LOS ANGELES — Sherwood Schwartz, the comedy writer
and producer who created what have remained two of the most enduringly
popular TV series in worldwide syndication, died Tuesday morning. He was
94.
Schwartz, who began his more than six-decade career
by writing gags for Bob Hope’s radio show in 1939, died of natural
causes at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, said his son Lloyd.
Schwartz once said he created “Gilligan’s Island,”
which aired on CBS from 1964 to 1967, as an escape from his seven years
on “The Red Skelton Show,” for which he served as head writer and won an
Emmy in 1961.
There was nothing quite as escapist as the wacky tale
of seven people on a small charter boat, the SS Minnow, who set out on a
“three-hour tour” and wound up shipwrecked on an uncharted South
Pacific island.
Starring Bob Denver in the title role of the boat’s
bumbling crew member, “Gilligan’s Island” famously featured the
exasperated skipper (Alan Hale Jr.), the millionaire and his wife (Jim
Backus and Natalie Schafer), the professor (Russell Johnson), the naive
country girl (Dawn Wells) and the sexy movie star (Tina Louise).
Schwartz also wrote the lyrics for the show’s memorable theme song:
“Sit right back and you’ll hear a tale,
A tale of a fateful trip.
It started from this tropic port aboard this tiny ship.
The mate was a mighty sailing man,
The skipper brave and sure,
Five passengers set sail that day
For a three-hour tour.”
Critics had a field day lambasting Schwartz’s shipwreck saga when it debuted.
“It is impossible that a more inept, moronic or humorless show has ever appeared on the home tube,” wrote UPI’s Rick DuBrow.
“It is difficult for me to believe that ‘Gilligan’s
Island’ was written, directed and filmed by adults,” wrote Terrence
O’Flaherty of the San Francisco Chronicle.
It is “quite possibly the most preposterous situation comedy of the season,” wrote Jack Gould of The New York Times.
But the show’s very preposterousness struck a chord with millions of viewers.
For all its crude sight gags, low-brow humor and
pratfalls, Schwartz viewed “Gilligan’s Island” as something more: It is,
he proclaimed, “my version of a social microcosm, where seven people
from various backgrounds had to learn to live together.”
In a 1965 TV Guide interview, Schwartz said he was
“not disheartened by the (negative) reviews — only a bit angry with the
lack of understanding of what was being attempted. Here are the same men
who are forever saying: ‘For heaven’s sake, won’t somebody give us
something other than the wife and the husband and the two children?’ “
Four years later, Schwartz served up his own version of that television staple: the family sitcom.
The story of the marriage between a “lovely lady”
with three daughters and “a man named Brady” with three sons, “The Brady
Bunch” became TV’s first sitcom to feature a blended family. And its
theme song featured lyrics again written by Schwartz.
The series, starring Robert Reed and Florence
Henderson as Mike and Carol Brady, aired on ABC from 1969 to 1974. The
Brady kids were played by Maureen McCormick, Barry Williams, Eve Plumb,
Susan Olsen, Christopher Knight and Mike Lookinland. Ann B. Davis played
Alice, the housekeeper.
Like “Gilligan’s Island,” “The Brady Bunch” was
dismissed by the critics, and it never did as well as Schwartz’s gang of
castaways in the ratings. But the idyllic suburban tale of Marcia, Jan,
Cindy, Greg, Peter, Bobby, Mike, Carol and Alice took on a life of its
own in endless syndicated reruns around the world, watched by succeeding
generations.
“The Brady Bunch” also begat a 1972-74 Saturday
morning animated series (“The Brady Kids”), a 1977 comedy-variety series
(“The Brady Bunch Hour”), a 1981 TV-movie (“The Brady Girls Get
Married”), a 1981 sitcom (“The Brady Brides”), a 1988 TV-movie (“A Very
Brady Christmas”) and a 1990 hourlong dramatic series (“The Bradys.”)
There was even a stage production in the early ’90s,
“The Real Live Brady Bunch,” which re-created episodes word-for-word, as
well as “The Brady Bunch Movie” (1995), a hit spoof starring Shelley
Long and Gary Cole that was followed by “A Very Brady Sequel” with Long
and Cole (1996); and “The Brady Bunch in the White House,” a 2002 TV
movie.
“Gilligan’s Island” likewise continued to air in
reruns around the world and spawned two animated series, three TV-movies
and a 1992 stage musical, “Gilligan: The Musical,” for which Schwartz
and his collaborator son, Lloyd, wrote the book.
Schwartz, who practically made a career out of the
two shows, put little stock in what the critics had to say about his
creations.
“I honestly think I could sit down and write a show
tonight that the critics would love, and I know it would be canceled
within four weeks,” Schwartz said in a 1990 interview with the Los
Angeles Times. “I know what the critics love. We write and produce for
people, not for critics.”
Born on Nov. 14, 1916, in Passaic, N.J., Schwartz
received a bachelor’s degree from New York University and was working on
his master’s degree in biological sciences at the University of
Southern California in 1939 when he unexpectedly abandoned his plan of
becoming a doctor.
At the time, he was living with his older brother,
Al, a comedy writer for “The Bob Hope Show,” then in its first year on
radio. In need of money, Schwartz told his brother, “If I write some
jokes, would you show them to Bob?”
As Schwartz told Jordan Young, author of the 1999
book “The Laugh Crafters: Comedy Writing in Radio and TV’s Golden Age”:
“So I wrote some jokes, and he showed them to Bob, who liked them — and
the last month of ‘The Bob Hope Show’ that first year, they used some of
my material. And then (Hope) said to me, ‘Why don’t you come on the
show?’ “
After four years writing for Hope’s radio show,
Schwartz joined the Army and wound up writing for Armed Forces Radio
Service in Hollywood, including the shows “Command Performance,” “Mail
Call” and “Jubilee.”
After the war, he returned to radio, putting in
stints on “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet,” “The Alan Young Show”
and “The Beulah Show.”
He made his move to television in 1952, spending two
years writing for Joan Davis’ situation comedy “I Married Joan.” In
addition to “The Red Skelton Show,” Schwartz also wrote for the sitcom
“My Favorite Martian” in the early ’60s.
Schwartz conceived the idea for the Brady series in
1965 after reading a brief news report that said nearly one-third of
American households included at least one child from a previous
marriage.
“I realized there was a sociological change going on
in this country, and it prompted me to sit down to write a script about
it,” he recalled in a 2000 interview with the Los Angeles Times.
It took him more than three years to sell “The Brady
Bunch,” a show whose cheery depiction of family life was, he said in
another interview, “100 percent sincere.”
“A lot of people say television holds up a mirror to
life, and that’s why you see all the drug busts and the killings and the
seamier side of life,” he said in the 1990 Times interview. “I
personally take the view that as a responsible producer, it’s not
sufficient to portray only negative role models. I think it’s better to
give an alternative. It’s not enough to say ‘no’ to drugs. What do you
say ‘yes’ to?”
In addition to his son Lloyd, Schwartz is survived by
his wife, Mildred; his two other sons, Dr. Donald Schwartz and Ross
Schwartz; his daughter, Hope Juber; eight grandchildren; and four
great-grandchildren.
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