Blake Snyder (1957-2009) began his career in show business at an early age. His father, Kenneth Snyder, was an award-winning producer for children’s television shows, including The Funny Company, Roger Ramjet, and Sesame Street. His father hired Blake to do voice acting for various projects at the age of eight but fired him after a few years when his voice changed. After Blake Snyder graduated from Georgetown University, where he majored in English, he landed a job writing for Kids Incorporated, a Disney television series. In 1989, he sold his first “spec” script (spec refers to an unsolicited and therefore “speculative” screenplay that a screenwriter hopes to sell) for the 1992 movie Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, starring Sylvester Stallone and Estelle Getty. Snyder also co-wrote and sold scripts for Blank Check (Walt Disney Pictures) and Nuclear Family (Amblin Entertainment), each for a million dollars. Snyder firmly places his work in the “family comedy” category, as his successes suggest.

Though Snyder was one of the more successful spec screenwriters, critics do not hold his movies in esteem. Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, for example, was widely panned by critics but grossed over $70 million worldwide (“

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