American Masters: Charles Schulz

In conjunction with the new biography, Schulz and Peanuts (I just got the book yesterday and it's a massive tome), the PBS series American Masters is airing a profile of Charles Schulz on October 29.
His son, Monte Schulz, isn't too happy with it. Or the book. From the NY Post-

Schulz feels that both the book and the TV show depict his father, who died in 2000 at age 77, as dour and depressed. "I thought it was dreary and depressing," he said of the documentary. "I was not happy with it at all. Our response to the book, and it's the same for the documentary, is like they're kind of missing the point. They didn't really show enough of how fun Dad was."

Maybe he's right or maybe he just found it too depressing because that's his dad they're talking about. Either way, I'm looking forward to this.

Visit the show's site HERE for listings and some nice pics.

As for the book, here's an excerpt from a New York Times article (Click it for the full article. No really, do it. It's a good article that examines an artist's intent versus audience interpretation. It compares Charles Schulz with Balzac. When are you ever going to see those two names in the same sentence again?)-

"It’s not a full portrait,” Jean Schulz, his second wife, told The New York Times last week. Monte Schulz, his son, called it “preposterous.” Mr. Michaelis has defended himself, saying that after years of research and hundreds of interviews with those who knew the cartoonist best, “this was the man I found.”
Such arguments are nothing particularly new in the world of biography. Writers and loved ones often end up staring each other down across a big chasm separating substantially different versions of a subject both claim to know intimately. But in the case of Mr. Schulz, the dispute seems to bring up a more fundamental question, whether almost two centuries after outlaws like Byron and Chateaubriand linked suffering and creativity, a connection that probably would have baffled Shakespeare or Swift, we still have a deep-seated need to believe in the idea of the tortured artist, to think that the only enduring ones are the really unhappy ones, even if we’re talking about syndicated cartoon-strip artists.

I've only read the first eighteen pages of the book and it's already something of a bummer. Well written and fascinating, but a bummer.