It’s a Wonderful Life!

Jimmy Stewart with his Guardian Angel in It's a Wonderful Life

When she was a teenager and young adult home from college, our daughter’s favorite Christmas movie was It’s a Wonderful Life with Jimmy Stewart. For the next two weekends, you can see It’s a Wonderful Life on stage at the Doris Harper White Community Playhouse in Downtown Flagstaff. The website says that tickets for the Theatrikos production are going fast, so move quickly if you want to see Flagstaff actors in this classic play from the 1940s.

The history of the making of the Jimmy Stewart movie is itself an inspiring story. The author wrote it under the title “The Greatest Gift,” in 1939 but was unable to interest anyone in publishing it. Instead, he made it into a Christmas card and sent 200 copies to family and friends. Because of the card, the story came to the attention of RKO Productions and the agent for Cary Grant, who persuaded RKO to buy the story as a movie for Grant. After attempts to create a script that would work for Cary Grant, RKO abandoned the story and made another Christmas movie starring Grant. Frank Capra read the script and bought it from RKO, then worked with several different writers, including the famous Dorothy Parker, to create the script that became It’s a Wonderful Life, released in 1947. The film achieved five Academy Award nominations, but no award from the Academy. There was no stage production until the 1980s. In 1990, It's a Wonderful Life was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in their National Film Registry.

Go see this local production, and remember, we do indeed have a wonderful life in Flagstaff, AZ.