Frank Capra Didn't Set Out To Make It's A Wonderful Life A Holiday Classic

"It's A Wonderful Life" has played in many an American home for many Decembers. It has become an integral part of the holiday season, but it didn't start out that way. In fact, the film had a rather cold reception at first. The producer, director, and co-writer Frank Capra never expected it to go very far, but it has since become a staple of Hollywood cinema.

The original idea was based on scripts from three other writers, including Dalton Trumbo, who also worked on "Roman Holiday." "Three powerhouse guys had written scripts on this thing — they missed the idea," the director told AFI. The real idea would come from a Christmas card. "In about nine paragraphs there was this story. A man who is a failure was given the opportunity to come back and see the world as it would have been had he not been born, and he finds out no man is a failure."

Capra felt immediately compelled by the story. "My goodness, this thing hit me like a ton of bricks," he admitted. "This was, to me, novel, new, and a wonderfully humane way of pinning down this importance of the individual, which has always been the main theme of all my films."

Before it even went into production, "It's A Wonderful Life" got off to a rocky start. Capra initially hired the married writing team of Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich for the job, who had also co-written "The Thin Man" movie series. They were absolutely thrilled, recalls their nephew David L. Goodrich to The New York Times. "Any writer would give his soul to work for [Capra]. He's so creative," Goodrich once said, or so her nephew quotes her. These good relations sadly would not last.

Soon after being hired to write "It's A Wonderful Life," the Hacketts found out that Capra was rewriting their work with the help of another screenwriter, Joe Swerling, behind their back. "Joe Swerling was a very close friend of ours, and when we heard that he was working behind us — which was supposed to be against the rules of the Screen Writers Guild — it was a very unpleasant feeling," Hackett wrote. They ended up pulling out of the project early but were still given writing credits above Capra.

Squabbles over writing credits turned out to be the least of Capra's worries. This was the first film that he would co-write, direct, and produce. The film cost him $3.7 million dollars and only grossed $3.3 million in its initial release, Life reported. It wasn't until years later that the film would start to be broadcast across the nation every holiday season — a film that Capra "didn't even think of it as a Christmas story when I first ran across it," he admitted. "I just liked the idea."

In the 1970s, decades after its premiere in 1946, the film's copyright claim expired and it became public domain. Cable companies didn't have to pay any royalties to broadcast the film, so they would play it all the time. It was in the 1970s that the film became a true Christmas classic.

Happily, Capra lived to see his film have a surge in popularity. "It's the damnedest thing I've ever seen," Capra once said (via Life). "The film has a life of its own now and I can look at it like I had nothing to do with it. I'm like a parent whose kid grows up to be president. I'm proud . . . but it's the kid who did the work." On that, we can agree.