How I Escaped from Gilligan's Island: And Other Misadventures of a Hollywood Writer-Producer

Writer and former television producer Froug follows his five books on screenwriting with a mean-spirited, overlong memoir of his life in the entertainment industry that will be of interest solely to television history buffs. Despite the book's title, Froug quickly dispatches his work on Gilligan's Island as ""trivial and uninteresting"" choosing instead to share anecdotes about celebrities, including Elizabeth Montgomery, Lucille Ball and Aaron Spelling, but his mean-spirited stories have a sourness to them that keeps the gossip from being enjoyable. Froug's writing is alternately cliched and shallow, one moment telling the reader, ""The deepening blue sky was crystal clear,"" and a few pages later brusquely describing the ""milk-skinned redhead with a voluptuous body"" who ditched her movie star boyfriend to hop in the sack with Froug As for his work in television, Froug portrays himself as the innocent victim of a devious studio system, so much so that it's hard to take what he says at face value. For completists interested in the birth of television, The Twilight Zone, Bewitched or one of the other shows Froug worked on, this book is a necessity; to anyone else the book will appear as Froug's belated attempt at score settling. Photos