’Tis the Night Before the Night Before Christmas, and the world surely can use a holiday from Donald Trump and Ukraine and Twitter and omnium gatherum spending bills and inflation and crime and all those other grim tidings that overflow my e-inbox. I know that I can.
Medieval theologians speculated that souls in Purgatory were granted an occasional refrigerium from their present pains, in which they were vouchsafed a foretaste of the joy that would be theirs when their sins were at last washed away. In that spirit, this blog will be politics-free until Boxing Day, at which point it will be only proper to resume rhetorical fisticuffs.
Today’s Wall Street Journal carries few paragraphs, the lead-in to a sober piece about how “accidents, chance and serendipity can be crucial to success”, that I would like to quote:
The movie had every ingredient of a hit when it opened right before Christmas. By the new year, it was a flop. In fact, when the copyright on this film expired, nobody even bothered to renew it. It was so forgettable that it was quite literally forgotten.
This is also the reason that people are still watching “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
It might very well be the most iconic Christmas movie. It became that way by accident.
“It’s a Wonderful Life” fell into the public domain once the copyright lapsed 28 years after its release, and television stations began running the film around the clock because it didn’t cost a penny. It wasn’t Frank Capra or Jimmy Stewart or the enduring power of cinema that made it a lasting success. It was neglect. “The damnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” Capra himself once said.
That may all be old hat to movie buffs, but I had never run across it, and it was a delightful tidbit. What’s more, it delighted my wife, who thinks that the movie is sappy and boring. (I have similar feelings about her Christmas favorite, Love, Actually.)
Poking around the Internet, I see that the film’s budget was an estimated $3,180,000 ($44,000,000 in today’s diminished dollars), and the opening weekend box office was $44,000 ($610,000 today). That makes She Said and Lightyear look pretty good.
The Wall Street Journal implies that, without the lucky break of relegation to the public domain, It’s a Wonderful Life would have faced as bleak a future as Bedford Falls without George Bailey. And that’s almost certainly correct.
If the copyright had been renewed, it would have been set to expire in 2003, by which time changes to the law would have extended it automatically to around the middle of the 21st Century. Is it at all likely that, after renewal, the studio would have pulled this flop, which had lain neglected for 28 years, out of its vault and hyped it with a publicity campaign on a par with the torrent of royalty-free reshowings?
Perhaps Clarence paid a visit to the clerk who was supposed to mail the renewal to the U.S. Copyright Office and thereby won his second set of wings.