![]() ![]() The idea was to show how people can learn to live with one another. Back in radio, he and his brother had pitched a series called Help, about six or seven servants to a rich family. He left the series and was hired to retool the comedy My Favorite Martian in 1963, but he was also nursing his own idea for a TV series. I got a telegram - this is the only nice thing Red Skelton ever did for me - saying, ‘What would have been wrong with Skelton Schwartz?’”Įventually Schwartz grew weary of working with Skelton. “Skelton thought I was naming my daughter after Bob Hope, and I guess he was jealous. “We named her Hope because she came after three boys, and we were hoping for a girl,” he says. Schwartz also won a Writers Guild Award for one episode, which, remarkably, contained not a word of dialogue.ĭuring those years in the mid-to-late 1950s, Schwartz and his wife, Mildred, had their fourth child, Hope. It also brought Schwartz his first and only Primetime Emmy award. ![]() It was an odd arrangement, but it worked. After some negotiations, Schwartz agreed to take a job as head writer, but only if he would never have to meet with the star. Schwartz recalls that while Skelton was an enormous talent, he had a reputation for treating writers badly. Impressed, the agency asked Schwartz to run the show. The comedian had too much to say and not enough to do. Skelton, perhaps the greatest comic and mime ever, was not being used well, Schwartz told agency executives. The company sponsored The Red Skelton Show, which, after early success, was not faring well. He was getting a reputation around town for knowing how to make viewers laugh the executives at the ad agency for Johnson Wax began to take notice. In the late 1940s, as America fell in love with television, Schwartz switched to the new medium as a writer on I Married Joan, starring Joan Davis and Jim Backus (who would later star on Gilligan’s Island). “As the creator of The Brady Bunch and Gilligan’s Island, Sherwood has brought, and continues to bring to TV, that increasingly rare quality of American humor - originality.” Hal Kanter, who was also on the Beulah writing staff, says Schwartz proved to be a writer with a unique approach. When he returned to civilian life, Schwartz wrote for The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet on radio, and later for The Beulah Show, a radio comedy starring Hattie McDaniel. There, he estimates, he wrote for as many as 200 stars who appeared on the radio program Command Performance and other shows. While he didn‘t sit down and mentor me, I played by his rules and I learned to write concisely and funny.”Īfter four years with Hope, Schwartz joined the Army and was sent to the Armed Forces Network. “ taught me the ins and outs of comedy writing … I had to be brief, I had to be very funny, and I had to be consistent. Hope liked the jokes so much, though, that he offered Schwartz a writing job. The idea was to sell a few jokes a week for five or ten dollars each, enough to not be a burden on his brother. “So I wrote some jokes, and gave them to my brother and asked him if he’d show them to Bob.” “It didn’t seem to me to be hard to write jokes, which is all Bob Hope really wanted,” Schwartz says. The year was 1938, and Schwartz, now 21, went to live with his older brother, Al, a staff writer on Bob Hope’s radio show. I didn’t get into medical school.”īlown off-course, Schwartz left his hometown of Passaic, New Jersey, for Los Angeles. As I pointed out, ‘This is a democracy.’ I didn’t believe it, but they were right. I thought if I worked hard enough and got good grades, I could get in. “They suggested that I change my name or religion to get in. Because of quotas on the number of Jewish students admitted to the medical school to which he applied, he was put on a waiting list. “I had no interest in writing or comedy except that I could do it,” says the affable 92-year-old, seated in the office of his Beverly Hills home, surrounded by mementos of a 70-year career as a writer and producer on shows such as Gilligan‘s Island and The Brady Bunch.Įven though he earned money as a young man writing jokes for amateur comedy contests, Schwartz, who later earned a master’s degree in biology, was focused on medical school. He wanted to pursue a career in medicine - specifically to do research in endocrinology. Like Gilligan and the Skipper, two of his iconic TV creations, Sherwood Schwartz had always thought he knew in which direction the winds would take him. ![]()
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