Interview (Part 3): Lexie Tran

My interview with 2022 Black List writer for her script It’s a Wonderful Story.

Alexandra “Lexie” Tran wrote the original screenplay It’s a Wonderful Story which landed on the 2022 Black List. I had the opportunity to chat with Lexie about her creative background, writing a Black List script, and the craft of screenwriting.

Today in Part 3 of a 6-part series to run each day through Sunday, Lexie describes how both writer-director Frank Capra and actor Jimmy Stewart returned from their respective experiences during World War II as emotionally vulnerable individuals, and how those psychological wounds fed directly into the drama at the core of It’s a Wonderful Life.

Scott: You mentioned that some of those movies before 1945 when your story starts, he did The Philadelphia Story, which is another great movie, The Shop Around the Corner, delightful. Then, of course, You Can’t Take It with You and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” Capra and Stewart both had their unique connection.

At the beginning of your script, Frank Capra is in Washington, D.C. He’s directing and producing all those Why We Fight series of films, part of the propaganda in the positive sense arm of the government to incentivize Americans to get involved in the war effort. Meanwhile, Jimmy Stewart in what they called the Armed Air forces flying an airplane over in Europe.

Could you maybe talk a bit about those war experiences for each of them and how they each had…Well, Jimmy Stewart really did have a trauma. I guess you’d say it was PTSD in a way. Could you talk a bit about both of them, in terms of what they came away from the war with?

Lexie: Sure. I think it’s important to emphasize, too, that they were not young men for World War II. For Capra, he had served in World War I. Prior to being in film he was as a chemical engineer. He was stationed somewhere away from combat for World War I.

Capra, being an immigrant and being Italian as well, a Sicilian, even. Not even Roman Italian. He had this massive chip on his shoulder about having to always prove his American-ness because he experienced a great deal of racism even after being a successful director in Hollywood.

A lot of his service went into, “OK, well, I’m an American. I’m going to be as American as anybody else, even though I’m too old to go and shoot a gun, but I’m going to contribute what I do best, which is to motivate and inspire people to get riled up and do what needs to be done.”

A lot of what I ended up creating in the script was the sense of, what would it take for a man whose works are about the inherent goodness of man, to then put all that expertise into motivating millions to go kill an enemy. It’s so counter to his point of view, which was always about man being essentially good. The power of the little guy against the mob, against the unrighteous, and he always wins. Everything he’s known for is called Capra-corn for a reason.

Scott: Capra-corn.

Lexie: It was corny. Idealistic. Fairy-tale-like, where good and evil are clear and defined, and good always wins.

Then, there were several interviews I saw with Capra, after the war, when it became really apparent, like a lot of the Holocaust atrocities had come out, suddenly it became clear of what the war had been about, and what was at stake and how evil the evil was, and it shook him.

It altered that worldview of, “We can still be friends with these people eventually.” How do you become friends with people who commit genocide? Then I thought, too, about how this man who’s doing all he can to get people to want to go out and fight, knowing that a lot of them won’t come home.

What kind of toll would that take on him? He was a father, and a veteran. He could empathize with the loss on many levels. That would be extremely difficult. I thought about how would it feel to know that the last things you did that reached a wide audience were in service of war and were in service of killing other human beings, when your whole life has been about the goodness of man and what good people can do. That’s where that character really came from; the exploration of that idea.

Scott: He comes back and they give him a bunch of scripts to look at and they’re all war movies, essentially, because he’d done all that work. Was that true or is that something true and maybe even emotionally true, but was that something that he faced?

Lexie: That is my fabrication. What is true is that he comes home and he doesn’t have the clout that he used to have. He’d been away for four years. As we know in Hollywood, the minute you’re gone, you’re gone. People forget about you.

He’d always had a contentious relationship with his studio boss, Harry Cohn, who had made all of his hits. Cohn always controlled everything and didn’t want to make It’s a Wonderful Life, which at the time was called…

Scott: The Greatest Gift.

Lexie: Capra was insistent. After this experience and having gone through the war, you feel like, what’s the point of…What’s the word I’m looking for? What’s the point of censoring myself, of curtailing myself when life is short and can be brutal? I want to make what I want to make, studio be damned.

He quit his contract and he did go and form a partnership with two other colleagues and directors, and they formed a company that was independent. They only got to make one movie and it was It’s a Wonderful Life.

Scott: Liberty Films.

Lexie: Liberty Films.

Scott: Let’s jump to Jimmy Stewart. He had a more direct, visceral war experience. How did that impact him?

Lexie: Jimmy Stewart’s story is the less fabricated one. Stewart grew up with a family that was very focused on service. His father and grandfather had served. When World War II came to the United States, he was technically too old and too thin to enlist and was declared 4F.

He lobbied tremendously to be able to serve, and he went out and got his own pilot’s license. He was determined that he was going to serve in this way. Air combat was not new in World War II, but it was going to be tremendously important in a new way that it hadn’t been before.

At the end of the war, I believe he was a colonel, or he was a captain, I forget. He was pretty highly ranked. He commanded men. He led raiding missions over Germany to destroy munitions plants. There were mistakes. At one point, I read, they accidentally destroyed a town of German civilians. It weighed very heavily on him.

He did get what they called Flak Happy. He had PTSD. He did have to go and take several weeks off to convalesce in England, at which point he had to go back into the service. He went and he did his duty, but he came back and very much immediately was like, “I’m not going back to Hollywood. I’m going to go work in my father’s store, and that’s going to be my life from now on.”

My interpretation of that was, how can you spend your life doing something so frivolous when you’ve literally held lives in your hand and you’ve seen your friends lose their lives as a stroke of fate? How do you do that? How do you find that lightness to play make-believe?

In my script, I make it so that he doesn’t initially want to make It’s a Wonderful Life because he’s just done with that world. In truth, what happened was, he was a loyal friend. When Capra calls and says, “Hey, I need you to anchor this movie I’m making, be my blue blood on this ragtag indie.” He says, “Of course, Frank. Anything for you, Frank.” That’s what really happened, actually.

They make the film and in the making of the film, it’s pretty clear, Stewart gets into a deeper, darker place. The parts of him that you see when he’s experiencing the world if George hadn’t been born, he doesn’t have that darkness in any of his prior films.

Even the darker parts of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” he’s righteous, and he knows he’s on the right. It’s a man in a picture of despair at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life. That could only have come from his war experiences. He was very much alone. In real life, he wouldn’t meet Gloria until a year after the movie was made.

Again, I thought about, you come back from the war, you’re a middle-aged man and you’re alone. You don’t have a wife, you don’t have children and your parents are older, what do you have to cling to? I wrote it so that he channels that loneliness into that performance of George Bailey.

Tomorrow in Part 4, Lexie delves into how the private lives of both Stewart and Capra played out symbolically through the storyline in the movie they were making together.

For Part 1, go here.

Part 2, here.

Lexie is repped by Agency for the Performing Arts (APA) and Bellevue Productions.

Twitter: @LexWojTran

For my interviews with dozens of other Black List writers, go here.