Gilligan’s Island Was Almost Killed By The Kennedy Assassination

As Schwartz recalled, “Marooned” was scheduled to wrap shooting in Honolulu Harbor on November 23, 1963. “Even though that was our last day of location filming, the scene at Honolulu Harbor was to be the very first sequence in the ‘Gilligan’s Island’ pilot, where the S.S. Minnow leaves on its fateful excursion,” he explained. With such a pivotal scene left to finish and the production nearly out of time and money alike, there was little room for error. Then the unthinkable happened.

As production continued in Moloaa Bay on November 22, “somebody came running down to our company on the beach, claiming he had just heard a disc jockey on the radio say that President Kennedy had been shot,” Schwartz remembered. And while he and his crew were skeptical at first (being “thousands of miles from the mainland” only made the situation seem that much more implausible, as he explained), “Gradually the realization dawned that this was not simply a rumor. President Kennedy had indeed been shot.”

Despite finding it “incredibly difficult to continue work” as the news trickled in that Kennedy had died and Lyndon Johnson had been sworn in as the next U.S. President, Schwartz and his team had little choice but to finish that day’s shoot as planned and move on to their hotels in Oahu. However, when they arrived to film in Honolulu Harbor the next day, they learned that it and other U.S. naval and military installations would be shut down for the entire weekend “as a period of mourning for President Kennedy.” The problem was, the “Gilligan’s Island” cast and crew were already slated to fly back to Los Angeles before things would open up again the following week.