IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE: LIVE IN CHICAGO! BACKSTAGE GUIDE 13 Donna Reed had excellent aim. Though Capra had a stuntman at the ready in order to shoot out the window of the Granville House in a scene that required Donna Reed to throw a rock through it, it was all a waste of money. “Mom threw the rock herself that broke the window in the Granville House,” Mary Owen—daughter of Donna Reed—says. “On the first try.” The bartender would rather be at the ballpark. Actor and producer Sheldon Leonard said that he only agreed to play Nick the bartender so he could buy baseball tickets with his paycheck. Uncle Billy went unscripted. In one scene, a drunk Uncle Billy yells "I'm all right, I'm all right!" after supposedly clambering into some garbage cans off-screen. But actually, a crew member had dropped a giant piece of equipment — and the actors just went with it. Sam Wainwright was really on the other end of that phone call. Capra strove to make scenes as real as he could for actors. Thus the first kiss between James Stewart and Donna Reed was shot at the same time as the other end of the phone conversation, with Sam Wainwright (Frank Albertson) on a different set (Wainwright's New York office) at RKO's Pathe studio. A copyright lapse made it a holiday staple. The film became infinitely more popular when its rights lapsed, creating a free-for-all for broadcasters to play it nonstop on television during the holidays. That ended when NBC acquired the exclusive rights in 1994. Zuzu didn’t see the film until 1980. Karolyn Grimes, who played Zuzu in the film, didn’t see the film until 1980. She told Detroit’s WWJ : “I never just sat down and watched [it].” The FBI saw the film. They didn’t like it. In 1947, the FBI issued a memo noting the film as a potential “Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry,” citing its “rather obvious attempts to discredit bankers by casting Lionel Barrymore as a ‘Scrooge-type’ so that he would be the most hated man in the picture.“ It’s everyone favorite. Though their collective filmographies consist of a couple hundred movies, Capra, Reed, and Stewart have all cited “It’s a Wonderful Life” as their favorite movie. In his autobiography, The Name Above the Title, Capra took that praise even one step further, writing: “I thought it was the greatest film I ever made. Better yet, I thought it was the greatest film anybody ever made.” (edited from TheWrap.com, IMDB.com, Telegraph.co.uk, and MentalFloss.com) Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed in “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) Donna Reed and Jimmy Stewart in “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946)