Is the Screenwriting Grinch finally ready to smile? Do we have a Christmas script worth reading??
Genre: True Story
Premise: In the aftermath of WWII, a traumatized Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart use the making of IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE to attempt to find a way back into normalcy.
About: I promised myself I wouldn’t start reviewing Black List scripts until the new year. However, I couldn’t help myself when I saw a script celebrating my favorite Christmas movie, It’s a Wonderful Life. It felt quite festive to read such a script, which finished with 9 votes on the list.
Writer: Alexandra Tran
Details: 104 pages
A big reason I continue to be fascinated by It’s a Wonderful Life is that its inciting incident occurs in the third act. It’s just so antithetical to what we’ve been taught “works,” and yet even though the movie brazenly rejects this accepted premise, it thrives.
It makes me question everything. If a movie that rejects one of the most popular screenwriting rules in the world – your inciting incident should happen by page 15 – and can still become not just good, but one of the greatest films of all time, do rules even matter?
Ponder that while I summarize the plot.
World War 2 has just ended. Mega-director Frank Capra has spent the last three years making promotional movies for the military to keep recruitment up. So when the war abruptly ends, he has to decide what his first post-WW2 movie is going to be.
Meanwhile, legendary actor James Stewart has just come back from his service in the Air Force. He’s in a really weird headspace. Before the war, he thought acting was everything. Now, it seems trivial. So Stewart wants to move back to the Midwest and live a normal life, quitting acting forever.
That is until Capra shows up at his door and says I want to make this movie about a guy who dies and realizes what the world would look like without him. It’s ultimately a feel-good movie that no studio wants to make. They all want to make war movies instead.
At first, Stewart turns him down. But after speaking to his new girlfriend, Gloria, he decides to give it a shot. Right away, it feels like the wrong decision. Stewart can’t find his acting mojo. At one point, during one of the scenes, Stewart’s acting is so bad that one of the crew members laughs.
It’ll be up to Capra to shake Stewart out of his malaise and get a good performance out of him. Except the deeper into the shoot they go, the less likely that becomes. Will Stewart finally find his acting chops again? And will Capra’s big non-war-film gamble pay off? Maybe not right away. But something tells me it’s going to do well in the long run.
If It’s a Wonderful Life is a white Christmas, It’s A Wonderful Story is more like a light Christmas flurry.
There’s a major lesson that every screenwriter can learn here. Which is how important the introduction of characters is to your screenplay. Because I would argue that the bulk of this screenplay’s problems boil down to missed opportunities regarding the way the two main characters were introduced.
It’s a Wonderful Story wants to paint each of its two heroes in a particular way. For Frank, it wants to portray him as someone desperate to bring heart back to the cinema during a time when the movie industry just wants to make war movies.
For James, it wants to portray him as an actor who’s lost his way, who doesn’t see acting as important anymore after having experienced the horrors of war.
Here is the problem, though. Frank’s introductory scene has him gung-ho about cutting these promotional war films. He’s the guy responsible for charging young men up and making them want to go fight for their country. And he’s super into it. When a character comes into his editing session and tells him to stop, Frank is defiant. He wants to keep going. This is what he does.
So to then tell us, out of nowhere, that Frank is disgusted by those movies and that what he really wants to do is make a heartfelt movie, is confusing. Film is a show don’t tell medium. You just SHOWED us that he liked making those promotional films. So why does he hate them all of a sudden? It doesn’t make sense and it makes the character unconvincing throughout the rest of the script.
I know why the scene was written – and actually this is one of the harder things about screenwriting. The writer wanted to establish what Frank did during the war. Which is good. You want the audience to have that information. But screenwriting requires that you be able to do multiple things at once. Establishing information about a character is only one of several things you need to do within a scene. What wasn’t added was Frank’s resistance to war filmmaking and his pining to bring happiness and heart back to theaters.
With James Stewart, his whole thing is that war has changed him. It’s made everything else in life unimportant by comparison – especially acting. And that’s a noble character arc to examine. However, you never showed us James Stewart fighting the war. You never showed us him experiencing the horrors of war.
Let me repeat this because it’s important. Movies are a show don’t tell medium. You needed to show us James Stewart in the war seeing his friends die, almost dying himself, being scared out of his mind. THEN! When he’s ding-batting about trying to deliver a silly line of dialogue on a movie set, we understand why he thinks it’s stupid. Cause we saw, with our own eyes, him doing way more important things.
In many ways, a screenplay is a like a house of cards. If you screw up a few of the key pillars, the whole thing can come crumbling down. But you should find it helpful to know that most of those pillars are in your first act. So pay attention to them – moments like your main characters’ introductions – in order to make sure those pillars are strong.
These pillars were not strong and it kept coming back to haunt the screenplay again and again.
On top of this, I’m not really sure what this script is about. What is it we’re trying to say here? When you write period pieces, there’s more of an expectation from the audience that there be a lesson learned. If you look at a movie like The King’s Speech, that story was about placing the collective good above your own personal fears. He didn’t want to give the speech. He was terrified of it. But, in the end, he faced those fears because he knew it was important for the greater good of the country.
I don’t know why we’re revisiting this movie. What is important about it? I thought the script was going to do something clever like cover the production of It’s a Wonderful Life in a way that semi-mirrored the actual film. For example, what if James Stewart was feeling similar things about his own existence in relation to the fictional character he played? What does this world look like if James Stewart was never born? Fun stuff like that.
But it’s more of this traditional biopic “This is how it went down,” – main characters have their Screenwriting 101 fatal flaws they need to overcome. Nothing is natural or engaging. It’s a script that would do well in a UCLA screenwriting competition because it’s competently constructed.
But there’s no heartbeat to it. Which means Ebeneezer Carson strikes again! But all is not lost. Cause the script did remind me of what a great movie It’s A Wonderful Life is, and made me excited to watch it again this week.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Don’t ever allow your character to say something that isn’t consistent with who they are. In this script, Frank Capra is presented as this thoughtful, sweet, humble man. However, when a studio head tells him that he’s old and out of touch, Capra replies with, “I’m the most successful director in Hollywood.” Does that response sound thoughtful, sweet, or humble? No. So watch out for this. I’m guessing the writer wanted the reader to know that Capra was a highly successful director. But you can’t ever give information out in a way that betrays the character. Always always stay true to the character. There’s always another way to slip that piece of information in there (have another character bring it up, for example).
