Beyond the inclusion of Schulz’s cast of wildly popular characters, 1965’s A Charlie Brown Christmas seemed a production earmarked for failure. The special’s small crew was given a mere six months between the film’s conception and its maiden broadcast. At his own insistence, Schulz signed up to pen the script, his first attempt at a screenplay. . . . Schulz’s script centered around a pensive Charlie Brown attempting to find the true meaning of Christmas. “The 1960s were when Christmas first began to start the day after Thanksgiving,” says Mendelson. “There was an irony to this, given the commercialization of the comics. That wasn’t really his doing. He said, ‘If people want to buy stuff, that’s up to them. I’m not in the business of making stuff and selling it. I’m in the business of making a comic strip, and if people want products, then so be it.’ “
“We’re all a little schizophrenic in that way,” adds Jean Schulz. “You live in this world, and you despair. If you think at all, you’re always wrestling with this. I think that’s exactly what Sparky was expressing.” The special opens with a characteristically distraught Charlie Brown, speaking to the perpetually blanket-wielding Linus on a snow-covered version of the brick wall, the bald third-grader’s preferred location for vocalizing his ever-present inner despair. “I think there must be something wrong with me, Linus,” he begins. “Christmas is coming, but I don’t feel happy.”
In case that wasn’t enough to threatren the film’s commercial potential, the producers added one final nail to the prime time coffin: Schulz’s script called for Linus to deliver a subdued monologue at the film’s climax, a word-for-word recitation of Jesus’s birth, taken from the Gospel of Luke. “Bill said, ‘You can’t have the Bible on television!’ Sparky said, ‘If we don’t do it, who will?’ By the time that Coca-Cola and CBS saw it, they had no choice but to play it. They had nothing else to put in there.”
What the roomful of executives saw upon the first screening was a shock—a slow and quiet semireligious, jazz-filled 25 minutes, voiced by a cast of inexperienced children, and, perhaps most unforgivably, without a laugh track. “They said, ‘We’ll play it once and that will be all. Good try,’ “ remembers Mendelson. “Bill and I thought we had ruined Charlie Brown forever when it was done. We kind of agreed with the network. One of the animators stood up in the back of the room—he had had a couple of drinks—and he said, ‘It’s going to run for a hundred years,’ and then fell down. We all thought he was crazy, but he was more right than we were.” |