Screenwriting : Today's Wish and Creative Tip by Laurie Ashbourne

Make Snoopy Stand Up In honor of everyone’s favorite Beagle and Blockhead’s theatrical success – today’s tip and wish comes from my lifelong inspiration, Peanuts’ creator Charles Schulz. “A cartoonist,” Schulz once said, “is someone who has to draw the same thing every day without repeating himself.” It was this “infinitely shifting repetition of the patterns,” Umberto Eco wrote in The New York Review of Books in 1985, that gave the strip its epic quality. Watching the permutations of every character working out how to get along with every other character demanded “from the reader a continuous act of empathy.” His saga of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy and Linus ''is arguably the longest story ever told by one human being,'' Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, observed on the PBS ''NewsHour'' with Jim Lehrer, longer than any epic poem, any Tolstoy novel, any Wagner opera. In all Mr. Schulz drew more than 18,250 strips in nearly 50 years. “Sparky” Schulz said, the greatest decision he ever made in his daily routine, was to make Snoopy stand up. Indeed once he did this Peanuts’ became an unstoppable force. For me, that has been one of my personal driving forces in every decision I make, in fact when I quit Disney, that was in my resignation letter… “It’s time for me to go make Snoopy stand up.” I gave 6 month’s notice, and one month later, Charles Schulz died. The hurts of Mr. Schulz's early years provided a lifetime of material. At Central High School in St. Paul, he flunked Latin, English, algebra and physics. ''Ripley's Believe It or Not!'' accepted one of his drawings when he was 15 -- a picture of Spike illustrating ''a hunting dog that eats pins, tacks and razor blades'' -- but the cartoons he drew for his high school yearbook were rejected. Mr. Schulz remembered his failures more vividly than his successes. After his high school graduation, he took a correspondence course from Art Instruction Inc., but before he could start a career he was drafted into the Army. He left for boot camp only days after his mother died of cancer. During World War II, from 1943 to 1945, Mr. Schulz served in France and Germany and became a staff sergeant in the 20th Armored Division. He once refused to toss a grenade into an artillery emplacement because he saw a little dog wander into it. ''You can't create humor out of happiness,'' Mr. Schulz said in his 1980 book, ''Charlie Brown, Snoopy and Me.'' ''Drawing a daily comic strip is not unlike having an English theme hanging over your head every day for the rest of your life,'' he once said. He could do a strip an hour and six strips a day, but preferred not to. He generally kept three months ahead of publication and never took more than ten days off at a time, and then only reluctantly. As Schulz noted on The Today Show when he announced his retirement, in December 1999: “Snoopy likes to think that he’s this independent dog who does all of these things and leads his own life, but he always makes sure that he never gets too far from that supper dish.” He has animal needs, and he knows it, which makes him, in a word, human. In 1968, Snoopy became NASA’s mascot. The next year, Snoopy had a lunar module named after him for the Apollo 10 mission (the command module was called Charlie Brown). In 1968 and 1972, Snoopy was a write-in candidate for president of the United States! Snoopy may have been delusional, but in the end he knew very well that everything could come tumbling down. His very existence seems to be a way of saying that no matter what a person builds up for himself inside or outside society, everyone is basically alone in it together. By the way, in the end Snoopy did admit to at least one shortcoming, though he claimed he wasn’t really to blame. In the strip that ran on January 1, 2000, drawn in shaky lines, the kids are having a great snowball fight. Snoopy sits on the sidelines, struggling to get his paws around a snowball: “Suddenly the dog realized that his dad had never taught him how to throw snowballs.” Another Charles (Chuck Palahniuk; FIGHT CLUB) famously said, the goal isn’t to live forever, but to create something that will. 65 years later, Peanuts is nowhere near retirement, it's a box office smash. I have to tell you, the adults in the theater were 200% engaged, more so than the children. I won’t give out spoilers, but there was a father of two in front of us, who screamed at a key plot point. He later had to break away to take his children to the restroom, and my son was concerned he would miss part of the movie. In short, Snoopy is still standing, playing hockey and battling the Red Baron and there’s a little Charlie Brown in us all. When creating your heroes, think of one little thing that can make a world of difference and transcend time and species. I think of both of these quotes as I decide what to write next and all during the process – I wish you all the same inspiration.