TRACING THE PATH PODCAST

This episode traces the surprising origins of the beloved film It’s a Wonderful Life, revealing it was never intended to be a Christmas movie and initially struggled at the box office. It highlights how an unpublishable short story, The Greatest Gift, penned by Philip Van Doren Stern, found its way to Hollywood after being distributed as a Christmas card.

The narrative then intricately links the film’s creation to two pivotal figures: Amadeo Giannini, an Italian immigrant who founded the Bank of America by providing loans to the working class, thereby embodying the spirit of community and financial support later reflected in the movie’s hero, and Frank Capra, another Italian immigrant director renowned for making films about the “common man.”

Ultimately, a copyright oversight in 1974 propelled the film into the public domain, leading to its ubiquitous television broadcasts during the holiday season and cementing its status as an unintentional, yet enduring, Christmas classic.

Amadeo Giannini’s Bank

It wasn’t originally written as a Christmas story. In fact, it began as a dream that was then shared in a Christmas card. Movie studio writers, when they got a hold of it, expanded it by adding the story of an Italian immigrant who became a real American hero. And then another Italian immigrant gave it life before a mistake made it an annual classic.

Our story begins with Amadeo Giannini. Giannini’s family came to America in pursuit of the 1849 California Gold Rush. They came from Valle de Medello in Italy. His father Luigi worked the gold mines through the 1860s until 1870 when he and his wife gave birth to the Amadeo.

A family made Luigi want to provide a more stable lifestyle so he purchased a 40 acre produce farm and the family was in the produce business. Four years later in a pay dispute with an employee, Luigi was shot dead, leaving his wife and three kids to run the business.

Growing up, Amadeo took it upon himself to learn the trade and fill his father’s shoes. As he grew in his skills, he became a produce broker, commissions merchant, and dealer, representing his family farm and other farms in the area.

At the age of 31, Amadeo decided to sell the company, but he didn’t want to sell it to get rich. He wanted to sell it to his employees, so they had a way to get rich themselves. Because he had become a prominent and trusted local citizen, Armadeo was asked to become the director of the Columbus Savings and Loan Bank in San Francisco.

Working for the bank, Amadeo saw lost opportunity. He thought the bank could be of great service to the local working class citizens, but he couldn’t convince the other directors of the bank. They only wanted to serve businesses and rich people.

Amodeo really felt like working class citizens were honest and would pay back the loans. Furthermore he knew that loans would enable them to buy homes and start businesses. Amadeo knew his idea was needed, so he quit Columbus savings alone, raised money and started his own bank, a place he named, the Bank of Italy.

He bought a saloon across from his old Columbus Savings Alone, converting it into a bank, and even hiring the bartender as the bank teller. To be able to serve the working class, Amadeo had to change the way banks operate.

To start, he had to make sure the bank was open until 10 p.m. every day. While his opening day deposits totaled $8,000. The first years deposits exceeded $700,000, and he knew he had a good idea, because no one had defaulted on their loans.

In 1906, tragedy struck San Francisco, in the form of an earthquake. The 8.0 earthquake resulted in 80% of the city destroyed, 3,000 deaths, and over 250,000 people left homeless. Amadeo’s bank was one of the destroyed buildings.

Worried, he went to the bank in the middle of the night, sifted through the rubble, and moved over $2 million in cash into a garbage man’s wagon, covered it with garbage and wheeled it outside of town to the docks. There he constructed a desk out of barrels and wood planks and spread word that Bank of Italy was still open.

As the only bank open he gave out reconstruction loans and helped those who needed to withdraw from their accounts. And for those without identification, he did deals by handshake alone.

He also sent two ships to Oregon and Washington to get lumber for rebuilding, which ended up being the only lumber available in the early stages. Amadeo was a true American hero.

His bank became so successful, he opened branches all over California. However, in Los Angeles, he had found it difficult to get a stronghold. The Bank of America Los Angeles had been growing by buying small banks and had earned the respect of LA businesses.

Amadeo and Bank of America saw many benefits by merging.

Thus, in 1923, they did just just that and took the more universal name, Bank of America, for the entire operation.

Amadeo’s bank was instrumental in financing the start of California’s wine industry. It was the bank that funded Walt Disney’s Snow White and helped Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffith start United Artists. 

It also loaned money to William Hewlett and David Packard so they could start their business. He purchased the bonds necessary to fund the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge. And he also provided the funds to launch Columbia Pictures, which brings us to the next hero of our story.

The Impact of Frank Capra

Columbia Pictures started in 1918 as CBC Film Sales. It started making low-budget second rate films, in fact, the joke was that CBC actually stood for “corn beef” and “cabbage”. 1928, however, would change Columbia Pictures forever. They would cease being a joke and would begin operating as a major studio.

That’s the year the hired a young director named Frank Capra.

Francesco Capra was also an immigrant from Italy. He was the youngest of seven children, arriving in 1903 in the U.S. at the age of six. Later in life, Capra was still able to recall the horrifying 13-day journey by ship as one of the worst experiences of his life.

And he also remembers the moment his father saw the Statue of Liberty in the harbor. Exclaiming, “Sichio, look, look at that. That’s the greatest light since the star of Bethlehem. That’s the light of freedom.”

The family traveled across the country, and settled in Los Angeles’s east side, which Capra referred to as the Italian Ghetto.

Capra’s father worked as a fruit picker, while young Francesco sold newspapers until he graduated from high school. Francesco’s father instilled in him the desire to succeed and urged him to go to college to get a leg up.

So after high school, he entered the College of Technology, which later became the California Institute of Technology. He went there to study chemical engineering, but while there fell in love with the poetry and essays he learned in the Fine Arts Department.

Deep in the heart of World War I, in 1918, Congress passed the Naturalization Act that expedited citizenship for soldiers who weren’t born on American soil. Seeing the opportunity to gain citizenship, Capra enlisted in the army.

But after serving just five months, he contracted influenza and received a medical discharge.

Afterward, at his promised naturalization ceremony, Francesco Capra became the American citizen, Frank Capra.

While recouping from influenza, Frank answered a cattle call to be an extra in John Ford’s “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” his first foray into movies since working backstage at high school.

During his early 20s, he worked plenty of daily grind jobs and spent a good deal of time as a small time racketeer. He sold stock and fake mining companies to farmers, assisted by a 60-pound glittery rock he used as a prop.

As the movie industry became popular, he even invented a fake movie company, raising money to film a western, which he actually made.

His ventures took him up and down the California coast in railroad boxcars, meeting everyone in every small town. His trips endeared himself to the common man. Trying to sell stocks and mining companies and movie deals, he truly learned what was important to his common man audience. 

At the age of 25, he read a newspaper article about a new movie studio opening up, and exaggerated his movie making experience to get a job there. The owner was actually impressed, and hired him to shoot a one-reel silent film based on a Rudyard Kipling poem.

Capra succeeded and was given more projects.

1927 is the year everything changed for the movie industry. The first talking movie “The Jazz Singer” came out. And for Capra it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience seeing a man open his mouth on screen and hearing a song come out.

Few of the studio heads were aware of how this audio technology worked, but Capra having gone to a tech college and having the ability to bluff very well knew he could manage making talking pictures.

After a dispute with management, however, Frank left and joined Columbia Pictures, the one Amadeo Giannini loaned money to start.

At the time, Columbia was making short films, which didn’t compete with the bigger studios. Harry Cone, the CEO of Columbia, hired Capra with the hope they would in fact make full-length feature films to compete with the big boys.

Two years later, the Great Depression took over the world, and Frank Capra just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Government Propaganda

Capra knew the common man, the average American. He knew what they wanted and how to sell it to them. So for the 1930s, Capra made the most popular movies introducing the world to the likes of Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwick, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and Jimmy Stewart.

His movies were about regular folks taking on corruption, politicians, lawyers, bankers, and journalists. Capra and his writing partner, Roger Riskin, had a film nominated for Best Picture, six times in the 1930s.

He became Columbia’s number one director, going from making $1,000 a film to $25,000 per film. (gentle music) $25,000 per film.

During the Great Depression, when people felt the world was against them, it was Frank Capra’s movies they would pay for. But the Great Depression would end conclusively on December 7th, 1941, when Japan attacked America at Pearl Harbor.

While the attack was somewhat of a surprise, the American government had already been planning their entrance into the war. No one knew that better than Capra. Four days after Pearl Harbor, the Army Signal Corps showed up at Frank Capra’s office and they knew exactly what they needed from him.

Military conscription had begun one year prior and the government had already detected a problem.

The US military had hundreds of thousands of recruits quickly learning to become soldiers, but none of them had an emotional connection to their role. Germany on the other hand had produced many short films, vilifying Germany’s enemies, and endearing Germany’s history in the hearts of its soldiers.

They needed Capra to do the same thing for America.

Capra was now very wealthy, and knew he no longer was one of the common folk, which bothered him greatly. This war opportunity seems like a chance for him to prove his patriotism and commitment to those who needed it. He ended up making 11 films for the government. He made a seven-video series called “Why We Fight” and several propaganda films.

His movies were so successful, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal. And even though he wasn’t trying, he won an Oscar for best documentary.

The Patriot Jimmy Stewart

One of Frank Capra’s most successful movies prior to the war was Mr. Smith goes to Washington, starring a young Jimmy Stewart. Jimmy had also quit acting to become part of the war effort. He was one of the soldiers, Capra’s movies were aimed at. But unlike most World War II soldiers, Jimmy Stewart didn’t need outside motivation.

Jimmy’s third great grandfather, Fergus Moorhead, had served in the Revolutionary War. Two of his grandfathers had served for the Union Army in the Civil War, and his father had served in both the Spanish-American War and World War I. That’s why, even though he was one of the most famous actors in the world, in 1940, he left acting to join the army.

He had already been a pilot and thus was placed in the Air Corps. But the military wanted to use his star power, so in the beginning they featured him on radio programs, short films, and television sharing the government’s message.

Leveraging Jimmy Stewart’s star power and using Capra’s “Why We Fight” documentary weren’t the only tools of the government, however. They also devised a program for books.

Council on Books in War Time

The Office of War information was over all of these programs. Not only did they partner with Capra and use Jimmy Stewart, but they also partnered with a non-governmental agency called the Council on Books in War Time, which was a group of booksellers, publishers, librarians, and authors who wanted to use books to influence the thinking of the American public.

They put together a war book panel to help choose books that would be promoted to the general public. One of the council’s other goals was also to get the books in the hands of soldiers. But they needed books which could fit into the cargo pockets of soldiers’ pants and bags, which meant it was a slightly different kind of operation.

To head that effort, they chose Philip Van Doren Stern as leader. Philip had every skill they needed. He was an author, the foremost historian on the Civil War. He’d written preeminent books on the letters of Abraham Lincoln, and the letters of Edgar Allen Poe. He’d been in advertising, editing, and he’d worked at both Pocketbooks and Simon and Schuster. And he was a graduate of Rutgers.

Philip’s task was producing fifty new books per month, meeting with the book council twice a week. At pocketbooks, he’d already mastered the art and technique of printing smaller book copies.

Some of the first books they put out were by Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, Zane Gray, Jack London, John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, H. G. Wells and Charlotte Bronte. The books were sent to soldiers overseas in hospitals and even air-dropped into the fields. 

One such field was the RAF training fields for all the soldiers headed to the Normandy invasion. While Phil Van Doren Stern was working on the book council, he was still an author at heart. And on February 12, 1938, lightning struck him in the form of a dream.

The Greatest Gift 

As Philip stood in front of his bathroom mirror shaving, the dream he had dreamed the night before came flooding back to him. He found the dream so compelling, he wrote it down. His memory of the dream was so thorough the words flowed out from start to finish. But it was just a made up story.

Philip was a nonfiction history author, so he didn’t really know what to make of it.

It just sat on a shelf for a few years. The story itself was simple and somewhat reminiscent of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. In Philip’s dream, a man who was depressed and down in his luck decided he was going to end it all by jumping off a bridge. But a stranger shows up and offers him a view of what life would be like without him. And then seeing what life would be like without him, he changed this mind. 

Having been an editor at pocketbooks and Simon and Schuster, Philip knew agents and publishers. His agent took this story and floated it to every avenue imaginable, including publishers, farm journals, and even the Saturday evening post to see if they could get this wonderful story published.

But for most, the story was too magical.

No one wanted to publish it.

Several months passed, and all hope for the story getting published evaporated. So using the experience he got working at Pocket Books, he decided he turned it into a 20 page mini book that he’d send out as his Christmas card.

It was a seven inch by five inch, orange jacketed, tiny little booklet.

He sent it out to 200 friends and family. Glad he could get some value from the story.

Three months later, still in the middle of World War II, the phone rang in their Brooklyn apartment, and Philip’s daughter, Margret, answered it. It was a Western Union Telegram operator. A pit formed in Philip’s stomach when he was handed the phone. Western Union telegrams were not typically good news.

But this time, it was different. The Christmas card had been shared by one of his friends with the wife of an RKO executive, David Hampstead. She had loved the story, and they had shared it with actor Cary Grant, and he wanted to turn it into a movie and play the lead himself.

So Hampstead, over the phone, offered Philip $10,000 for the movie rights to the story. He was ecstatic and gladly accepted the $10,000 for a story no one had wanted. Knowing that a sale of the movie rights would add value to the book pitch, he resent it and sold rights to Readerscope magazine, Goodhousekeeping magazine, and David McKay publishers.

And the story was given a name, The Greatest Gift.

In the meantime, RKO and Cary Grant hired some writers to expand this 20-page story into a full-length feature.

The Rise of Liberty Films

And both Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart had returned from their stint in the war. Both of them unsure what the feature would hold. Making the war movies really gave Frank Capra a sense of purpose he hadn’t had, making movies for Hollywood. He didn’t really want to go back to making shallow films.

He wanted to do something that would influence Hollywood.

So he started his own movie company, named Liberty Films. He couldn’t do it alone though, and collaborated with three others who had returned from the war themselves. All of them wanted more purpose than Hollywood could give.

He also met with and got a loan from Amadeo Giannini at Bank of America, and reached out to RKO and negotiated a nine movie distribution deal. All they needed now were movie ideas.

RKO President Charles Kernher had an idea for Frank Capra’s first film. Cary Grant was busy making a movie and RKO needed to do something with this $10,000 Greatest Gift story they’d purchased.

He gave it to Capra to read, and Capra loved the story, and the meaning built into it. RKO just wanted to recoup their investment and sold the rights to Capra for $10,000 as well. Plus, as a bonus, Capra got the two scripts RKO had paid writers to create.

They told Frank that Cary Grant wanted to play the lead, but Frank already had another idea. He only knew of one man who could play a role like this. Jimmy Stewart.

Before the war, Jimmy had been the star of Frank Capra’s most highly acclaimed movie to date, “Mr. Smith goes to Washington”. In that, Jimmy played an honest man taking on a corrupt system.

When Frank contacted Jimmy about the role, Jimmy just wasn’t sure yet what he wanted to do. So, Frank moved on. For the villain in the movie, as R.K.O.’s script people had created, he wanted Vincent Price. But Vincent was also busy, so he contacted a second friend, Lionel Barrymore.

Barrymore was interested and liked the idea of Jimmy Stewart, so he called Jimmy Stewart and convinced makings of the cast. He just needed to finalize the script.

For the script, however, Capra had an internal struggle. Prior to the war, he had his finger on the pulse of America. The Great Depression really helped define his audience. But the world now is different. The war had created great prosperity and fear. T

he idea that the war could come back to America’s shores was a real concern. His lack of confidence in the message he needed the movie to portray caused him great problems.

He worked with nine different copywriters, all a bit unsure of what he warned them to write. Some like Roger Rifkin, his regular partner, all left frustrated. His internal determination about the movie itself could be seen on screen with the character of George Bailey.

George played by Jimmy Stewart was an everyday common man in an everyday common town that he truly didn’t want to be in. In creating the character of George Bailey, he wanted George to become the hero of the people. So he modeled George after the true American hero, Amadeo Giannini.

Even down to the time, Amadeo set up a makeshift bank down by the pier after the earthquake. It only took four months to film the entire movie from April to July of 1946.

And being that the film was made in summer, they had to invent a new kind of fake snow to create the snowy backdrop.

They released the movie with a different name. The Greatest Gift just didn’t seem compelling enough to Capra. So Capra renamed it “It’s a Wonderful Life”. They released the movie in December of 1946 to meet the Academy Awards deadline, with the full release to all theaters in January.

While the movie culminated in a Christmas scene, no one had considered a Christmas movie at the time. The movie was met with mixed reviews, and sadly, Box Office receipts were $525,000 shy of breaking even. Capra’s inability to figure out the message, burnt a lot of bridges with writers, and the loss of money left him almost bankrupt.

But there was a silver lining to Capra’s confusion as to what the message should really be as it created tension on screen. The Academy Awards Committee loved it, and nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

But it only won in one category for its technical advancements. The snow.

The snow they had invented was a modern marvel. But Frank couldn’t recover financially and had to sell. Paramount was the highest bidder, netting Frank and his partner $3.4 million and a five-picture deal at Paramount. And with the sale, Paramount got the rights to “Its a Wonderful Life.”

 Shortly thereafter, Paramount incorporated the movie into its pre-1950s library, which included everything except for the Popeye. That catalog was then sold to the United Film Service, which was then sold to National Televille Associates.

Since “It’s a Wonderful Life” just wasn’t a big hit, the movie largely just sat in the catalog list, until 1974 that is. That’s when a mistake was made that would change the future of the movie forever.

The Power of Movie Copyright

 Back in 1909, the copyright act was passed, protecting films for 28 years, and then another 28 upon renewal. While National Telephone, which became Republic Pictures, owned the rights to “Its a Wonderful Life”, they failed to renew the copyright protection in 1974. 

And the movie became part of the public domain.

Movies in the public domain were attractive to television stations that didn’t have a lot of money for programming. Therefore, in an attempt to compete with the big television networks glitzier Christmas specials, PBS was the first to add “It’s a Wonderful Life” to their holiday programming.

 And within a few years, the big networks did as well.

And then, like the Wizard of Oz, “It’s a Wonderful Life:, became an American classic tradition.

Fortunately, Jimmy Stewart, Frank Capra, and Philip Van Doren Stern were still alive in the early 80s, and got to see their little film turn into something amazingly special.

On January 5, 1992, it became the first American program broadcast on Russian TV to an audience of 20 million people. And in 1993, it became the first full-length movie on CD-ROM for Microsoft Windows. And in 2002, the American Film Institute named “It’s A Wonderful Life”, the 11th Best Movie of all time.

Frank Capra finally received the accolades, the movie had earned.