm not unhappy about that because I think there comes a point of exhaustion with a show. Most shows, if they run 100 episodes that's pretty much what they can do. In those years, nowadays it's only like 22 new episodes a year. But in that year the first year we did 39 shows in one year.

TVP: Are you amazed that it's still on the air.

SS: I guess so. I don't think about it but I'm surprised. I get a great deal of fan mail. I get a lot of letters from little kids who love it because it's an easy show to understand. Both shows are easy to understand. Most of the letters come from people who watched it when they were little kids running home from school. It would be on every day at 3:30 or 4 o'clock. They're delighted to sit down and relive those shows with their own kids now. I get a lot of letters from people in their 20s and 30s who tell me they don't know how they could have survived their teen years without those two shows, which is an elaboration on the truth I'm sure but also there's some truth in it. Particularly the character of Gilligan. Most kids think that they're misunderstood and they do the best they can and nobody appreciates them. It's a common understanding of kids. And that's what Gilligan is. He never means wrong. He always means right. Somehow he screws things up. Kids believe that's their problem in life. Whether it's right or wrong, that's what they believe. So there's great identification.

And then with the kids on "The Brady Bunch." Every one of those kids can be identified with by somebody who thinks that's them. Whether it's Marcia, Marcia, Marcia or whether it's little Bobby who never thought he'd be as big as his brothers, I just tell the truth, really, in my shows. Based on maybe a far-fetched idea, but the way I approach it is the truth is my truth.

TVP: And both shows dealt with the whole idea of people getting along together, being thrown together and having to get along.

SS: Yeah. The two shows are very similar. "The Brady Bunch" isn't that different than "Gilligan's Island." It's two families that have to learn to live together in one case. In the other case it's seven strangers who have to learn to live together. I think that's the most crucial problem in the world today. Just take a look at these kids who go to school with guns and kill people because they don't know how to live together. Nations have to learn. We only have one planet to live on and we have to learn to live with each other or the planet will get blown up.

TVP: With "The Brady Bunch," other writers might have said let's have one kid on this side and two kids on that side. But you threw six in there. How did you think of that number?

SS: Well, I didn't think of that number. I originally had two on each side. But that didn't get me to where I wanted to be in terms of the kind of audience I could reach. I am very, very audience conscious. I am not network conscious. I am certainly not critics conscious. But I am audience conscious and I want all the people that possibly can see my shows to be interested in them. I would have done more on each side but three was the most I could manage and still do a half-hour episode. I couldn't dig deeply enough with eight and two seemed wrong somehow. Anyway I wound up with three.

TVP: Whom did you leave out originally?

SS: I no longer remember. The only problem I had there -- you always have problems -- the only problem I had there was the production company, Paramount, wanted me to do the traditional kids. They wanted one kid to be eating all the time, a fat kid. They wanted me to have one kid who all he talked about was sports, he knew all about baseball players and football players. And then another kid who wore glasses and was intellectual and read books all the time. I said no, I don't want to do that.

Paramount wanted me to make them cartoon characters. I wanted them to grow with the characters and I achieved that because they are real flesh and blood people. You think of "The Brady Bunch" as flesh and blood people. I don't think you think the same way about the characters on "Gilligan's Island" because they're more cartoon characters.

TVP: I imagine if you did "Gilligan's Island" today, the network would be pushing for sex or violence or some additional element.

SS: Yes, they would. That's true. And that's the unfortunate thing is that writers in today's market are no longer able to pursue their dreams. People keep waking them up.

TVP: So what would make today's situation comedies better?

SS: I really don't know. I cannot answer that question because I just do what I want to do myself. I have no control over comedies. I would not put these shows on the air that are all mirror images of each other. It's either three guys living with two girls or two girls living with one guy. It's always combinations of people, which forces writers to write all sexual innuendo. Ninety percent of the jokes in comedy today are built on some aspect of sexual reference. I did some of that with Ginger on Gilligan's Island. There was a presence of sex. I certainly don't object to sex. I object to the fact that every line shouldn't be about sex. There are just things that are just as important as sex in life. Maybe not as important, but certainly has some importance, so that every situation and every storyline and every joke doesn't have to be about sex.

TVP: And that creates the problem that you can't sit down with your entire family and watch a TV show anymore.

SS: No, you can't. Except for my shows. That's why I get a lot of letters from parents saying, "Thank God your shows are on the air. I can leave the room."

TVP: When my oldest daughter was born I didn't know any lullabies to sing, so I would sing your theme songs. Those songs do stick in your head.

SS: Yeah, they do. People have asked me to explain that and I don't know how to explain it except the fact that I feel deeply about those shows and apparently that creeps in. I wrote the songs. I'm not a songwriter, but I wrote those songs in order to avoid exposition and tell their stories and that seems to have worked very well.

TVP: I think without the songs you'd be pretty lost.

SS: That's exactly true. That's what I kept telling Jim Aubrey at CBS. I had a funny experience in North Carolina. I did, I should say we did because I wrote this with my son Lloyd who I work with a lot. We wrote a musical. It started in North Carolina. And I was sitting next to a couple, oh, 10 years ago. An older couple. Not that I'm young, but I view life like I'm still young. So they were an older couple and they were sitting next to me. During intermission I said did you enjoy the show? It turns out they didn't have a television set. They said to me, "These are an interesting group of people in the show." They said, "They might be interesting to watch from week to week, like in a show." (laughs). At first I thought they were kidding until I learned North Carolina has pockets of people who don't have television sets.

TVP: You've been working on a play for a long time.

SS: I just did a dramatic play. My first totally dramatic play, called "The Trial of Othello." Othello stabs himself in remorse because he has strangled his wife because he believes Iago's tale that she was not faithful to him. So he strangles her. And he finds out that she was faithful and he stabs himself. My show takes place shortly thereafter because he didn't kill himself when he stabbed himself. So he's now on trial for having strangled his wife. It's a courtroom drama. No comedy in it at all, except a very brief scene with Bianca, who is kind of the town harlot. After the play, I was talking with different people who didn't know me at all except for this play they had seen, which was totally dramatic except for that little scene. So they said to me, "That was a really funny scene with Bianca." Have I ever considered writing comedy? (laughs). I said yes.

TVP: Are you a big fan of Shakespeare?

SS: Yes. I think he's the greatest writer who ever lived.

TVP: I think you have a lot of children their first taste of Shakespeare with your musical "Hamlet" on "Gilligan's Island."

SS: I did. I got a lot of letters from teachers who said thank you for exposing our children to Shakespeare and to opera.

TVP: It's hard to hear "Carmen" now without thinking of that episode.

SS: Thank you. That's a very nice thing for me to hear. That was a remarkable episode. I always give credit to the writers. I put the music in. They didn't have that. I got the idea to add the music to the soliloquy. And it's hard for me to hear (sings)
"I ask to be or not to be/A rogue or peasant slave is what you see." I hear that in my head whenever I hear "Hamlet." (sings) "Neither a borrower nor a lender be."

It just seems so natural with that music. Shakespeare never had music in it but the music seems to fit exactly.

TVP: I think it works.

SS: Yeah.

TVP: Both shows that you're known for, it's hard to imagine anyone but those actors, Bob Denver as Gilligan and Alan Hale as the Skipper, in those roles.

SS: That's a great example. Once that show ended, they had hard luck trying to get other work because they were so identified. Almost the clothes made them identified, that red shirt on Gilligan and the blue shirt on the Skipper. It was so engrained in the social conscience.

TVP: Is that a tragedy that they were typecast?

SS: Yes. And they were not sufficiently financially rewarded for that, in my opinion. All they got were six residuals. By the time I did "The Brady Bunch" there were 10 residuals and after that there were no residuals. Then, about four or five years later, it became residuals in perpetuity, which I think it should be, because part and parcel of the reason people tune in is those actors.

TVP: Was it easy to get them to come back and do the later reunion shows and movies because there wasn't much else for them to do?

SS: Yes. Yes. However the money was very attractive, for those two-hour shows. They got much more money than they would normally get because Bob Denver was irreplaceable. You couldn't think of doing a show without him or without a Skipper.

TVP: And the Brady movies, and "The Brady Brides."

SS: Yes. Those were all the originals. They were well paid for that. Much better paid. That made it fair.

TVP: How happy were you with the Brady Bunch movies?

SS: I was happy. I didn't always get what I wanted. With movies, the director somehow is more important than the producer. I didn't always get the character I wanted or the part I wanted. I would say it's half and half. Half of the time I won.

TVP: How do you think you influenced television?

SS: Not a great deal. Not a great deal. I influenced people because I don't know any other writer-producer who gets the kind of fan mail I get. Not just from this country, but from all over the world. I get some 80, 100 letters a week, all of which I answer. I just send them what they ask for, which is usually a picture of me to see what I look like. And also they want a picture of the casts. So I send those out. Every once in a while I get a meaningful letter. Usually I send them out in the order in which they arrive.You get letters that make you cry sometimes. Somebody writes me a letter that they spent three months in the hospital with some terrible disease and then only thing that gave them relief when the pills didn't do the trick was watching "Gilligan's Island."

TVP: Do you think the day will come that both shows are off the air?

SS: Not in my lifetime. I hope not in my kids' lifetime. But I'm an old man.

TVP: Are there shows you worked on or created that haven't gotten the recognition maybe they should have?

SS: No. No. I have other shows that I liked better than what got on the air, but they never got on the air. I have another show that got on the air and I did some wrong things with it. And the only thing people remember is the theme song. I guess I'm a theme song writer basically.

TVP: What show was that?

SS: It was a show called "It's About Time." (Sings) "It's about time / It's about space / About strange people in the strangest place." The only thing people remember about that show is the theme song.

TVP: It was only on for about a year, right?

SS: It was on a year, yeah.

TVP: What did you do wrong with that show?

SS: There's one thing. That show was a satire on the space program. We had not yet landed a man on the moon. We did that a year later. So I was playing satire against a non-event that had not yet happened. If I did that show two years later, it would have had a better chance for success because the image of the spacecraft landing, people walking out, that was not yet in the audience's head. You can do that with drama. Drama is much more successful with an unheralded event than comedy, which plays off things people know. So I did that too early.

TVP: Before your time?

SS: Yeah. That was before its time. Also the caves, physically, were dull, brown caves. I was playing reality and I shouldn't have. I should have jazzed them up a little. So you make mistakes.

TVP: You've had caves in all three of those shows.

SS: Yeah (laughs). I like caves. My son likes them even better. His favorite thing is caves.

TVP: You mentioned the clipping in the LA Times sparked the idea for "The Brady Bunch." Was there anything similar that sparked "Gilligan's Island"?

SS: No. Although some people I must have stolen that from "Robinson Crusoe." I don't think so, but anything's possible. My memory of it is I wanted to do a show about democracy, in its basic form. Seven people who have to learn to live together. I couldn't do that with a job because you can get fired. Where could I put people where they could not get away from each other? That's what started that show. The only place I could think of was an island, a deserted island, where a group of people were for some reason stranded there.

TVP: I once won a radio trivia contest for knowing that it wasn't actually filmed on a real island.

SS: True. You didn't think of sharing that prize with me, did you?

TVP: The prize was a very bad record album.

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