20 Things You Didn't Know About It's A Wonderful Life

The name Zuzu has a surprisingly little history to it, before AND after the film was released.

The actress who played her, Carolyn Grimes, revealed the name was inspired by Zu Zu Ginger Snaps. This was referenced at the end of the movie when George says to her at the top of the stairs “Zuzu, my little ginger snap!”.

The unusual name continued to live on after It’s A Wonderful Life was released. George realises he’s alive when finds Zuzu’s petals that he had earlier pretended to re-attach to her flower. Zuzu’s Petals is now the name of a Brooklyn flower shop as well as a Minneapolis rock band.

Gower’s drug store was filled with 1940s product placement and it is particularly noticeable when young Violet and Mary are present, with many brand names visibly in the background. This includes Coca-Cola, Vaseline, Bayer aspirin and Pepto-Bismol.

The one which actually works as a plot device is the Sweet Caporal – a popular cigarette brand of the early 20th century. Its ad slogan “Ask dad, he knows” inspires George to run to his father when Mr. Gower orders him to deliver capsules that are accidentally filled with poison.

…At least not until a few decades after it was released.

Karolyn Grimes, who portrayed Zuzu Bailey, delivers the famous line “every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings” during the final scene. In a 2013 interview with Vanity Fair, she admitted that she never actually watched It’s A Wonderful Life until the late 1970s. Her mother always advised her not to watch her own movies because it would be prideful. Grimes said:

I never took the time to see the movie. I never just sat down at watched the film.

However, she claimed to make up for all the lost opportunities having seen it ‘500 times’, and her favourite scene being when George is praying at Martini’s.

Do you remember when Phoebe Buffay from Friends watched It’s A Wonderful Life and was distraught when the ‘mean’ pharmacist made George Bailey’s ear bleed? Well, she’d be even more heartbroken if she knew the bleeding part of the film was technically not scripted.

In the scene where young George tells pharmacist Mr. Gower that he has mistakenly dispensed poison, he responds by slapping him viciously across the face. His actor, Robert J. Anderson, later admitted that the blood was real.

He (H.B. Warner) actually bloodied my ear. My ear was beat up, and my face was red and I was in tears......I didn't know what we were building for. H.B. was perfect. He reached the crescendo.

Anderson did assure everyone that after the scene ended, Warner hugged him as a way of apologising for being so caught up in the moment.

Two of Sesame Street’s characters, Bert and Ernie, share their names with the film’s cop and cab driver, respectively, and there is still a debate about whether it is a coincidence or not.

Karolyn Grimes (Zuzu) insisted that the two Muppets were named as such because the movie was Jim Henson's favorite, where as Henson's writing partner Jerry Juhl insisted to The San Francisco Chronicle that Ernie and Bert were not named after the movie's characters. Juhl said:

I was not present at the naming, but I was always positive [the rumor] was incorrect. Despite his many talents, Jim had no memory for details like this. He knew the movie, of course, but would not have remembered the cop and the cab driver. I was not able to confirm this with Jim before he died, but shortly thereafter I spoke to Jon Stone's first producer and head writer and a man largely responsible for the show's format. He assured me that Ernie and Bert were named one day when he and Jim were studying the prototype puppets. They decided that one of them looked like an Ernie, and the other one looked like a Bert. The movie character names are purely coincidental.

The late Carl Switzer rose to fame in the 1930s as a child actor in the mini-series of “Our Gang”, more commonly known as The Little Rascals – he played Alfalfa. After his childhood stardom, Switzer landed minor roles in film, before pursuing a career out of the spotlight to become a dog breeder and guide.

Somewhere in between, he made a small appearance in It’s A Wonderful Life. In the scene at the dance in the high school gym, when George Bailey first sees Mary and approaches her, the young man talking to Mary is Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer, portraying the uncredited role of Freddie Othelo. He is also in the scene where he turns the key that opens the gym floor to reveal the swimming pool.

Frank Capra had great control over the process of the film having produced, financed, directed and co-wrote the script. And once Capra held the rights to the project, parts of his own personal life constructed the storyline.

For example, Sam makes a living in plastics whilst Harry becomes an engineer at his father-in-law’s glass factory. Both of these came directly from Frank’s personal education in chemical engineering. He struggled to find a job with his experience, and much like George Bailey, considered himself a failure for years.

Furthermore, the Martinis are based on Capra’s own family, who emigrated from Sicily in 1903. At one point in the film, a goat accompanies them in the car. “Capra” means goat in Italian.

Since the film’s release, Frank Capra has frequently claimed It’s A Wonderful Life as one of his favourite movies of his own.

A secondary plotline to the film focuses on Clarence Odbody, a second class angel, working to earn his wings. In order to achieve them, he is sent to save George Bailey’s life. According to Clarence, every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings. This proverb is later reiterated by Zuzu Bailey, after a ring is heard on their Christmas tree, implying that his guardian angel finally got his wings.

Throughout the entire movie run, a total of forty-two bell rings are heard, and if Clarence is correct, it means forty-two angels got their wings.

This was Donna Reed’s first starring role. She had beaten out names such as Olivia De Havilland, Martha Scott, Bea Arthur and Ann Dvorak for the role of Mary. Reed would later become a pop culture icon for her series The Donna Reed Show, but prior to It’s A Wonderful Life, very little was known about her.

In the scene where teenage George Bailey and Mary Hatch explore the town and come across the Granville house, Mary throws a rock at the window. Frank Capra hired a marksman to shoot it out on cue. But it surprised everyone with Reed broke the window by herself. She had played baseball in her high school years and had literally grown up milking cows, so she had since developed a strong throwing arm.

It's A Wonderful Life was actually the fourth time Beulah Bondi played Stewart’s mother. Prior to this, the two had collaborated as mother-son roles in Vivacious Lady (1938), Of Human Hearts (1938) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). Later on, In The Jimmy Stewart Show (1971), she once again played the mother of James Stewart’s character.

Additionally, one of the crows in the bank, famously known as Jimmy the Raven, starred in You Can’t Take It With You (1938), with Stewart as the leading role.

When RKO still held rights to It’s A Wonderful Life, it was originally developed with Cary Grant in mind to play the leading role of George Bailey. Once Frank Capra got his hands on the project, he rewrote the script to be tailored with James Stewart in mind.

However, Stewart himself was reluctant to undertake the role as it would be his first film after returning from World War II. Plus, since he had been overseas fighting in the war, his experiences ultimately changed his views on acting as a profession. James was suffering from post traumatic stress disorder and battle fatigue.

Lionel Barrymore (Mr Potter) convinced James Stewart to be in It’s A Wonderful Life, and may have inadvertently saved his film career. Since then, he always cited George Bailey as being his favourite character he ever portrayed.

As aforementioned, James Stewart acted for It’s A Wonderful Life so soon after battling in World War II, and was still suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. It was inadvertently used to his advantage when he began to sob real tears.

During the bar scene, where George prays, Stewart was so overcome with emotion, that he started crying. Frank Capra loved it so much, he had the footage re-framed and expanded the shot to capture the expression of James. This is why the image is so grainy in comparison to the rest of the movie.

According to Carol Coombs (Janie Bailey), Stewart was also very convincing at yelling at the children, that it made them genuinely scared enough to cry easily.

One moment of the film which James Stewart kept on procrastinating off was the phone kiss scene because it was the first onscreen kiss he would do since his return to acting after the war. He especially found it all the more difficult because he viewed Donna Reed was the epitome of goodness.

Jimmy asked Donna if she wanted to rehearse it, but she suggested they just do it and see what happens. It ended up being filmed in one unrehearsed take, and was such a success, that part of the embrace had to be cut just to make it past the censors.

Stewart has since proclaimed it to be “One of the best things I’ve ever done!”.

There was one unplanned moment within filming that ended up making it into the final cut. As Uncle Billy, inebriated, leaves the Bailey household, it sounds as if he’s stumbles over some trash cans on the sidewalk. What can be heard is actually a large tray of props dropped by an unseen stagehand, which was coincidentally timed right after Thomas Mitchell comes off screen. James Stewart began laughing and Mitchell improvised “I’m alright, I’m okay!”.

Because Frank Capra loved this accidental scene so much, he gave the crew member an extra $10 (equal to about $132 these days) for ‘improving the sound’.

Another case of improvisation on the spot was during the bank scene, which prior to filming had been extensively rehearsed by James Stewart and Ellen Corby. When Corby’s character was asked how much money she needed, the scripted reply was £17. At the last minute, Capra told Ellen to given Stewart an odd number, because it might be funnier. When she said “17.50” to James, he was caught off-guard and spontaneously kissed her, which wasn’t in the script. It was kept in the final film.

It’s a common misconception that It’s A Wonderful Life originated from a Christmas card. It actually goes slightly further back as it originated as a short story called “The Greatest Gift”, written by Philip Van Doren Stern in November 1939. After it was rejected by several publishers, it was printed as a pamphlet and sent over to his family and friends in Christmas 1943.

It then caught the attention of either Cary Grant or RKO producer David Hempstead, who showed it to Grant’s agent and staff began writing various screenplays of the story. On early draft, written by Dalton Trumbo saw George Bailey as a cynical politician who attempts suicide after losing an election. The angel shows him Bedford Falls as if he went into business rather than politics, instead of what life would be like if he hadn’t been born.

Once Frank Capra got rights to the story, it became a less than friendly production. Many of the original writers quit because did not consider Capra a very nice man and hated his alterations to the script.

Mr. Potter is never caught as the thief who embezzled $8,000.00 and it is assumed he gets to keep it. This was very unusual for a Hollywood film at the time because the Motion Picture Production Code (the film industry's censor code) required that criminals must always be shown to be either punished or made to repent at the end of every film.

Allegedly, the original screenplay was also dubbed inappropriate, because it included rude language, blasphemy which said the Lord’s name in vain and racy implications. For instance, Violet’s line “I was out all night last night” had to have the ‘all night’ omitted because it was deemed too risqué. The censors were also strict on when George and Clarence dry out their clothes, insisting that there be no suggestion that either of them are naked.

At the time of producing, the film set for Bedford Falls was one of the most elaborately built for an American movie. It covered four acres of RKO’s Encino Ranch and included over seventy-five buildings, a main street of 300 yards long, a factory district and a large residential and slum area.

Furthermore, production created a brand new kind of fake snow to use across the set. Prior to this, film sets typically used cornflakes painted white to replicate the snow falling effect, but the crunch of the them were so loud, the dialogue had to be dubbed in later.

Director Frank Capra had a new snow effect developed. It contained foamite (a fire-fighting chemical), soap and water, which was then pumped through a wind machine to create a more vivid form of snow. As a result, the RKO Effects Department actually achieved a Class III Scientific or Technical award from the Academy of Motion Picture arts and Sciences for the development of new snow.

Speaking of snow, you probably noticed how much of It’s A Wonderful Life takes place during the winter season, from Harry Bailey almost drowning in the frozen lake to George Bailey running happily through a snowy Bedford Falls.

But you probably couldn’t tell that most of the movie was filmed during a heat wave in July. Perhaps the one give away is how George Bailey is sweating profusely in the snowy evening scenes. This was not just an aspect of his nervous/excited character, but the fact that actor James Stewart couldn’t help but perspire in his heavy winter wear.

It got so hot that Frank Capra allowed a day off for cast and crew in order to convalesce.

Some of it does anyway.

Although it was originally an extravagant set built specifically for the fictional town of Bedford Falls, parts of it still exist. When the set was razed in 1954, two locations survived: the Martini house, at 4587 Viro Road, in what is now the city of La Cañada Flintridge and the gymnasium at Beverley Hills High School, which still has the pool underneath the floor in regular use, both of which can be located in Los Angeles County, California, USA.

Seneca Falls, New York, claims to be the inspiration for the setting as Frank Capra visited the district in 1945 and investigated in the history of the location. It now features an It’s A Wonderful Life museum, which brings to life Bedford Falls through exhibits and replica set pieces.

Being a film which is over seventy years old and is now regarded as one of the greatest movies ever, it’s alien to think that It’s A Wonderful Life was a significant box office failure upon its initial release.

The expenses of production cost $3.7 million, mostly funded by director Frank Capra himself, and after its first theatrical release, it only earned £3.3 million, causing Capra to be in severe debt. He would eventually make up for the cost in his next project State of the Union (1948).

Critics didn’t like the film, claiming the sentimentality was weak. Furthermore, although it was nominated for five Academy Awards at the Oscars, it didn’t go on to win any of them. And even the FBI gave it a mark of disapproval, who deemed it communist propaganda for its populist themes and bad portrayal of city bankers.

It’s A Wonderful Life wouldn’t gain its iconic status until decades later in the 1970s. Because of a clerical error at the National Telefilm Associates (NTA) office, the copyright was not renewed when it expired in 1974. It became public domain, meaning anyone who could obtain a print could broadcast it without paying any royalties. Local stations aired it frequently between Thanksgiving and Christmas Day. In the 1990s, after a series of court battles, the NTA's successor, Republic Pictures, re-acquired the rights to the film because they owned the original source material and the film's score, which were still copyrighted.

The lapse in copyright was a blessing in disguise as the 'lost' film shortly became a beloved classic.