‘Brady Bunch’ Creators Fought Studio Over Dirty Stuff in ‘Brady Bunch Movie’
Long before The Brady Bunch Movie became a surprise smartass hit in 1995, series creator Sherwood Schwartz and his son, Brady Bunch producer Lloyd, were hard at work on their own movie adaptation. In the Schwartz version, the sitcom family sees a crime and enters the witness protection program, a straight-ahead comedy with no satire whatsoever. The ‘90s were a fertile time for movie versions of classic TV shows — Batman, The Fugitive, The Addams Family — so studios were interested.
The Schwartzes revised their screenplay multiple times until a version featuring the Bradys held captive by escaped convicts got the greenlight. But this rendition of the movie wasn’t meant to be. The studio executive who approved the project got fired, and new producers threw out the Schwartz script.
Lloyd was furious, but the Schwatzes agreed to read a different script that brought the stuck-in-the-’70s Bradys into the ‘90s. Ugh! The new screenplay was “thoroughly off-putting,” wrote the younger Schwartz in the book Brady Brady Brady. “They simply destroyed the characters.”
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The new approach featured a world in which “everyone dislikes the Bradys and wants to put them down,” wrote Lloyd. But even worse was the dirty stuff.
“I’m no prude,” he claimed, “but it was pretty distressing to read pages about high school boys all wanting to ‘get into Marcia’s pants’ and ‘pop her cherry.’” Packs of “stereotypical screen lesbians” also wanted to get with the oldest Brady girl. The new version of Alice was “sex-mad and jumps all door-to-door salesmen.” Bobby and Cindy visited a sperm bank. “At every turn, the script was filled with profanity and lewd behavior.”
Sherwood and Lloyd went on the offensive, writing “blistering pages of notes detailing exactly how the script had to change if we were to find it acceptable.” But the movie’s writers kept the naughty tone in new drafts. When the Schwartzes threatened to bad-mouth the movie on talk shows, Paramount finally asked the writers to at least consider the suggestions.
What would a Schwartz Brady Bunch Movie have looked like? Lloyd had plenty of casting suggestions, including Madonna or Mia Farrow for Carol Brady. “With Mia Farrow’s image due to her situation with Woody Allen and all those kids,” he figured, “she would bring a quirkiness to the role.” This was a few years after the revelations about Woody and Soon-Yi, so yep, casting Farrow would have been quirky.
After the movie became a hit, Lloyd took credit for its successful aspects — the Schwartzes had suggested actress Christine Taylor for Marsha, and many of the original sitcom’s plots were borrowed to parody. “Okay, I’m blowing my own horn, but are you getting my point?” wrote Lloyd. “Everything they loved about the film was what Dad and I proposed.”
Everything? Not exactly. The film still had plenty of dirty jokes, including Marcia’s gay best friend fondling her thigh under the covers. The sitcom dialogue, “Something suddenly came up,” took on new meaning after Marcia French kissed her date. And after Marcia breaks her nose, she worries that big man on campus Doug Simpson won’t want to date her. “Of course I do,” he assures her. “It’s not your nose I’m after.”
And the Schwartzes must have hated the film’s closing credits, which included Peter being seduced by his lingerie-clad neighbor, Greg dancing with drag queen RuPaul, Marcia kissing her gay pal, and Mike and Carol preparing to get busy with a bottle of Wesson cooking oil.
As for Alice, she’s not seducing door-to-door salesmen, but she’s shaking what she’s got in a dominatrix outfit.
