For your reading pleasure, please enjoy our Black List Tales interview with Alexandra Tran about writing It’s a Wonderful Story from Backstory Magazine’s issue 49 – now available to read! If you want to read the accompanying script, we hope you’ll join us to read the rest of the issue by subscribing to Backstory Magazine!
Alexandra Tran traces the origins of It’s A Wonderful Life, a film born out of director Frank Capra and star James Stewart’s service in WWII
By Danny Munso
During a rewatch of It’s a Wonderful Life a few years ago, screenwriter Alexandra Tran began Googling the movie to learn about how it was made. What she discovered actually became subject matter for a movie of its own. “A few things really jumped out at me,” she says of her deep dive. “One of them was despite it being a huge film now, it was a massive flop when it came out. I read it was [director] Frank Capra’s favorite film among all of his films, which is interesting because it’s one of his last. I also read it was [star] James Stewart’s favorite character he ever played. He was looking at not acting again after coming back from World War II, and it was this film that made him want to give it another go and gave him another 40 years of career. All these coalesced, and I wanted to tell this story.”
She ran the idea by her reps but was met with the same question she had been wrestling with herself: Yes, It’s a Wonderful Life is a classic, but why tell this story at this particular point in time, almost 80 years after the film’s release? That response changed in 2020 as the world went through the COVID pandemic. Suddenly a script about two people making a movie that helped them both deal with trauma in the aftermath of World War II seemed a lot timelier. “Now I had an allegory,” Tran says. “We’re all going through this shared global trauma in a way we haven’t really done since World War II. There’s a lot of similarity in the trauma response to both events. I thought, Okay, this is a story about how we come out of the pandemic and about choosing to focus on and deal with our trauma in productive ways.”
Tran fell in love with writing in high school and after graduation moved from Illinois to attend Scripps College in Southern California, where she began interning and working in the film industry during her summers. She penned her first feature script in 2008, and the years that followed were a lesson in persistence from which all aspiring writers can learn. Things reached a turning point in 2018 with a spec called Black Girls Don’t Swim, partly inspired by a true story. After submitting it to Project CRE8, a contest put on by BET and Paramount Players, Tran made the top five and got to pitch her film to those company heads. She didn’t win, but a revelation while penning the script led directly to her current success. “That was the script that cracked my process and my understanding of structure,” Tran says. “I finally understood the purpose of the midpoint and how it should function. Once I figured that out, my understanding totally clicked, and everything I’ve written has been at that higher level ever since.” A few months later, the writer’s next spec—about Ruth Handler, who created the Barbie doll—garnered the attention of manager Kate Sharp at Bellevue Productions, and they’ve been together ever since.
Alexandra Tran
Tran didn’t start writing It’s a Wonderful Story until August 2021, but she had already done some research on the film back when she had the initial idea. The problem was there wasn’t exactly a lot more research to be done. “Oddly, there’s very little information out there about the film itself,” she notes. “I did read Frank Capra’s autobiography and then a biography written about him—two wildly different accounts of the man. I read an autobiography of Jimmy Stewart, and there was a little more information in there but little about the nuts and bolts of the actual [It’s a Wonderful Life] filmmaking. Whatever I could find I put in the script.” Indeed, there are fun moments for die-hard fans—including the fact that a movie that takes place in winter was filmed in blistering100-degree heat in Encino, California—and you get to see Stewart and co-star Donna Reed perform some of the more well known scenes. But the reason the script is so phenomenal is it’s less about the making of the movie and more about the two men at its center.
It’s a Wonderful Story follows Capra and Stewart in the aftermath of their time spent serving the U.S. during the war. Capra had made a series of documentary films for the military intended to boost soldiers’ morale and remind them of why they’re fighting, while Stewart served in the Air Force and manned missions over Europe. After returning home, Stewart found acting trivial and vowed to quit, but then Capra asked him a favor: Would he star in the director’s new project, a vessel Capra would use to convey his eternal optimism in an increasingly dark world. With the help of Gloria, a single mother of two that he will eventually marry, Stewart rediscovers his passion for performing—and for life—once again. “I did have to futz with some timelines and did embellish some of the character arcs based on the facts we know, but the broad strokes of the characters’ lives are all real.”
Tran’s writing process begins not with an outline but with something shorter: a logline. “I have to create a working logline to know that I have a real concept with real implied conflict and tension and stakes. Once I have that, I pitch it to my manager, and if she approves, then I go to a beat sheet. In making that, I do plot out what the character arcs are [and] what is the main three-act structure. My manager is very good at zeroing in on if we’re missing a beat here or there. When we get through that process, which can take a long time, then I’m ready to actually start putting down pages. Once I know the overall beats, I can play with what they will turn into in the script.” Since she had been thinking about the story for a long time and had done as much digging into the topic as possible, Tran envisioned a short writing process for the script itself. “I thought this was going to be an easy write. I had everything planned out, and I thought, An easy three months, no problem.”
Frank Capra and James Stewart
Instead, the script ending up taking five drafts and almost an entire year to get just right. It turned out the story had a fatal flaw: the arc of Frank Capra. Version after version, Tran just could not get the famed director’s story to work just right, particularly in conjunction with Stewart’s. Initially, the men’s journeys were too similar, and that ended up cutting into the impact of both. It was easy to track how the making of It’s a Wonderful Life changed Stewart. But for Capra, it felt forced, and then 10 months into Tran’s writing of It’s a Wonderful Story, inspiration struck. And it arrived in the unlikely form of Paddington 2. While watching the extraordinary film with her son, clarity hit. “As I’m watching it” Tran says, “I realized Frank Capra needs to be Paddington—and by that, I mean he doesn’t change. He doesn’t go through an evolution the way Jimmy Stewart does. His whole purpose in the story is to maintain a point of view that changes everybody else around him.” Rather than force the narrative that filming It’s a Wonderful Life changed Capra, the script adopts the view that—much like Paddington or the title character in Forrest Gump—Capra stays the same throughout the film, while the others around him are the ones that change. “It was a eureka moment. I kept trying to do various versions of, Here he is down, and now he’s up. No matter how I reworked Frank’s starting point, he cannot have that transformational arc in that way. And that’s ultimately what the truth was. The truth was this is functionally not going to be the kind of character who goes through that journey. He needs to be the one around whom everyone else changes, and once I figured that out, everything fell into place. Everything made more sense.”
Stewart’s arc came more naturally. Tran used Stewart’s relationship with Gloria as a catalyst for his change. When Stewart met her, she was a divorced mother raising two boys on her own. The two married in 1949 and stayed that way until her death in 1994. Though the pair didn’t actually meet until the year after It’s a Wonderful Life was released, Tran uses Gloria and her two children—Michael and Ronald, whom Stewart later adopted—as a way to address a very real event in Stewart’s life at the time of filming: his PTSD from the war. “It is known he had a lot of trauma from the war,” she says of the actor. “He had to go convalesce in England for a while in between missions, and when he got back, he did not talk about his war experience at all. So his PTSD is real, and I embellished certain things around that experience to show how real [that can be].” This is showcased in It’s a Wonderful Story’s best scene. When Michael is going through something he won’t share with his mom, Gloria calls Stewart over to the house to talk to him. At the time, the two aren’t dating and Stewart is in the middle of filming, where he has been struggling due to lack of confidence and conviction. But when Stewart is alone with Michael, he can’t get the boy to open up, so he begins playing with Michael’s army men, giving them voices and a story. That gets Michael to start talking and Stewart shares things about his time in the war that he hadn’t told others. The scene escalates with Stewart role-playing as Michael’s classmate, whom he had offended, and the source of Michael’s angst was uncovered. It’s an incredible scene as each character elicits information from the other in an emotional way.
“That’s one of the few scenes that remained largely unchanged in the year I spent writing the script,” Tran says. “It takes something tremendous to make Stewart access his pain [from the war], and the only thing I could think of that would be more important to him than his own suffering is a child’s. Gloria’s kid is suffering with guilt and shame for something he has done and can’t talk about. Jimmy finds a way to use his acting in a way that is in service of healing, and that’s what breaks open for him this idea that maybe acting isn’t so silly after all. He can still be useful doing this. The scene is totally fictionalized, but it’s there in service of the story of a man coming to grips with his trauma.” The scene was born out of Tran’s research. In real life, Gloria’s son Ronald was killed at the age of 24 while serving in Vietnam and Tran came across a photo of the family at Ronald’s funeral that shows Stewart standing and saluting his adopted son’s grave. “I just thought, There’s something there. In Jimmy Stewart’s family, there is a long line of service, and he took service very seriously. He lobbied hard to be able to serve. I thought that was something I could use as a way for him to connect with this boy and this family.”
After nailing down Capra’s arc, Tran took another two weeks to do a final rewrite, and that was the version of It’s a Wonderful Story her reps at Bellevue and Agency for the Performing Arts sent to production companies in October 2022. The script garnered immediate interest and got enough votes in a short window for the script to make that December’s Black List. “It’s definitely a feather in the cap,” she says of making it, an honor she learned about only after being tagged in a mention on Twitter. The companies interested in making the film all had their own script suggestions, and while Tran liked some ideas better than others, no perfect fit has been found. Still, she admits, “In this last week, something pretty incredible has happened, but I can’t disclose further.” Whether the script itself will get made remains up in the air, but at a minimum it has grown Tran’s profile, giving her considerable talent the spotlight it deserves. In the meantime, she’s back writing, working on a high-concept adventure romance in the vein of 2020’s time-hopping sci-fi comedy Palm Springs. “It’s ambitious, and I have not fully cracked it yet. But I’m excited—it’s a new challenge.”
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