THE GILLIGAN MANIFESTO Documentary Comes to LA and NYC!

A documentary that takes a unique approach to the iconic comedy show "Gilligan's Island," THE GILLIGAN MANIFESTO, will open in Beverly Hills' Music Hall Theater on November 16th and on the 23rd in New York at the Cinema Village. All screenings are free for Academy members.

In 1963, television writer Sherwood Schwartz began filming his comedy classic "Gilligan's Island," which depicts seven Americans shipwrecked on a deserted island. The Gilligan Manifesto reveals this seemingly innocuous sitcom was intended as an analogue for a post-apocalyptic world where survivors had to rebuild civilization.

Director Cevin Soling interviewed Schwartz as well as Russell Johnson and Dawn Wells, who played the Professor and Mary Ann. Soling also interviewed several professors from Harvard and succeeded in getting Chicago 7 defendant, Rennie Davis, to narrate the documentary.

"Sherwood Schwartz said that he conceived "Gilligan's Island" as a social microcosm where people from all walks of life would have to figure out how to get along," Soling said, "but he confessed to me, in his final interview, that the show was deliberately designed as lowbrow humor to conceal its political message. For this reason, American audiences never realized that the show celebrates Marxism and lampoons Western capitalism and democratic governance."

"The most transgressive message conveyed by Gilligan's Island is that it shows how much better off people are under 'true' communism - not the dictatorship governments the Soviets and McCarthyites called communism. The characters that represent the pinnacle of success in capitalist society - the millionaire and the movie star, become whole people and establish social bonds that they never could have otherwise. On the island, their lives cease to be empty."

For additional information, please go to https://www.facebook.com/gilliganmovie/.