Study Guide prepared by

Susan Speidel, Director of Education

Funding for the Paper Mill Playhouse Adopt-A-School Project

has been made possible through the generosity of:
Bank of America, Schering-Plough Corporation Foundation, Novartis Pharmaceuticals
Corporation, Citigroup Foundation, Nordstrom, C. R. Bard Foundation, Inc., PSE&G,
and FirstEnergy Foundation
Additional Funding for Paper Mills Education Programs is provided by:
The New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, A Partner Agency of the National
Endowment for the Arts, and by funds from the National Endowment for the Arts,
Investors Savings Bank Charitable Foundation, The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation,
The Provident Bank Foundation, Shirley Aidekman-Kaye, and The Mall at Short Hills

LYRICIST SHELDON HARNICK

Born and raised in
Chicago,
Sheldon
Harnick studied the
violin in grammar
school. After serving in
the
United
States
Army, he earned a
Bachelors Degree in
music
from
the
Northwestern University School of Music in
1949. Though his focus had been the violin,
Harnick also developed skills as a writer of
comedy sketches, songs and parody lyrics, and
eventually decided to try his luck as a theatrical
lyricist in New York City. His first song in a
Broadway show, "The Boston Beguine" for NEW
FACES OF 1952, introduced the wry, subtle
humor that would become his trademark. Over
the next several years he contributed lyrics or
whole songs many revues until he joined up with
composer Jerry Bock and they began to write their
own musicals. While the first Bock & Harnick
musical, THE BODY BEAUTIFUL in 1958
showed promise, it was their second musical,
FIORELLO! in 1959, that put the team on the
map. This musical biography of New York City's
legendary mayor Fiorello LaGuardia earned the
Tony Award, Pulitzer Prize and New York Drama
Critics' Circle Award.
Their next musical,
TENDERLOIN (1960), set in late 19th century
New York, was followed by SHE LOVES ME
(1963), marked by Central European charm and
operetta elegance. In 1964 Bock & Harnick,
working with director-choreographer Jerome
Robbins and book writer Joseph Stein, created
their musical masterpiece, FIDDLER ON THE
ROOF. Based on a series of short stories by
Jewish folklorist Sholom Alecheim, the show
earned the Tony Award, New York Drama Critics'
Circle Award, a gold record (for both its
Broadway cast album and film soundtrack
recordings) and a platinum record (for the
Broadway album). In 1971, with the Broadway
production still running, United Artists released
the film version starring Topol. After FIDDLER,
the Bock & Harnick collaboration continued with
THE APPLE TREE (1966), which is comprised
of three one-act musicals and is currently being
revised on Broadway. This was followed by THE

ROTHSCHILDS in 1970, about the founding of the

Rothschild banking dynasty. Harnick also
collaborated with other composers including Michel
Legrand and Richard Rodgers. His work for
television and film ranges from songs for the HBO
animated film, THE TALE OF PETER RABBIT
(1991), to lyrics for the opening number of the 1988
Academy Awards telecast. A solo work for
children, DRAGONS in 1984, was based on a
Russian play and given its premiere at Harnick's
alma mater, Northwestern University.
COMPOSER JOE RAPOSO
Joseph Raposo, Jr. was an
American composer and
lyricist, best known for his
work on the children's
television series SESAME
STREET, and on the
situation comedy THREE'S
COMPANY, including its
theme song. The son of
Portuguese immigrants, Raposo was born in Fall
River, Massachusetts. He attended Harvard College,
where he wrote several scores for the schools
famous Hasty Pudding shows. Although much of
his composing career was spent in television and
film, Raposo began in musical theater after college
as the musical supervisor for the original cast of
YOU'RE A GOOD MAN, CHARLIE BROWN. In
the 1970s, he wrote original music for the animated
film RAGGEDY ANN & ANDY: A MUSICAL
ADVENTURE, and later teamed with playwright
William Gibson to create a stage musical about
Raggedy Ann which had a brief run on Broadway in
1986. Raposo composed "Its Not Easy Being
Green," for the character of Kermit the Frog, on
SESAME STREET, a song that has been recorded
by at least 25 artists, including Frank Sinatra and
Ray Charles. His song "Sing," also written for
SESAME STREET, earned a gold record for The
Carpenters. Along with numerous Grammy and
Emmy nods, his song from THE GREAT MUPPET
CAPER, was nominated for the Academy Award
for Best Song in 1981, only to lose to "Arthur's
Theme" from the film ARTHUR. He worte the
scores for three Emmy Award winning Dr. Suess
television speicals and in 1986 was the host of the
CBS speical, AMERICAN IS, which won an Emmy

for outstangind Childrens programming. He died

in New York in 1989.
A WONDERFUL LIFE, THE MUSICAL
Created by Sheldon Harnick and Joe Raposo, A
WONDERFUL LIFE is a musical adaptation of
the 1948 film ITS A WONDERFUL LIFE. It is
also based on the original source material for the
film, a short story called THE GREATEST GIFT
by Philip Van Doren Stern. A WONDERFUL
LIFE was first performed at the University of
Michigan in 1986, and following at staged reading
at Paper Mill Playhouse in 1990, had a successful
run at Washington, DC's Arena Stage in 1991. It
was performed in New York in a concert version
for one night only on December 12, 2005.
ITS A WONDERFUL LIFE, THE FILM
Due to its perennial popularity as a Christmas
television ritual, Frank Capras 1946 film, ITS A
WONDERFUL LIFE, seems to have a life of its
own. But actually the film is the result of a long
line of influences and collaborations, each adding
a significant contribution to the American classic
that millions know and love. The idea for the film
first appeared in 1938 as a short story called The
Greatest Gift, by Philip Van Doren Stern. This
twelve-page fiction concerns a man named
George Pratt who contemplates suicide at
Christmas time, only to have a mysterious
stranger give him a unique perspective on his life.
Although there was an active market in magazines
for short fiction during the 1930s, Van Doren
Stern could not find anyone to publish his tale. By
1944, without a publisher, he decided to create a
pamphlet that contained the story and send it in a
holiday card to friends and family. One of the
friends was a Hollywood agent who made
arrangements for the story to be sold to RKO
Pictures for $10,000. Originally, RKO thought of
the property as a post-war vehicle for Cary Grant,
one of their major stars at the time. However,
they were unable to find a screenwriter who could
successfully translate the brief story into a fulllength feature film. At the same time, Frank
Capra, who had formed his own production
company after World War II, began to look for a
project that would be his first post-War
Hollywood film. Before the war, Capras positive

outlook and visions of epic Americana had made for

powerful films that were popular hits, but the war
and the atrocities he had observed had changed his
world view. He wanted to show a more realistic
world, albeit one in which hope and faith a belief in
the basic goodness of mankind, in spite of a
troubled world, were still possible. He found it in
the short story THE GREATEST GIFT and upon
learning that the project was owned by RKO, he
offered to buy the property for the same $10,000.
Capra set to work, rewriting the screenplay with the
aid of Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich who
would later become well-known for their play THE
DIARY OF ANNE FRANK. He fleshed out the
story by creating the town of Bedford Falls, New
York, the home of the storys hero George.
Drawing on images of small town life and
Americana, similar to those found in the paintings
of Norman Rockwell (below), the town in many
ways, became the films other central character. It
was a living, breathing place a town where
everyone knew everyone - the archetypal American

hometown that many people had just spent the war

years fighting to preserve. Capra knew instinctively
that it would strike a chord with audiences. The
name of the town, which is never mentioned in the
original Van Doren Stern story, was created by
combining Bedford Hills, in Westchester County,
New York, and Seneca Falls, a small town midway
between Rochester and Syracuse. The set for the
town took two months to build and was one of the
longest sets that had ever been made for an
American movie. It covered four acres of RKO's
Encino Ranch and included 75 stores and buildings
with a factory district and a large residential and
slum area in addition to the downtown area. Main
Street was 300 yards long, more than three whole
city blocks! After creating the physical heart and
soul of the film, Capra next
went to his favorite actor,
James Stewart, and offered
him the lead character of
George Bailey. Stewart (at

right) was also returning home from World War II

service with the Army Air Corps and was also
looking for a film to reactivate his acting career
after four years away from
Hollywood. Although he had
some initial misgivings, he
signed on to the project.
Opposite him, in the role of
Mary Bailey, Capra cast a
young actress named Donna
Reed (with Stewart, at left, in a scene from the
film), who would later find great success on
television in the 1950s and 60s, in her film
debut.
The others
actors brought into the
project
were
also
Capras favorites and
read like a whos
who of Hollywoods
greatest
character
actors including Lionel
Barrymore as Mr.
Potter
and
Henry
Travers (at right with Stewart), another Capra
favorite who was cast as Clarence, the Angel who
helps George realize what a gift his life has been.
Production on the film wrapped in the summer of
1946. Capra was pressured by the studio to release
the film for Christmas, but it was neither a huge
box office nor a huge critical success and both
Capra and his star were overlooked by the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
who awarded unanimous Oscars that year to
William Wylers film about post-war America,
THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES. At $3.7
million, ITS A WONDERFUL LIFE was a very
expensive film for an independent production and
its initial release failed to make a profit, earning
just over $3 million and putting Capras film
production company in debt. The film also drew
fierce criticism for its political statements about
post-WWII society when it was released in 1946.
Even the FBI labeled it a "subversive" movie and
charged that its use of a Scrooge-like businessman
(the character of Mr. Potter) "was a common trick
used by communists."
The movie seemed
doomed to slip into obscurity, although both
Capra and Stewart always referred to it as their
best work. However, it was given a reprieve
when the rights to the film became public domain
in 1974, after Capras film company went out of

business, meaning that it could be shown, without

any royalty or licensing payment, by any television
station. Stations all across the nation jumped on the
chance to screen it for free and the frequent
showings of the film turned it into an iconic
Christmas event.
In 1979 the New Yorker
magazine published a full page editorial about the
film, entitled Wonderful. It recounted how a
group of young New Yorkers were in the custom of
gathering every Christmas over drinks and
sandwiches to watch it on TV. The film continued
to grow in popularity and when one New York
station failed to air it one year, they received more
letters and phone calls of complaint than ever before
in its history. ITS A WONDERFUL LIFE was
itself experiencing a revisionist history, but not just
a popular one. It became the subject of academic
study and was praised in Film Comment, the Village
Voice, Partisan Review, and others and in 2006,
was named the most inspirational film of all time by
the American Film Institute, and placed eleventh on
the list of 100 Greatest American Films. James
Stewart's performance as George Bailey is ranked
Number 8 on Premiere Magazine's 100 Greatest
Performances of All Time.
FRANK CAPRA
Very few directors have had
words coined from their names
to describe their filmmaking
style. "Hitchcockian" is one,
used to describe work created
in the style of the master of
suspense, director Alfred
Hitchcock, and Capra-esque
used to describe work in the style of director Frank
Capra, is another. Capra's was a style and an
approach to filmmaking that few have been able to
emulate. Many of his stories, in other hands, would
have been slapstick or sickeningly sweet, or
maudlin. But he was a sure hand at storytelling,
able to find a balance in his films between
sentiment and insightfulness. Born in Italy on May
18, 1897, he came to America as an immigrant at
the age of six, traveling in steerage class as the son
of a fruit picker. After graduating from college with
an engineering degree and serving in the military
during World War I, he began his Hollywood career
as a gag writer for Hollywood directors and
producers Hal Roach and Mack Sennett and then

became a writer and director for silent film

comedian Harry Langdon. Eventually he landed
at Columbia Studios, and there began the work
that would eventually land him among the greatest
directors of all time. At Columbia, he directed
films such as THE YOUNGER GENERATION
(1929), THE MIRACLE WOMAN (1931), THE
BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN (1932), and
LADY FOR A DAY (1933). IT HAPPENED
ONE NIGHT (1934) became the first film to win
all five major Oscars. He won two more Best
Director Oscars, for MR. DEEDS GOES TO
TOWN (1936) and YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH
YOU (1938), which also won Best Picture. His
success was due in part to a collaboration with
screenwriter Robert Riskin, who helped develop
the characteristic Capra-esque stories of the
little man who fights the establishment. After
directing LOST HORIZON (1937) and MR.
SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON (1939), he
left Columbia and began working for Warner
Brothers. MEET JOHN DOE (1941) and
ARSENIC AND OLD LACE (1944) were the
result.
He spent the WWII years making
documentaries and after the War, he, George
Stevens and William Wyler formed Liberty
Pictures, which produced IT'S A WONDERFUL
LIFE (1946) and STATE OF THE UNION
(1948), among others. Both were flops at the box
office, but today are considered among his best
efforts. He continued to direct through the early
1960s, with films such as A HOLE IN THE
HEAD (1959) and A POCKETFUL OF
MIRACLES (1961), but never quite equaled the
success of his earlier projects. He died in 1991, a
respected elder statesman of Hollywood.
Frank Capra, writing about
ITS A WONDERFUL LIFE, from his
autobiography, THE NAME ABOVE THE
TITLE...
. . .It was my film for my kind of people. A film to tell the
weary, disheartened, and the disillusioned; the wino, the
junkie, those behind prison walls and those behind Iron
Curtains, that no man is a failure! To show those born
slow of foot or slow of mind, those oldest sisters
condemned to spinsterhood, and those oldest sons
condemned to unschooled toil, that each man's life
touches so many other lives. And that if he isn't around it
would leave an awful hole. A film that said to the
downtrodden, the pushed-around, the pauper, "Heads up,
fella. No man is poor who has one friend.

DISCUSSION AND CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES

BEFORE THE SHOW:
1. Watch the film Its a Wonderful Life. What are your
impressions?
2. Discuss the differences between the audience
experience at a film and a play. Why see a play
when you can see the movie? What are the
advantages and disadvantages of this format of
storytelling?
3. Create a list of other favorite holiday stories and films.
What do they have in common with ITS A
WONDERFUL LIFE? Why are holiday stories, in
general, so appealing?
4. How does the films
mythical town of
Bedford Falls relate to
life in cities and towns in
America today? Is your
hometown more like
Bedford Falls or
Pottersville? Explain.

AFTER THE SHOW:

1. Clarence grants George the gift of seeing what the
world would be like if he had never been born. In
Georges case, it turns out to be a wonderful gift, but
would you want to see what the world would be like
if you had never been born?
4. Choose one of your favorite characters from literature.
Write a scene or a story describing what life might
have been like in their world if that character had
never been born.
5. If you went through an experience like the one George
has, how would you describe it to others? Would
you even try, or would you keep it a secret? Write
out or improvise a scene between George and
another character from the story where George tries
to tell them what happened to him.
6. The Bailey Building and Loan Company is a small
bank which takes depositors' money and uses it to
build and mortgage low cost homes for people who
don't have a lot of money. Why doesn't George want
to spend his life working for the Building and Loan
Company?

TIMELINE
Most of the story of A WONDERFUL LIFE takes
place in the mythical town of Bedford Falls, New
York from 1928 to 1945, a tumultuous time in
American history when economics and war changed
the fabric of small town life. The following timeline
provides insight on the major events, before and
during this important period, that inform the story of A
WONDERFUL LIFE and that changed everyday life
for people in towns like Bedford Falls.

1931: Du Pont announces the marketing of a new synthetic

material called plastic
1932: Unemployment in America continues to rise with
almost 11 million people out of work
1932: Franklin D. Roosevelt is elected in a landslide victory
over Herbert Hoover

1819: The first savings bank opens in New York State

1933: A decline in national income forces a frantic run on the

banks and many small savings and loan offices are forced to
close as investors withdraw their savings. President Roosevelt
declares a bank holiday, closing down the nations banks to
prevent further withdrawals and Congress creates the Federal
Deposit Insurance Corporation to protect bank deposits

1843: Charles Dickens writes A Christmas Carol

1933: Prohibition is repealed

1907: The Cunard ocean liner Mauretania sets a speed

record for transatlantic travel

1935: The Pan American Clipper seaplane flies from San

Francisco to Guam

1914: World War I begins, Germany invades Belgium

1936: Dance bands, headed by leaders such as Duke

Ellington, Count Basie and Benny Goodman, promote swing
music and swing dancing around the country

1916: Frank Lloyd Wright designs the Imperial Hotel in

Tokyo
1917: The Selective Service Act creates a military draft
system

1939: Hitler invades Poland and Europe enters into World

War II

1917: United States declares war against Germany

1941: After an attack on Pearl Harbor, America declares war

on Japan

1919: The Versailles Peace Treaty is signed, ending World

War I

1942: Rationing of food and gas begins in the United States

as citizens make sacrifices to support the war effort

1920: Prohibition, a national ban on the sale of liquor,

begins

1945: V-E Day (May 7), Germany surrenders

1925: The Charleston dance craze reaches its height

1927: Charles Lindbergh flies solo across the Atlantic
Ocean
1929: The stock market crashes on October 24th (Black
Tuesday), wiping out billions of dollars in investments and
marking the beginning of a period of economic strife called
The Great Depression
1931: 4.8 million Americans are unemployed and financial
relief is sought by almost every level of American economic
society.
1931: The Do-X, the worlds largest passenger aircraft,
makes its maiden transatlantic flight
1931: The George Washington Bridge, spanning 3,500 feet
across the Hudson River, is completed and opens for traffic

1945: August 6 & 9, The United States drops atomic bombs

on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan
1945: V-J Day (August 15), Japan surrenders
1945: The first Christmas at peace in four years sees a large
group of American soldiers returning home from both Europe
and the Pacific, many of them in time for the holiday season

FUN FACT
Although ITS A WONDERFUL LIFE is set at
Christmas, the film was actually made during a
summer heat wave. In one climactic scene,
actor James Stewart is visibly sweating,
although fake snow is falling around him. In
fact, the heat was so bad that filming had to be
closed down for two days so that the cast and
crew could recuperate.