Today’s Guest: Lloyd Schwartz, executive producer, “The Brady Bunch,” author, Brady, Brady, Brady: The Complete Story of The Brady Bunch as Told by the Father/Son Team who Really Know
Mr. Media is recorded live before a studio audience of Marcia Brady look-a-likes who will be lording their good luck over pretend sister Jans for the rest of their natural lives — in the new new media capitol of the world!
It was a sitcom that began on ABC way back in the 1960s for cryin’ out loud, but here we are, still talking about “The Brady Bunch” some 40 years later.
Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!
Days away from my 50th birthday, I can tell you that I was nine years old when the Bradys hit the airwaves in 1969 and, packaged back-to-back with “The Partridge Family,” they were an instant smash with the grade school gang. That was a great year for me: I was in Mrs. Arnesen’s fourth-grade class at Judd Elementary School, Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon that summer and the Amazin’ Mets won the World Series for the first time.
Good times.
LLOYD SCHWARTZ podcast excerpt: “Robert Reed was extremely difficult, all the time. I always wanted to shake him and say, ‘Mike Brady is a nice guy. Why don’t you be like him?’ He was always bitter. I don’t remember having a nice conversation with him in the 10 to 15 years I knew him.”
You can LISTEN to this interview with LLOYD SCHWARTZ, executive producer of THE BRADY BUNCH and co-author with his dad SHERWOOD SCHWARTZ of BRADY BRADY BRADY, by clicking the audio player above!
I was the oldest of three kids, but I was torn between liking Greg, the oldest Brady, best, or Bobby, the youngest, because we shared a name. (And no, that doesn’t mean you can start calling me Bobby. That’s reserved for family and friends who have known me at least that long.)
The new book, Brady Brady Brady, by father-and-son team Sherwood Schwartz and Lloyd Schwartz, does a brilliant job of taking readers back to that crazy time in America. It fills in the gaps between what we saw on the Brady sitcom and what was really going on. Some things we knew already, like Robert Reed being gay and some we suspected, like the out-of-control hormones raging between Greg and Marcia backstage. But Florence Henderson’s thoughts on being kissed by Reed on Day One are hysterical.
Sherwood Schwartz may have created “The Brady Bunch” and “Gilligan’s Island,” but his son, Lloyd, was the man on the scene from day one, rising from the guy who ran lines with the six Brady kids to executive producer. He helped one of the girls kick drugs later and picked up girls with one of the boys.
This is not his father’s “Brady Bunch” story—okay, part of it is, but most of it isn’t.
Lloyd Schwartz Facebook
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Wow. Nice
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