• For the scene that required Mary (portrayed by Donna Reed) to throw a rock into the window of the Granville House, Capra hired a marksman to shoot it out for her on cue. To everyone's amazement, Donna Reed broke the window with true aim and heft without the assistance of the hired marksman!

• Jimmy Stewart was nervous about the phone scene kiss because it was his first screen kiss since his return to Hollywood after the war. Under Capra's watchful eye, Stewart filmed the scene in only one unrehearsed take, and it worked so well that part of the embrace was cut because it was too passionate to pass the censors.

• Capra did a little extra research and discovered that it was raining in New York state the day of the real bank run of 1933. To add veracity to the scene, he decided to have it rain in the Bedford Falls' bank run scene.

• During production, Frank Capra maintained a rigorous 17 hour daily schedule. He used 350,000 feet of film to create this masterpiece.

• With his usual eye for detail, Capra has an appropriately sentimental movie playing at the Bedford Falls theater marquee, "The Bells of St. Mary" (1945), a film featuring Henry Travers who played Clarence in It's a Wonderful Life.

• The original script called for the movie to end with George falling to his knees reciting the Lord's Prayer. Wisely, Capra recognized that an overly religious conclusion would not have the emotional impact of George's friends rushing to his side in his hour of need.

• As Uncle Billy is leaving George's house drunk, it sounds as if he stumbles over some trash cans on the sidewalk. In fact, a crew member dropped some equipment right after Uncle Billy left the screen. Both actors continued with the scene ("I'm alright, I'm alright!") and director Frank Capra decided to use it in the final cut and gave the technician $10.00 for improving sound characterization.

• On the Pottersville sequence, Capra once said he should have made Mary more independent and attractive instead of playing her as the frightened, weak librarian.

• James Stewart repeated his role in It's a Wonderful Life in a one-hour radio version for NBC Radio Theater in 1949.

• It's a Wonderful Life was remade for television as "It Happened One Christmas" (1977) with actress Marlo Thomas playing the Stewart role and Wayne Rogers as her husband George Hatch.

• The set for Bedford Falls was constructed in two months and was one of the longest sets that had ever been made for an American movie. It covered four acres of the RKO's Encino Ranch. It included 75 stores and buildings, main street, factory district and a large residential and slum area. The Main Street was 300 yards long, three whole city blocks!

• The lovable Sesame Street characters Bert and Ernie were named in honor of Bert the cop and Ernie the cab driver in It's a Wonderful Life.

• Over the years, more people wrote to Frank Capra about why Capra allowed Potter to go unpunished after stealing the $8,000 from Uncle Billy. Capra stoutly decreed that he would leave the entire matter to the audiences' imagination!

• Only after It's a Wonderful Life lapsed into public domain in 1973 and became a T.V. Christmas-time perennial was the film accepted and acknowledged as a classic it truly is.

• The fictitious town called Bailey Park in It's a Wonderful Life was actually filmed in La Crescenta, California.

-- MattWalsh - 26 Dec 2003