History Book - A Christmas movie flop

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Monday, December 20th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Next up, the WORLD History Book. This week a Christmas classic flops at the box office, a typo in a Sears catalog leads to an unexpected Christmas tradition, and a surprise guest lights the White House Christmas tree.

EICHER: Katie Gaultney is away this week. Associate correspondent Harrison Watters is filling in.

HARRISON WATTERS, CORRESPONDENT: Four days after Japan bombs Pearl Harbor, Germany declares war on the United States. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill secretly sails to America to coordinate battle plans—and arrives on December 22nd, 1941.

GLENN MILLER: JINGLE BELLS (1941)

Despite the security concerns of being a nation at war, with blackout curtains and rationing already in the works, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt keeps a promise he made a year earlier in 1940. To make the traditional tree-lighting event “more homey,” the president moves the tree to right up against the fence on the South Lawn, and invites 20,000 guests onto the White House grounds.

FDR: How can we put the world aside as men and women put the world aside in peaceful years to rejoice in the birth of Christ?”

Moments later, President Roosevelt welcomes Winston Churchill to the microphone.

CHURCHILL: Fellow workers, fellow soldiers in the cause, this is a strange Christmas Eve…

But Churchill appeals to his American friends to courageously observe Christmas—for the sake of their children.

CHURCHILL: Let the children have their night of fun and laughter let the gifts of Father Christmas delight their play. Let us grown-ups share to the full in their unstinted pleasures before we turn again to the stern task and formidable year that lie before us. And so in God's mercy, a happy Christmas to you all.

We turn now from a successful Christmas speech to a terrible Christmas flop.

In 1943, a writer named Phillip van Doren Stern mails a 21-page story to his friends and family with his annual Christmas card. The story is called The Greatest Gift, and a copy of it lands on a producer’s desk at RKO films. After commissioning three failed scripts, RKO breaks even when it sells the story to an upstart studio called Liberty Films.

The director and lead actor are fresh from serving in WWII when they make the film during the summer of 1946. With expectations running high, the director sets the film’s premiere for the Friday before Christmas—so it can qualify for the 1947 Oscars.

And so, on December 20th 75 years ago today, Frank Capra’s movie It’s A Wonderful Life hits the big screen—and fails miserably.

MOVIE CLIP: Help! Help! Help!

Critics at The New York Times call George Bailey a “figment of simple Pollyanna platitudes.” Meanwhile, many movie-goers pass on the film about a suicidal man who gets to see what the world would be like without him in favor of more optimistic stories.

MOVIE CLIP: Why did you want to save me? That’s what I was sent down for. I’m your guardian angel.

The film cost around $3 million dollars to make, but on opening weekend, it makes a third of that amount, leaving Liberty Films over five hundred thousand dollars in debt by the end of the year.

MOVIE CLIP: There’s only one way you can help me. You don’t happen to have $8000 on you? (LAUGHS) No. We don’t use money in heaven.

At the Oscars in March, It’s A Wonderful Life manages to bring back an award, but not for best picture, best actor, or best director. Judges grant the film a Technical Achievement award for creating a new kind of movie set snow that doesn’t involve painting corn flakes.

MOVIE CLIP: I said “I wish I’d never been born!” Oh, you mustn’t say things like that…

It was a disappointment for Frank Capra, who sold Liberty Films to Paramount Pictures that same year. The movie about a man who never got out of Bedford Falls was quietly put on a shelf and forgotten about.

MOVIE CLIP: You’ve got your wish. You’ve never been born.

It’s actually because the movie was put on a shelf that it became a classic. It’s a Wonderful Life became part of a library of films that changed hands several times over the next three decades. As soon as it fell into the public domain, TV stations across the country started playing It’s a Wonderful Life every year.

MOVIE CLIP: ZuZu’s petals! There they are! Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas…

In 1984, Phillip van Doren Stern, the man who wrote the original story, died at age 83. Stern lived to see his story become one of the most-watched Christmas movies ever made.

MOVIE CLIP: AUDE LANG SYNE

And finally, we end today with a typo that turned Air Force pilots into Santa’s helpers. In December 1955, Colonel Harry Shoup receives a call on his secret Pentagon hotline. When he answers, a child asks if he is Santa Claus.

Colonel Shoup’s children explain what happened next in this 2014 NPR interview.

FARRELL: So he'd talk to him, ho-ho-hoed and asked if he had been a good boy and may I talk to your mother? And the mother got on and said, you haven't seen the paper yet? There's a phone number to call Santa. It's in the Sears ad. And they had children calling one after another. So he put a couple airmen on the phones to act like Santa Claus.

What began as a bit of fun turned into a full-scale media production, with phonograph recordings of NORAD personnel giving updates on the identification of a flying object coming from the vicinity of the North Pole

NEWS BULLETIN: From what we’ve been able to piece together, there is a sled shaped object. Red in color. Being pulled by nine reindeer.

From radio to web, NORAD continues to track Santa’s flight around the world and field questions from children. In 2017, NORAD received over 120,000 calls with inquiries about Santa’s flight, although the phone number has changed since Colonel Shoup received the first call.

That’s this week’s World History Book. I’m Harrison Watters.

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