THE INVENTOR OF BAD TV

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

TELEVISION IN THE 1960s and early '70s did not lack absurdities. It was a time when viewers were entertained by a flying nun, a buxom genie and a suburban witch who twitched her nose. Yet of all the ridiculous TV shows of the era, two stand out for their enduring, unfathomable allure: The Brady Bunch, the sitcom about an adage-spewing stepfamily cavorting on an Astroturf lawn, and Gilligan's Island, the tale of seven mismatched castaways on an island that seemed oddly close to Hollywood. Both shows had a goofy otherworldliness painfully out of step with their tumultuous times. Both spawned fanatical cult followings and countless spin-offs. Both, amazingly, were created by the same man, Sherwood Schwartz.

After a couple of decades in relative obscurity, Schwartz, 78, has suddenly resurfaced. He co-produced the current box-office hit The Brady Bunch Movie and has already started work on a sequel. He is in the midst of writing a big-screen version of Gilligan's Island. (No cast yet, but Schwartz has his wish list: Martin Short as Gilligan, John Goodman as the Skipper and Michelle Pfeiffer or Geena Davis as the improbably maquillaged starlet Ginger.) What's more, Schwartz is teaming with Ted Turner to create a chain of Gilligan-inspired amusement arcades. Among the attractions: Gilligan's volcano, the professor's science lab and Mary Ann's dessert bar. These projects could finally earn Schwartz significant financial rewards; he does not own the rights to either of his perpetually airing TV creations.

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.

The 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 of fast teenagers, evil developers and psychotherapy, was much more to his liking. But the stress took its toll: the day the film opened, at dinner Schwartz blacked out. He later had a pacemaker implanted to correct a heart condition--called, incredibly, bradycardia.

In his 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."

The Brady Bunch, he contends, was "socially significant" because it "dealt with real emotional problems-the difficulty of being the middle girl, a boy 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 O.K."

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? In the world of Sherwood Schwartz, it makes perfect sense.

--Reported by Tara Weingarten/Los Angeles

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COLOR PHOTO: ALAN LEVENSON FOR TIME ONE MIND, TWO CLASSICS: Schwartz gave us the Bradys and seven castaways [Sherwood Schwartz sitting cross-legged in front of palm tree]

COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOFEST SIGHT GAG Gilligan the punch line [headshot of Bob Denver as Gilligan]

COLOR PHOTO: EVERETT Here's a Story ... Mike and Carol in all their beloved vacuousness [Robert Reed and Florence Henderson as Mike and Carol Brady]

With reporting by Tara Weingarten/Los Angeles