Sherwood Schwartz was a television writer and producer who became well known for creating the situation comedies "Gilligan's Island" and "The Brady Bunch."
Schwartz, who held a master's degree in biology, began his entertainment career writing for Bob Hope's "Pepsodent Show" during the Great Depression. Schwartz said the key ingredient in writing a joke for Hope was brevity.
He later would write for another comedy giant, Red Skelton, a performer with a notorious dislike for the men employed to feed him funny lines.
Schwartz originally developed "Gilligan's Island" as an escape from writing "The Red Skelton Hour" and thought it would not last more than a season or two.
"The Brady Bunch," Sherwood said, was not as easy to sell as "Gilligan." He wrote the pilot five years after Gilligan." Then it took 3 1/2 years to sell it to ABC.
Both "The Brady Bunch" and "Gilligan" have been turned into feature films produced and written by Schwartz and his son, Lloyd.
Schwartz has worked in production of several other television series, including "Big John, Little John" (1976) and "Dusty's Trail" (1974).
Schwartz died July 12, 2011, of natural causes at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, in Los Angeles. He was 94.
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