It’s Still a Wonderful Life

The beauty of a simple premise: Would the world be any different if I had never been born? I won’t ever know the answer to that question, but I can get a small taste of the impact from watching “It’s a Wonderful Life”.

Yes, Elf is funny, The Grinch is crazy-imaginative, Die Hard is exciting, Home Alone is slapstick fun, all Chevy Chase movies are annoying, but no other Christmas movie comes remotely close to capturing my heart the way It’s a Wonderful Life has. It is far and above my favorite Christmas movie, and one of my favorite movies ever made. You too? Well, we’re in good company – it was Jimmy Stewart’s favorite movie he ever made. It makes me think, it makes me cry, it makes me laugh, it gives me hope. Everyone loves this movie. And this time, everyone is right.

I have been watching “IAWL” since I was young – I enjoyed it then – but it becomes a very different movie once you get married and have children. Suddenly the stress and pressure George Bailey encounters becomes very real, and what was once a fun story becomes a much more serious opportunity for self-reflection. The premise becomes more than a storyline.

I could spend the entire post explaining why this movie is so great, but I won’t. Instead, I thought you might like to know a few interesting things about the movie, and the people involved.

The screenplay was based on a short story by Philip Van Doren Stern, who would later become a well-respected historian, specializing in the Civil War era.  The short story  was 4100 words – entitled “The Greatest Gift”. The idea of the story came to him in a dream he had in 1938, but it took him until 1943 to get it written down. He tried to get it published, but there were no takers. So he decided to self-publish. He printed 200 copies of the story as a 24-page pamphlet, and sent them to his friends as Christmas cards.

One of the pamphlets made its way to Hollywood, where RKO Pictures bought the rights to it for $10,000, with plans to cast Cary Grant as the lead. I imagine that Cary would have done just fine with the role, but I’m sure glad that it ended up with Jimmy Stewart. (An interesting side-note is that Mr. Stern was notified by telegram that the studio wanted to buy the rights to the story – and getting a telegram in 1944 was usually bad news, so the family was greatly relieved when it turned out to be such good news.)

The successful film director Frank Capra had just completed his service in the military and wanted to restart his film career with something uplifting – critics would fault him for being overly sentimental in a post-war world. In fact, Frank Capra’s post-war career suffered from the criticism that he did not evolve with the times. “IAWL” did get nominated for best picture, but would lose to “The Best Years of Our Lives”.

The movie did OK. It grossed $3.3 million, but cost $3.1 million – which was pretty expensive at the time.  It was the 27th most popular movie of 1947. Of course they didn’t help that a lot by wide-releasing the movie two weeks after Christmas. D’oh!  Part of the high cost was that the entire main street was built on a ranch in Encino, California, and the rest was filmed in a studio. It was filmed in the summertime – so all the snow is fake. It wasn’t until years after, and a zillion rebroadcasts on cable TV that everyone began to know and fall in love with the movie.

Fast forward to 1985

Jimmy Stewart had donated his collection of memorabilia, scripts, scrapbooks, etc. to be housed in the BYU library’s special collections in 1983. Two years later BYU held a “Jimmy Stewart Week” to celebrate his career. The week culminated in a special screening of “It’s a Wonderful Life” in the DeJong Concert Hal, with Jimmy Stewart and his wife Gloria in attendance. You bet I was there! I went with my roommate, because I was too poor to spring for two tickets. It was so great to see Jimmy Stewart in person, and then watch his classic movie.

As we were walking out of the theater in a slow-moving line, I said to my roommate, “They sure don’t make them like that anymore!”  An eavesdropping man behind us chimed in, “Sure, it was a great movie, but they still make great movies nowadays too.” I looked at him and replied “Movies?  I was talking about Donna Reed!“

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A couple of tidbits:

• Why does George’s son growl when he puts on the Santa mask? Was Santa supposed to be scary?
• Bert and Ernie (Cop and cab driver) were NOT the inspiration for the Sesame Street Muppets.
• In an earlier draft of the script, George’s brother Harry falls through the ice because they were being chased by Mr. Potter’s dogs – the boys had tried to retrieve a hockey puck on Potter’s property – and Potter sent the dogs after them.
• In a 1946 interview, Capra said that he made the movie to combat a “modern trend towards atheism.”

Here are a few pictures from the film. They make me happy.