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Interview
with Hope Juber Part One |
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We cannot say much about this yet, but even though Hope Juber is an
actress, a very successful playwright and screenwriter, singer,
songwriter and oh let’s not forget that she also produces music, as well
as films, She may just have another really good movie on the way. Sorry
that is all we can tell you for now…except…
“I have had readings of my movie that I wrote with my partner Ellen
Guylas (Full House,
Newhart,
Three’s Company,
Who’s The Boss?) I am very
passionate about this particular project, because it is totally mine,”
says Hope Juber.
For those not familiar with her work, among other things she has acted
in, worked on and produced the television series for, movies of and
musicals based on Gilligan’s
Island and The Brady Bunch,
both of which were created by her father Sherwood Schwartz.
“I had the idea for this movie a few years ago and I brought it to my
partner Ellen Guylas and we started talking about it. It was the only
project I ever took to my dad. I told him all the different ideas I had
and what I was working on. When I took him this one he said you keep
going with this one, because this is your commercial hit movie. He said
I want you to keep going. Will you promise me you will? I said yes.
Right now what I am focusing on is casting the Brady reading. We have a
reading of A Very Brady Musical,
which is going up in New York in February. We are going to be doing a
reading for a couple of producers and we would like to get that up on
the stage. It is coming up to the fiftieth anniversary of The Brady
Bunch, which is amazing to say that, but it is true. We would like to
get a production of the musical going. We are thinking of an
Off-Broadway production.
We did a workshop at Theatre West (in Los Angeles) and it did great.
There are always rights issues anytime that you are dealing with
studios and in the middle of the workshop production CBS decided that we
could only do the production and then they were going to pull the rights
to do the musical and it took a few years to get the rights back. We got
them back recently, so we said let’s get this back on its feet.
(The musical) is edgier than The
Brady Bunch, but it is still family friendly. It is a really fun
piece. It is interesting, because when Laurence and I worked on the
score for the Gilligan Musical, for years, we would put songs in and
then we would take them out. I don’t know how many years it took us to
write the score to that musical, but when we started writing the score
for The
Brady Musical it was like the
house got plugged into a socket. We wrote the entire score for the
musical in two weeks. We were buzzing over here. It was crazy. We were
up all night working on the songs and it just all came out in a big
gush. It was just so right. I am excited for people to hear it, because
some of the songs will just knock you out,” she says.
In 2015 Juber collaborated with Jeff Doucette to create the innovative
play Without Annette, which
was originally staged at Theatre West.
“I had been taking improv classes from Jeff Doucette and I had an idea
to set a play in an improv workshop. I went to Jeff and I asked has
anyone set a play in an improv workshop? He said not that he had heard
of. I said if you do that then there will be times in the class when
they will do a scene or a game and those could be really improvised and
so every show will be slightly different and have pockets of improv
through the whole show. Jeff loved that idea and we wrote it. We had a
production of it at White Fire Theatre and then it got picked up by
Theatre West. After that it was published. I would love another theatre
to do that particular piece. It was so much fun to do. The actors liked
doing it, because it was fresh every night,” says Juber.
Hope Juber’s involvement with theatre also extends beyond that of adult
audiences, as she has written four plays for Storybook Theatre, which is
owned and operated by her brother Lloyd Schwartz and his wife Barbara.
“The thing about Storybook Theatre that is unique and that I love is how
interactive and kid friendly it is. You can take little three year olds
and they don’t have to feel strapped in. They are encouraged to yell and
some of the kids get up on stage. There are cookies and milk in the
middle of the intermission. It is a kid friendly first theatre
experience. It is a delight. Since the shows are written by adults and
they are performed by adults, they have a wink and a nod to all of the
adults in the audience too. It is a fun and entertaining afternoon for
the kids and the adults,” she says.
There is so much about Hope Juber’s life that it like a wonderful
adventure this writer was momentarily challenged with which pathway to
go down next. Okay, Hope let’s talk about growing with a father who
created two of the most iconic shows of the sixties and seventies, which
in turn spun off some movies. For younger readers Gilligan’s Island was
about a group of people who went out on a ship, although it looked much
more like a large yacht and they were marooned on an island together.
The Brady Bunch was a light hearted story about two families that were
blended together. In fact, Hope Juber had a recurring role as the
teenage girlfriend of the series’ character Greg. Spill the beans Hope,
what was it like growing up as the daughter of Sherwood Schwartz?
“When I was a little girl I would get up in the middle of the night and
I would go into the room and my dad would be sitting with a faraway look
in his eyes. I would say what are you doing dad? He would say I’m
working. For us this is where it has always been and it was never
anything unusual, because when I grew up and where I grew up all of my
friends’ parents that is what they were doing too. They were creating TV
shows. When I was seven years old my best friend’s dad was doing
Get Smart on the same lot
where my dad was doing Gilligan and after school we would walk down the
street and we would go to the studio. We would go to either the
Get Smart set or go to the
Gilligan set. That was just our normal way of being. I didn’t think of
it as anything unusual for where I was and who I dealt with, because
that is what everybody was doing. With everybody I talked to their dad
was producing a show or their mom was doing this or in this show. It was
such a special and unique thing. I loved going with my dad. It was great
for a kid to run around with the performers on
Gilligan’s Island. It was
normal. That was my childhood. It just seemed like that is what we all
did. I didn’t come here from Oklahoma to make it in the industry. I just
grew up around it all of the time. I loved it and I still love it, but
it was not anything unusual,” she says.
Hope Juber talks about the special relationship that she enjoyed with
Dawn Wells who played the character Mary Ann Summers on
Gilligan’s Island, “I loved
Dawn. I always loved her outfits and I always thought she looked so
cute. She would take me shopping and we would go looking for miniature
versions of what she had, because she knew that I loved the way that she
dressed in that show. She is a lovely lady and she still is. She is
beautiful and kind. I think she is wonderful.”
Then it was time to get those marooned on the island off of the island
and Hope Juber had a hand in that with the movie
Rescue from Gilligan’s Island.
She was a dialogue coach.
“Dad had wanted to get them off of the island and had the idea to do a
rescue show. He had to convince people this would be a good idea and
that people would want to see it. He got a lot of pushback about that
originally and then when they finally filmed the movie and it came on
the air, it was the highest rated TV movie for years. It did great.
For dad when he was trying to sell Gilligan’s it was really hard to sell
that show. You have to be so persistent and you have to understand and
believe what you are doing, so well. My dad was extremely persistent. He
would continue to take it out when it had all been rejected and then he
would wait a while and go back again. That was one thing that he always
taught me, that you just keep going. I feel if you keep trying to do
something then it may or may not happen, but if you don’t try it won’t,”
says Juber.
Hope Juber sheds some light on why her father wanted to produce
Gilligan’s Island as a musical, “When my dad went to New York to see
Annie many years ago he came
back thinking it was a fun, family musical. Gilligan’s has a fun, almost
unreal feel to it and he thought that Gilligan could be done as a
musical.
Dad came to me. I had a comedy Rock and Roll band through the eighties
and into the nineties called The Housewives. This was before there were
angry, or desperate or real ones (as
a comment about reality television shows) or anything. I started it
in 1978, but I was performing with it from ’82 until probably 1993 and
my dad loved to come and see the band, because he liked the songs that
we were writing. I write comedic, but for that I called it domestic Rock
and Roll songs for things other people didn’t write songs about. He
loved that project and he said I have been thinking about doing a
Gilligan musical and I want you and Laurence to write the songs for it.
We started working on the songs in 1988. We did a workshop production in
North Carolina. When we went to San Diego with that show we did a full
rewrite and it took a while for us to get that into the shape that we
were all really happy about. He (Sherwood Schwartz) just felt that it
would be a really fun family musical like an
Annie type of thing.
It did what dad wanted to do with the series itself. My dad always said
that all shows that he ever produced were basically the same show. That
might sound strange, but in his philosophy you take people and then you
put them in a situation when they have to learn to work together like a
family. He felt what the world really needs is for people to figure out
common ground and to figure out how to work together in a peaceful
positive way. He wanted to take
those seven castaways from different life situations, put them on an
island and get them to figure out how to work together peacefully. That
was Gilligan. When Brady came along
it was about two families getting together and merging as one family and
then learning how to live together.
My dad was a really optimistic and a very warmhearted man. I really feel
like the world needed that above all else. It needs people to figure out
how to work together and to work out their problems. He said I just keep
doing that same show over and over again. You wouldn’t think that Brady
and Gilligan have that in common, but when you think about it they do.”
As for her being cast in a recurring role as Rachel on The Brady Bunch,
she says, “I think it was partly, because I was an adolescent girl going
through my own things. The Brady
Bunch was difficult for me, because there was this entire other
family of perfect kids that was happening within my family and I had
some mixed emotions about that. I think my dad to make me feel a part of
it every once in a while would say hey do you want to do this role or
that role? (He thought) I wouldn’t feel like an outsider.
Sometimes I would be at home when these six kids and my dad would be off
in the Grand Canyon or in Hawaii or whatever
The Brady Bunch was doing and
I would feel like oh I am the real kid, so I just have to be at home.
That one wasn’t always easy. It wasn’t like Gilligan, which was a joy
all of the time for me. I was dealing with things at school, because
people knew my dad did the show. Some of my friends wanted to go to the
set and all of a sudden I had new friends. Were they really friends or
did they just want to go to the set? Occasionally I would bring someone
home from school, just as a friend, but oh they wanted to be on the show
and they would break into a monologue. I think dad recognized that and
he wanted me to feel a part of it and every once in a while I would be
on the show.”
Hope Juber and her brother Lloyd Schwartz produced
The Brady Bunch 35th Anniversary
Reunion Special: Still Brady After All These Years (2004).
To read the second part of our interview with Hope Juber
click here.
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I
have been working on it for a long time and I am hopeful, because this
is a movie that has to be made. It is a very expensive movie, so it
involves major studio involvement and that is not easy to do. It is
going to take me a while. I won’t say exactly what it is now, but it is
a big family movie. I am very passionate about it. 
Laurence
and Hope Juber wrote the score for
Gilligan’s Island: The Musical
and Lloyd Schwartz and Sherwood Schwartz wrote the book for it. The
musical has been staged all over the world and theatre companies can
license the rights to produce it.