It's A Wonderful Life - Page 3
Production of "It's a Wonderful Life" started April 15, 1946, and from the beginning there was a certain something special about the film. Even the set was special. Two months had been spent creating the town of Bedford Falls, New York. For the winter scenes, the special-effects department invented a new kind of realistic snow instead of using the traditional white cornflakes. As one of the longest American movie sets ever made until then, Bedford Falls had 75 stores and buildings on four acres with a three-block main street lined with 20 full grown oak trees.
As I walked down that shady street the morning we started work, it reminded me of my hometown, Indiana, Pennsylvania. I almost expected to hear the bells of the Presbyterian church, where Mother played the organ and Dad sang in the choir. I chuckled, remembering how the fire siren would go off, and Dad, a volunteer fireman, would slip out of the choir loft. If it was a false alarm, Dad would sneak back and sort of give a nod to everyone to assure them that none of their houses was in danger.
I remembered how, after I got started in pictures, Dad, who'd come to California for a visit, asked, "Where do you go to church around here?"
"Well, " I stammered, "I haven't been going... There's none around here."
Dad disappeared and came back with four men. "You must not have looked very hard, Jim," he said, "because there's a Presbyterian church just three blocks from here, and these are the elders. They're building a new building now, and I told them you were a movie star and you would help them." And so Brentwood Presbyterian was the first church I belonged to out here. Later that church was the one in which Gloria and I were married. A few years after that it was the same church I'd slip into during the day when Gloria was near death after our twin girls were born. Then, after we moved, we attended Beverly Hills Presbyterian, a church we could walk to.
It wasn't the elaborate movie set, however, that made "It's a Wonderful Life" so different; much of it was the story.
The character I played was George Bailey, an ordinary kind of fella who thinks he's never accomplished anything in life. His dreams of becoming a famous architect, of traveling the world and living adventurously, have not been fulfilled.
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