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.

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