My Drive-In Asylum co-host Bill Van Ryn shared an ad for a movie that I’d never heard of on his Groovy Doom Facebook page and it has fascinated me. What could Death Is Not the End be? Dr. Kent Dallt, Professor of Psychology at UCLA, said “I can’t explain the film you are about to see. I doubt anyone can.”

While G-rated, this movie was not recommended for younger children.

So what is it?

That took some detective work.

First off, it was directed by Richard Michaels. He started his career as a summer assistant to legendary New York sportscaster Marty Glickman before becoming a script supervisor. He worked in this role on several films and TV series before directing episodes of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and The Odd Couple, as well as producing Bewitched, a show he would direct 55 episodes of.

That show would change his life, as he and star Elizabeth Montgomery fell in love during the eighth year of the show, breaking up her marriage to William Asher and his to Kristina Hansen. They were together for two and a half years.

The rest of his career was spent in TV, mostly directing TV movies such as The Plutonium Incident, Scared Straight! Another Story, Heart of a Champion: The Ray Mancini Story, Leona Helmsley: The Queen of Mean and many more. He retired in 1994 and currently lives in Hawaii. His daughter, Meredith Michaels-Beerbaum, was the first woman to be ranked #1 in the world in equestrian show jumping.

In the midst of his career, in 1975, is Death Is Not the End, which was written by another TV veteran, Elroy Schwartz. The brother of Sherwood Schwartz, he and Austin Kalish wrote the original pilot for Gilligan’s Island, which went unaired until TBS showed it in 1992. He would continue to be a writer on the show along with his brother Al. In 2000, the Los Angeles Times reported that Schwartz and Kalish were suing Sherwood, saying “They charge that the older sibling has been cheating them out of “Gilligan’s Island” credits and royalties for decades. The dispute apparently began in 1963, when Elroy and Kalish say they wrote most of the pilot show. Sherwood was the producer and, as a favor, they honored his request and put his name on the script as a co-writer, the suit says. Ever since, they charge, Sherwood has tricked them out of their share of royalties and has controlled the rights to the show, which has made him as rich as, say, Thurston Howell III.”

Kalish was no neophyte to writing. He and his wife Irma wrote hundreds of television episodes, including memorable installments of Good Times, Maude and All in the Family. It is believed that he conceived the show’s characters, including giving each of them (and the boat, the S.S. Minnow) his or her name. In his obituary in The Hollywood Reporter, it was said that “Years after the show ended, Kalish said documents were uncovered that indicated he should have been entitled to one-quarter ownership of the series, worth about $10 million, but he received nothing.”

But back to Elroy Schwartz.

Before working in TV, he wrote for some of the best known comedians of the 40s and 50s, including Lucille Ball, Groucho Marx and Bob Hope.  Outside of his writing work, Schwartz was a licensed hypnotherapist who specialized in past life regressions, which brings us closer to the truth of what exactly this movie is.

The AFI Catalog says, “Writer-producer Elroy Schwartz, president of Writer First Productions, signed a distribution deal for 75 IT with Libert Films International, the 7 Apr 1975 Box Office announced. The 25 Jul 1974 HR stated that 75 IT would premiere at the Atlanta International Film Festival in GA on 16 Aug 1976, but the 15 Dec 1975 Box Office claimed that the film’s premiere occurred a year later, on 8 Dec 1975, in Phoenix, Arizona. When a new releasing company, Dona Productions, took over distribution in 1976, the film’s title was changed to Death Is Not the End, according to production materials dated 6 Aug 1976 in the AMPAS library files. Schwartz, a Palm Springs, CA, hypnotherapist and television screenwriter, wrote in the document, “There wasn’t any established script. The movie is a “happening” — a spontaneous filming of a hypnotic regression into reincarnation, and “procarnation” — a look into the subject’s next life.” He described the film to the 15 Dec 1975 Box Office as a “filmed psychic experience.”

While Writer’s First only has this movie and episodes of the show Dusty’s Trail as released and Dona Productions seems made just to distribute this film, there’s plenty more info on Libert Films International, which seemingly was a tax shelter used to distribute films like Rum Runners, Angela, Encounter with the Unknown, The Great Masquerade, My Brother Has Bad Dreams, Mario Bava’s Roy Colt & Winchester Jack, The Devil With Seven Faces, Never Too Young to Rock, Willy & Scratch, Charlie Rich: The Silver Fox in Concert, Beyond Belief and Stevie, Samson and Delilah.

It was then picked up in 1977 by Cougar Pictures, who also distributed The Flesh of the Orchid, Starbird and Sweet William, Scream, Evelyn, Scream! and Beyond Belief.

The IMDB listing for this film is sadly absent of much info beyond this quick description — “The mystery of life eternal is discussed by a number of purported experts in various fields of metaphysical research, as well as individuals who assert that they’ve lived before.” — and the cast and crew. Let’s get into those.

Listed actors include Ken Dallet, Wanda Sue Parrot as a reporter and Jarrett X as a laborer, as well as Schwartz playing himself. So much for more information on the actors. As for the crew, IMDB lists Hal and Charles Lever as executive producers. And…another dead end.

What about the music? It came from Mort Garson, who wrote the song “Our Day Will Come,” which is on the soundtrack of Grease 2, More American Graffiti, Under the Boardwalk, Shag, Buster, She’s Out of Control, Love Field, The Story of Marie and Julien, You Should Have Left and Role Play. He was an electronic musician who released music based on the zodiac, so this makes sense.

The Zodiac’s Cosmic Sounds was a 1967 concept album released by Elektra Records that had early use of the Moog synthesizer by Paul Beaver (“a Scientologist, a right-wing Republican, unmarried, and a bisexual proponent of sexual liberation” who helped build Keith Emerson’s custom polyphonic Moog modular synthesizer, did the sound effects for The Magnetic Monster and composed the score for The Final Programme) with music written by Garson, words by Jacques Wilson and narration by folk musician and Fireside Theater producer Cyrus Faryar, all with instruments played by members of the Wrecking Crew studio collective, such as Emil Richards, Carol Kaye, Hal Blaine, Bud Shank and Mike Melvoin.

He was an early adopted of Moog and even though he wrote the theme song for Dondi, we won’t hold it against him. After all, he wrote the song “Beware! The Blob!” for the Larry Hagman directed sequel. His song as The Zodiac, “Taurus – The Voluptuary,” also shows up in several gay adult films of the early 70s, including the Satanic-themed Born to Raise Hell, which also uses his songs “Black Mass,” “The Ride of Aida (Voodoo),” “Incubus” and “Solomon’s Rising.”

That’s because Garson was also Lucifer, the electronic artist that released Black Mass — also called Black Mass Lucifer — that AllMusic reviewer Paul Simpson says is “a soundtrack-like set of haunting Moog-based pieces which interpret various supernatural and demonic themes.”

Even wilder, he also scored René Cardona Jr.’s Treasure of the Amazon, Paul Leder’s Vultures and Juan López Moctezuma’s To Kill a Stranger. And oh yeah — ten episodes of an Alex Trebek hosted game show, The New Battle Stars, had him compose the theme. On this show, celebrities seated in triangles answered game questions for the contestants. The object of the game was to capture three celebrities by putting out lights around them and the stars included Rip Taylor, Linda Blair, Jim J. Bullock, Fannie Flagg, Richard Simmons, Charles Nelson Reilly and more.

Alan Stensvold was the cinematographer for Death Is Not the End. He shot everything from Bigfoot and Wildboy to The Astral Factor, Dimension 5, Cyborg 2087, Thunder Road and the TV show Dusty’s Trail, which is where he had to have met Elroy Schwartz, who was the co-creator with his brother Sherwood.

This movie was edited by Joan and Larry Heath. While Joan has no other credits, Larry has a large portfolio of work on TV, including 106 episodes of Rhoda, 46 of Simon & Simon, the film Billy Jack and along with episodes of Gilligan’s Island, also worked on Dusty’s Trail.

All of these many facts don’t get me any closer to finding this movie or knowing more.

Luckily, there was an article in The Tampa Times from April 4, 1977 that gets me closer.

Hypnotist explores uncharted areas of the mind by Noni Brill

Elroy Schwartz, stocky, cordial, gregarious, doesn’t look like a Svengali, but, he says, he’s “a hell of a hypnotist.” Schwartz is in town from Los Angeles, where he’s a full-time writer and producer (he’s written for such TV shows as I Love Lucy, Gilligan’s Island and Movie of the Week and a sometime hypnotist who’s delved into unchartered areas of the mind. From these explorations have come both a book, The Silent Sin, and a movie, Death Is Not The End, scheduled for showing Monday night at the Tampa Theatre. His book, written six years ago, deals with a hypnosis subject whom he “regressed,” or took backward in time, over a period of several months, eliciting from her unconscious several past lives she felt she had lived in various reincarnations. In one reincarnation, the subject went through a reenactment of labor pains. For Schwartz, “It triggered something in my mind.” He thought, “If we can go backward in time, why can’t we go forward?” He tucked the thought away for a while, but some time later met Wanda Sue Parrot, a newswoman with the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and “got good vibes from her.” They started work on regressing, and when he felt she was really in touch with her subconscious, Schwartz asked her to go forward in time to her next life.

He was in for a shock. Wanda was “reborn” as a mutant inhabitant of a world recovering from the near-annihilation of an accidental atomic detonation from China. What had been the United States was now “America’s Islands,” fragmented, with whole sections gone from the map. She lived in “Utah County” in the year 75 I.T., which, the hypnotist found, meant International Time, a time system set up by the “World Tribunal,” which governed what was left of Earth.

From the concept of this horror story evolved the movie, which was filmed live as Schwartz put his subject repeatedly into a trance state under the supervision of a medical doctor.

“It’s not edited except for time,” Schwartz said. “Producers have told me it’s not technically a movie, but it has a tremendous impact. Wherever it’s shown, people thank me. They want to see it again.” For himself, Schwartz “knows what we have is real. Maybe this is a warning; maybe we can stop history if we stop and think what we’re doing.” For now, he’s trying to find practical and creative ways to utilize his gift.

He worked for some time at a halfway house for girls in California, treating young drug addicts. He thought, “What if I could get them on imaginary heroin, then break them of an imaginary habit?”

“They reacted totally to the imaginary fix,” he recalled. “They got the sniffles, got very down in demeanor,” He found that the ritual of “shooting up” was as important as the actual drug, and “I learned a lot about the ghetto, about heroin, about addiction. Mainly it was low self-image that kept them on the drug; I tried to improve that image.” ‘ He says he’d like to do further work with a drug control program, but “I’d need a sponsor.” Schwartz has never charged for his work. ”

Hypnotist Elroy Schwartz says he can take his subjects back and forth in time. “I find it totally fascinating. The mind is an incredible machine, a computer. It stores up all visual, audio, input, the senses you’ve had since the day you were born.” He thinks anyone can hypnotize Tm a catalyst. If you taped what I say, you could do it, too.

On a one-on-one basis, I’ll use my eyes, but it’s not necessary. You hypnotize yourself; it’s all there on your computer tapes. I only bring it out.” He believes that many people still see hypnosis as “voodoo, black magic. But it’s a good tool medically, in criminology, dentistry.” He feels that people can be taught to hypnotize themselves out of headaches, or into a quick refreshing nap, can lessen physiological pain. He has this capacity himself, he said, and last fall, while waiting in the emergency room of a California hospital where he had been rushed because of pain, Schwartz said he successfully psyched himself out of his symptoms to such an extent that he “fooled the doctors.” When they operated, they were startled to find that he needed three major surgical procedures.

‘They told me later I was six to 12 hours away from death,” he . said,”But I’d kept all my vital signs normal, and they couldn’t believe it was an emergency.” One thing haunts him. After his sessions with the woman reborn into the future, Schwartz realized there was one question he had “forgotten” to ask. In this strange new world with its lands destroyed by a holocaust and its population mutated, who was he, where did he fit into the future? His eyes grew thoughtful. “I’ve always wondered who she was talking to…”

Schwartz is listed as the co-author — along with Dr. John Woodbury — of The Silent Sin: A Case History of Incest. He conducted the hypnosis that allowed the patients to recall their blocked memories of incest.

The Seventh Sense is another Schwartz book — “A web of murder. A mystery for forty years! Linda Packard was murdered in June, 1952. In April, 2000, Jenny Matthews is hypnotized and, although she does not believe in reincarnation, is regressed to a prior life – Linda Packard. Research proves the reincarnation to be true! With information from Jenny’s subconscious, as Linda, they identify her killer!” — that seems to be self-published on Amazon. He also wrote Enron to the 5th Power, VANISHED (The Snowbird Jones Mysteries), The Iron Christmas Tree, Hyena, The President’s Contract — “When the President of the United States joins forces with the Mafia, the bizarre result is the President’s Contract. Beautiful girls, Black Power advocates and the hilarious misadventures of the V-P complicate their scheme.” — and Tulsa Gold.

Amazon even has a bio: “Writing principally for television and film entertainment, the comedies and dramas of Elroy Schwartz have been enjoyed by millions of viewers over several generations. You may have seen his work in episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man, It Takes a Thief, The Lucy Show, Gilligan’s Island, Baywatch, The Brady Bunch, Policewoman, McHale’s Navy and General Hospital as well as the original or reruns of his movies for television, The Alpha Caper and Money To Burn, among others. Elroy has also worked as an executive story editor, consultant and producer. Today he writes mystery and adventure stories for print and e-book publication. Elroy and his lovely wife Beryl are longtime residents of Palm Springs, California, which is also home of the historic Agua Caliente Indian Reservation. The largest collective landowner in the area, this sovereign tribe stewards more than 31,500 acres of ancestral lands, including the protected Bighorn sheep habitat. The Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians owns two major casinos and hotels, the Spa Resort Casino in downtown Palm Springs, and the Agua Caliente Casino in Rancho Mirage, California. One of the Indigenous Peoples of North America, the tribe strives to maintain its cultural heritage and past, while supporting and helping to develop the communities of Palm Springs, Cathedral City, Rancho Mirage, and other areas of Riverside County.”

Sadly, Elroy died in 2013 and if this movie is to be believed, he’s moved on to his next life.

The problem is, that’s all I can find about this film.

So this is where I’m asking for help.

If you know anything else about Death Is Not the End, if you have a print, if you’ve seen it — email me at bandsaboutmovies@gmail.com

I’m obsessed!