Interview (Part 4): 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 4 of a 6-part series to run each day through Sunday, 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.

Scott: It’s interesting to hear the real-life versus the version of the script because you did make some smart choices as a screenwriter, as opposed to have him saying, “Yeah, Frank, sure, I’ll make that movie.” You have dramatic irony at work because you’re tracking two stories.

You’ve got Frank at home with his wife, and they’ve got their own issues, and Frank in his career, which is kind of stalled. Then you got Jimmy Stewart, who’s basically saying, “I’m not going to do this anymore.” Then he meets Gloria. Gloria is a really interesting character the way you shape that character.

She’s almost like a mentor figure at first, as opposed to someone that they become erratically involved with. For example, there’s an exchange where he says to her, “I’m going to quit acting.” She says, “OK, I give up. Why can’t you act anymore?” Jim says, “It feels silly, phony.” She says, “Sure.”

Jim says, “It didn’t before.” Then he follows it up later he says, “A good actor doesn’t just say the lines and hit his marks. He has to make the audience feel something. The only way that works is if it’s real to him. If it’s real to him, it’s real to the audience. Gloria, in parenthetical: getting it. Nothing feels real anymore. Jim: nothing good.”

You bring that war experience, the trauma there, it’s impacted him and getting in the way of him being an actor. At first, he tells Frank Capra, I can’t do it, but then something starts to twist him. Could you talk a bit about that shift that happens with him where he does eventually agree to do it?

Lexie: It’s that loyalty. One of the things that’s well studied and well documented about World War II veterans is the camaraderie that was forged in that experience staying with them the rest of their lives and loyalty was tremendously important to them.

He doesn’t want to do this movie. It’s the last thing he wants, but if it’s make or break for Frank, then he’ll suffer for Frank’s sake. That’s what he does. He struggles so much initially in making the movie and in trying to channel a young carefree George Bailey in his 20s. That’s what I was going for.

Scott: Literally, it’s in description at one point, I think it’s his first day. That says, “Absolutely does not want to be here.” This is after he’s committed to the movie. That’s another interesting choice you made, which probably diverges from what happened in real life, because Jimmy Stewart’s just the consummate actor, that he’s struggling through some of those early scenes.

There’s an interesting dynamic that’s going on, and I’m sure you were aware of that, milking it. George Bailey doesn’t want to be doing his job at the Bailey Savings & Loans.

Lexie: Exactly.

Scott: George Bailey is doing something that he does not want to be doing, and Jimmy Stewart is doing what he does. Actually, Frank Capra’s got a situation like that, too. George Bailey: “I want to see the world, I want to build bridges, I want to build skyscrapers.” That was what Frank Capra did with all those great movies that he won those Oscars for.

Now he’s struggling to make this movie. He’s behind schedule. He’s over budget. He’s got an actor who is struggling. They’re both struggling. In some ways, they have their own inner George Bailey thing going on. Do you want to talk a bit about that?

Lexie: Yeah, definitely. The way I structured it, and I’ll be honest. I thought when I first began to write this, that it would be a quick three-month project because I knew the story forwards and backwards. I knew all the history and the trivia, and I had the structure down. My outline was great… and it still took a year to break this story. The reason is this.

I realized that I was trying to give traditional hero’s journey arcs to both Frank and Jim, and it couldn’t work that way. One of them needed to have that “from darkness to light” journey in a traditional way, and that’s Jimmy. Then Frank needs to be what I call the Paddington Bear character.

Literally, I used this when I pitched the rewrite to my manager. I was watching “Paddington 2” with my son and it hit me, “Oh, this is it. Frank is Paddington.” Like Paddington, Frank needs to maintain a certain belief, an unshakable belief that drives him regardless of whatever gets thrown at him.

It’s their unshakable belief that changes everybody around them. Frank has this drive to make this movie, which, in his words I read somewhere, was the one movie that combined everything he was trying to say with all the other previous movies. If his career is over, he wants to go out with this very idealistic idea, when the whole world is feeling very cynical.

That belief is what changes his wife and helps her overcome her anxieties and brings them closer together. It helps Jimmy realize that maybe there’s a way to take the broken pieces of his identity and forge them to something new. Not quite as good as who he used to be, but maybe still be useful. Still be worth being.

That’s the way the structure ends up. When the movie is a failure and Frank is beside himself, I organize it so that Lu knows what Frank needs. She knows that he has somehow lost the point of his own thesis, and she makes him go watch the movie by himself.

When he experiences the movie through the eyes of one regular person, he learns his own lesson, which is the lesson of It’s a Wonderful Life. Ironically he has to learn the very lesson he was trying to teach, which is that regardless of the disappointments and failures, you have no idea the impact that your life will have on others.

He learns his lesson finally, and he’s able to let the movie go and move on with his life. He retired shortly thereafter. About 20 years later, thanks to the invention of television, the film becomes everything it was always meant to be and reaches millions more people than it ever would have at first time around. It makes me cry even now.

Scott: I know. I’ve seen the movie, I don’t know, probably 15 times. I can still remember the very first time I saw it. Came home from a midnight Christmas Eve candlelight service with my folks and saw this grainy thing on TV, and by the end of it, I’m weeping. It was such a powerful experience.

Lexie: There’s that one line where George is home and the whole town is in his living room and his brother is the last one to arrive. His brother who had the life that George wanted. Brother comes home and offers a toast and goes “to my big brother George…”

Scott: Richest man in town.

Lexie: I cry every time. I can watch 30 seconds on YouTube and burst into tears because it just…It brings the whole movie home, the whole what, 90 minutes into one line. Just masterful.

Scott: Your script includes a really interesting scene, which I’m sure came from whole cloth your own creative instinct, where Gloria asks Jimmy Stewart over to the house because her son Michael has not been talking to her and has been rather sullen for three days. It’s like, the first time he’s even met the kid. It’s a long scene.

It’s like five to six pages long with the real estate of a script. Could you maybe talk about why that scene exists? Because Jimmy Stewart starts doing this acting thing with the kid. Maybe talk about that scene because it’s quite evocative and it’s a great way of showing visually this shift that’s starting to emerge in his character.

Lexie: Thank you so much for that. That’s one of the first scenes I wrote, and it’s the only one that’s remained largely unchanged through every draft. That scene is my midpoint shift for Jim’s arc. It’s the one where he suddenly realizes that “OK, maybe acting isn’t useless.”

This kid has been through something and he won’t talk about it. He’s clammed up. He’s clammed up the same way that Jim and millions of men who went through trauma are clammed up. He knows from firsthand experience that clamming up eats you from inside. He doesn’t want that for this little boy. It’s a little boy who doesn’t know him, doesn’t trust him, has no reason to talk to him whatsoever.

Jim digs deep into the tools he has. The tools he has to connect are acting tools. He shares a story about what it was like to be afraid while he was in service and it’s something he hasn’t spoken about before in the movie. He hasn’t spoken about it to Gloria. He shares it out of necessity to connect with Michael.

Then, when Michael still won’t admit what happened or can’t process what happened, Jim says, “OK, well, let’s act it out,” like you might with a therapist, I think now. A lot of therapy, you revisit traumatic situations to make them have closure the way that you need them to. That’s exactly what they do.

They enact the situation where Michael feels terrible for something he did. They bring closure to it. The whole point of that scene is for Jim to realize that acting does not really just have to be entertainment. Acting, movies, and stories can be and often are extremely healing to people who have no other way of getting that healing.

It’s immediately after that scene where Gloria, who is very intuitive, finally tells to Jim stop hiding. She can see in him that he’s hiding from himself, that he won’t give himself the same help he just gave to Michael. He hasn’t fully accepted his traumatized self.

She tells him, “Stop hiding. For your own sake, not for mine.” That’s when Jim figures it out. He puts the pieces together and figures out, “Maybe I’m not useless. Maybe I can still use this and do some good.”

That’s when he goes and is able to channel all of his really horrible dark feelings into incredible, moving scenes, and it makes the movie work.

Tomorrow in Part 5, Lexie answers some questions about the craft of screenwriting.

For Part 1, go here.

Part 2, here.

Part 3, 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.