Gilligan's Island

Gilligan’s Island and Film History

63 Gilligan’s Island and Film History banish him to a mental institution: during the competition, all he kept muttering was “Gilligan!” Gilligan’s Island and Film History Along with other 1960s telefilm sitcoms such as Bewitched, Gilligan’s Island gave directorial work both to classical Hollywood directors (such as Jack Arnold, who had directed Russell Johnson in 1950s science fiction films) and to young up-andcoming directors such as Richard Donner (who would go on to direct 1978’s Superman and the Lethal Weapon films). Perhaps most intriguingly, film studies’ recent rediscovery of Ida Lupino as one of the few women directors from the classical Hollywood period has turned attention to Gilligan’s Island, of which she directed six episodes. Despite auteurist critics’ rescue project to uncover Lupino’s role behind the cameras in Hollywood, these same critics reject her work in television situation comedy in almost identical ways to the original erasure of her film directing. In their entry on Lupino in The Encyclopedia of Television, Mary Celeste Kearney and James Moran explain, “Although she directed episodes of The Untouchables and The Fugitive, whose intricate weekly subplots and relatively large guest casts required her creative input, her influence on formulaic series such as Gilligan’s Island or Bewitched was minimal” (1390). Similarly, in Disaster and Memory: Celebrity Culture and the Crisis of Hollywood Cinema , Wheeler Winston Dixon argues, “There is little to say, for example, about Lupino’s work on Bewitched or Gilligan’s Island, but her work for The Untouchables and Thriller is often adventurous and individualistic” (71). I believe, in fact, there is quite a lot to say about Lupino and Gilligan’s Island. For one thing, while the role of the director 01 Metz text.indd 63 1/20/12 12:00 PM 64 Gilligan’s Island in episodic television is significantly different than in feature filmmaking (the “creative control” sometimes given to a film director is often in the hands of a television producer, as it was in the case of Schwartz and Gilligan’s Island), it is nonetheless the case that the television director is fully in charge of orchestrating the filming of the dramatic scenes on set and getting the best performances possible out of his or her actors, just as in film direction. Lupino orchestrated the image and got wonderful performances out of her actors, both in the feature films she directed, such as The Bigamist (1953), and in her situation comedy work. The episodes of Gilligan’s Island that Lupino directed are remarkable for a number of reasons. For one thing, Lupino helmed early first season episodes—the fourth, “Goodnight, Sweet Skipper” (October 17, 1964) and the fifth, “Wrongway Feldman” (October 24, 1964)—at precisely the time the show was shifting from its opening episodes’ serial establishment of the characters’ given circumstances on the island to an episodic series format. In “Goodnight, Sweet Skipper,” the trauma suffered by the Skipper during World War II is plumbed for dramatic effect and foregrounds Alan Hale Jr.’s skill as a dramatic, in addition to comedic, actor. The next episode, “Wrongway Feldman,” is the first episode of Gilligan’s Island to feature a guest star, a format that the show would use to great effect later on, as in the well-remembered episode “The Producer,” featuring Phil Silvers as the producer of a musical version of Hamlet, a third-season episode also codirected by Ida Lupino. In “Wrongway Feldman,” Hans Conreid portrays a flying ace who has accidentally landed his airplane on the island. Conreid, a well-known character actor from the classical Hollywood cinema (his first film was 1938’s Dramatic School) found himself in the 1960s in similar circumstances to Lupino, bouncing around between film and television, taking small jobs as they came. 01 Metz text.indd 64 1/20/12 12:00 PM 65 Gilligan’s Island and Film History As Dixon admits, “Most previous studies of Lupino have failed to consider her television work, yet a careful examination of her series projects reveals that her directorial sensibility is still apparent, although muted, to some degree by the inevitable television treadmill” (71). This motivates an intervention into the significance television studies can have for the well-studied area of auteurist film theory. Since the foundations of the discipline, articulated by Andrew Sarris in The American Cinema (1968), authorship theory has posited the notion that a film director’s...