Brian Damage
08-08-2010, 11:23 PM
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.
http://www.tvparty.com/sherwood-schwartz2.html
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.
http://www.tvparty.com/sherwood-schwartz2.html