SUNDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2010
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EZ EE the christmas issue}acharlie brownchristmas Schulz and Co. took a risk, created a classic
Imagine pitching a TV special based on a pathetic loser
BY MICHAEL CAVNA Before the steady stream of
Emmy Awards and Grammy nominations and Oscar consider- ation came The Idea — the one that producer-director Lee Men- delson, nearly a half-century lat- er, calls with a certain zest “the best idea I’ve had in my entire life.” “I’d just made a documentary
about the best baseball player in the world,” saysMendelson, refer- ring to his award-winning NBC work about Willie Mays. “So I decided to make a documentary about the worst baseball player in the world.” That, naturally, would be Char-
lieBrown.Mendelsonreada“Pea- nuts” strip about the perennially losing hurler and thought: Why not make a documentary about the cartoon’s creator? It turned out to be the best
pitchMendelson ever made. Mendelson called fellow
Northern California resident Charles Schulz — “His phone number was listed right in the book,” the producer recalls—and proposed the documentary. For- tunately, Mendelson says, Schulz had seen “A Man Named Mays” and liked it. “Sure, come on up,” Schulz re-
plied, so Mendelson motored up from San Francisco to Sebastopol and, right there in the heart of wine country, the inspired ideas began to ferment and a 38-year friendship and creative partner- ship took root. By 1965, the two men — work-
ing with veteran Disney andWar- ner Bros. animator BillMelendez — collaborated on their first work, the holiday special “AChar- lie Brown Christmas,” a TV show that took chances, defied certain conventions — eschewing even a laugh track — and, ultimately, remained authentic to the trio’s collective vision. The debut of “A Charlie Brown
Christmas” would capture not only the Emmy and Peabody awards but also roughly half the peoplewatching television across America. Its place in the nation’s holiday hearth has remained fixed ever since. As the special celebrates its 45th anniversary this month—and the strip enjoys its 60th year — ABC airs the “Peanuts” special on Thursday. As viewers tune in to see a
sparse and wilting “Charlie Brown Christmas tree” — a coni- fer embodiment of Chuck’s hard- luck seasonal mood that soon entered our national vernacular —aquestionaboutthis beguiling- ly humble cartoon perseveres: Why, precisely, does “A Charlie Brown Christmas” endure?
Subtle power of ‘Peanuts’ “I think it has to do with the
impact that ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’ had on the viewer when he or she first saw it,” says Jean Schulz, the late cartoonist’s wife and shepherd of the “Pea- nuts” estate. “It might have been as a child sitting with parents. Or it might have been adults in their 40s or 50s who were delighted to see a meaningful, adult-themed showthat brushed aside the plati- tudes that surround public dia- logue and then passed this on to their children and grandchildren. “I think,” she emphasizes,
“these first impressions are very important to us.” PulitzerPrize-winning novelist
Michael Chabon, in his recent autobiographical book, “Man- hood for Amateurs,” writes of the “Peanuts” special’s lasting appeal. “That show, in its plot, charac-
ters, and perhaps above all in its music, captures an authentic bit- tersweetness, the melancholy of this time of year, like no other work of art I know.”
BETTER-THAN-GOOD GRIEF: “ACharlie Brown Christmas” celebrates its 45th anniversary this month.ABC will air the beloved “Peanuts” special Thursday night.
“Mother Goose and Grimm”
creator Mike Peters worked with Mendelson on a ’90s animated series based on Peters’s strip. To Peters, the greatness of “ACharlie Brown Christmas” springs eter- nal. “There has not been a Christ-
mas that we or one of our kids hasn’t bought a sad, pathetic Charlie Brown Christmas tree — the smallest, most scrawny tree we could find for some cherished place in our home,” Peters says. “Sparky [Schulz], Mendelson
and Melendez have touched something deep in our American soul with ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas,’ ” thePulitzer-winning cartoonist continues. “As with any great piece of art, as many times that you see it , you take away something new — the hu- mor, the heart, the laughter and the tears.”
Kissed by kismet Lee Mendelson smiles like a
man who believes in serendipity. “I’ve never actually looked up
the word in the dictionary,”Men- delson, 77, says with a laugh, “but, yes, I believe in serendipity. I had it with ‘A Charlie Brown Christ- mas,’andit continued for40more years. It’s happened too often not to believe in it.” (MendelsonhadcometoWash-
ington in October for the “Pea- nuts” 60th anniversary celebra- tion and Charles Schulz photo- graph unveiling at the National Portrait Gallery.) Part of the magic of “A Charlie
Brown Christmas,” Mendelson says, is the evocative appeal of the music. It was in 1963 that the producer was in a car heading across the Golden Gate Bridge when he heard Vince Guaraldi’s “Cast Your Fate to the Wind.” Mendelson was struck by the
jazz track and contacted Guaral- di, who happened to be a fellow San Franciscan. The producer hired Guaraldi for the planned documentary and soon after got a call from the composer. “He said, “I’ve got to play this
thing for you,’ ” Mendelson re- counts. “I said, ‘I hate to hear it over the phone,’ but he insisted.
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He played [what became] ‘Linus and Lucy.’ It was jazz for adults but still had a childlike quality. “Right then, I had the weirdest
feeling, the strangest thought, that someday this music is going to have an effect onmy life.”
Stops and sudden starts Mendelson and Schulz’s first
collaboration was the planned documentary, which featured the cartoonist drawing and discuss- ing “Peanuts.” The strip launched in October 1950 in only a handful of newspapers but by 1963 had amassed a large national follow- ing. The two men shopped their newproject to agencies, but to the producer’s surprise they couldn’t land a buyer. Stymied, Mendelson took in-
dustrial production jobs to pay the bills. He had worked at the Bay Area station KPIX-TV after graduating from Stanford in 1954 and had rapidly become a veteran of documentary filmmaking. His film on the 1915 San Francisco World’s Fair, “The Innocent Fair,” had led to a “San Francisco Pag- eant” series that won a Peabody Award. Buoyed by that success, Mendelson left the station to hang out the shingle of his own production company. Yet one thing Mendelson had
never attempted was animation. Early in 1965, however, Coca-
Colacamecalling. Executive John Allen — whom Mendelson calls “the hero who had kept the flame burning” — remembered the “Peanuts” pitch of twoyears prior. Now he had a counter-pitch. “Charlie Brown was getting
huge by April 1, 1965, when Time magazine put ‘Peanuts’ on its cov- er,”Mendelson says. “We got a call from [ad agency] McCann Erick- son, which had Coca-Cola as a client. . . .They weren’t interested in a documentary, but they said, ‘Have you andMr. Schulz consid- ered doing a Charlie Brown Christmas show?’ “Of course I said yes.” Mendelson called Schulz with
the pitch: “Therewasalongpause — it felt like an hour, though it was probably five seconds. Then Sparky said, ‘Okay, come on up.’ ”
Birth of the cool Charles Schulz was long
viewed as a man plagued by anxi- ety, self-doubt and fear of rejec- tion. Yet when it came to the production of “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” Mendelson says, Schulz was the epitome of confi- dence and assured cool. After the initial call toMendel-
son, Coca-Cola and McCann Er- ickson were going to make their decision in one week’s time. Translation: Inan erawhenWest- ern Union was their fastest form of written communication, Men- delson and Schulz had only a few days to cobble together an out- line. They immediately brought
aboard Melendez, who several years earlier worked with Schulz on a Ford account featuring “Pea- nuts.”Melendez—who had never headed the animation of a full- length cartoon — flew up from SouthernCalifornia.Onthe clock, the collaboration moved swiftly. “Schulz’s first thought was to
have this revolve around aChrist- mas play,” Mendelson says. “He also said we should have some winter scenes,outdoorscenes.We also talked about the music. We would have some Beethoven, some traditional, and Schulz had liked so much of the music Guar- aldi had written for the documen- tary.” “I had read ‘The Pine Tree’ by
Hans Christian Andersen and threw out the idea of decorating this ugly duckling of a tree,”Men- delson continues. “And Bill sug- gested thatweanimatesomekind of dance sequence, and we want- ed to have them skate. All these ideas were flying around with no form, all in about an hour.” Schulz wrote an outline that
day. “And that was pretty much
what we did,” Mendelson says. “Ninety percent of the show was out of whole cloth.” Days later, Coca-Cola bought
the project. Now the creative trio’s work really began.
The gospel of ‘Peanuts’ Schulz insisted on one core
purpose: “A Charlie Brown “A SPECTACULAR EYEFUL!” —The Washington Post CBS
Christmas” had to be about some- thing. Namely, the true meaning of Christmas. Otherwise, Schulz said, “Why bother doing it?” Mendelson and Melendez
asked Schulzwhether hewassure he wanted to include biblical text in the special. The cartoonist’s response, Mendelson recalls: “If we don’t do it, who will?” To Coca-Cola’s credit, Mendel-
son says, the corporate sponsor never balked at the idea of includ- ingNewTestament passages. The result—Linus’s reading from the Book of Luke about the meaning of the season—became “themost magical two minutes in all of TV animation,” the producer says. In writing about the “Peanuts”
special in “Manhood for Ama- teurs,” Chabon—a self-described Jewish “liberal agnostic empiri- cist” — waxed: “I still know that chapter and verse of theGospel of Luke by heart, and no amount of subsequent disillusionment with the behavior of self-described Christians, or with the ongoing progressive commercialization that in 1965 had already broken CharlieBrown’s heart, has robbed the centralmiracle ofChristianity of its power to move me the way any truly great story can.” Mendelson also credits part of
the power of the scene to child voice actor Christopher Shea, whose tone of wise innocence, the producer says, fits the moment perfectly. Several years earlier, young
voice actors were cast as “Pea- nuts” characters for a Ford com- mercial — this at a time when adult actors were typically cast to voice animated children. “They were 6 or 7 years old
whentheymadethe commercial,” Mendelson says of the “Peanuts” actors, “and now they were 10 or 11. But they were still the best voices.” (Melendez, meanwhile, was
drafted to voice the sounds of Snoopy, which were speeded up by 10 times the rate at which they were recorded.) “We needed an innocent voice
for Linus, and a more blah voice for Charlie Brown [actor Peter Robbins],” Mendelson says. “Once we recorded the kids, I knewwehad something strong— especially when the Linus actor read from the Bible.”
Showtime With the national network de-
but just weeks away, Mendelson and Melendez were convinced they were going to become the guys who turned “Peanuts,” the national treasure, intoananimat- ed flop. “We thought we’d ruined Char-
lie Brown,” the producer says. So much had come together in
amatter of months, including the opening theme. Mendelson had decided to use a Guaraldi track to help create a bigger opening, but they needed lyrics. All the song- writers they turned to were busy, so in desperation Mendelson sat at the kitchen table and wrote a poem in 10 minutes, he says. The result: “Christmas Time Is
Here.” “The words just came to me,”
Mendelson says. In short order, a Bay Area children’s choir was hired to sing the enduring, much- covered tune. At one point,McCannErickson
executive Neil Reagan — brother of the future president — was dispatched to San Francisco to check on the show’s
progress.The genial ad exec was not encour- aged by what he saw. But much to the animation team’s gratitude, Mendelson says, Reagan kept a tight lip on his opinions when he returned to the agency. Finally, “A Charlie Brown
Christmas” was screened for CBS executives—whopromptlydidn’t get it. “They didn’t get the voices.
They didn’t get the music. They didn’t get the pacing,”Mendelson recalls. “They said: ‘This is proba- bly going to be the last [“Peanuts” special]. But we’ve got it sched- uled for next week, sowe’ve got to air it.’ ” On Dec. 9, 1965, “A Charlie
Brown Christmas” debuted. The specialgarneredglowingreviews. And half the United States tuned in.
“The next morning, I walked
into my neighborhood coffee shop,” Mendelson, says referring to Towle’s Cafe in Burlingame, Calif.,“andeveryonewascongrat- ulating me. That’s when I knew we might have something.” The next year, “A Charlie
BrownChristmas” received aPea- body Award, as well as an Emmy AwardforOutstandingChildren’s Program. The irony, Mendelson notes, is that Schulz always wrote “Peanuts” with an adult audience in mind — but with enough warmth and distilled emotion and universality that the feature appealed to kids. The Christmas special also
kicked off a creative partnership among Schulz, Mendelson and Melendez that spanned 38 years, dozens of specials and multiple Emmys before Schulz died in 2000. And still, the meaning of a
“Charlie Brown Christmas tree” continues to burn bright in Amer- ica’s homes. “Bravo for the 45th year,”Mike
Peters says. “. . . I know it will be as fresh and funny and touching 45 years from now.”
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