Tag Archive for Frank Capra

| December 14, 2021
Comments Off on 9 Fun Facts About Christmas Vacation

9 Fun Facts About Christmas Vacation

9 Fun Facts About Christmas Vacation

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation made its debut in movie theaters on December 1, 1989. Christmas Vacation unleashed more Griswold family dysfunction upon the world and created a classic holiday movie. Here are some things you might not know about one of my favorite Christmas comedies.

1. Christmas Vacation is based on a short story

Christmas Vacation is based on the short story, “Christmas ’59,” written by John Hughes for National Lampoon in December 1980. The movie pays tribute to the short when Clark is trapped in the attic and pulls out a box of old home movies, including one labeled “Christmas ’59.”

2. The Christmas Vacation cast was very impressive

Christmas Vacation’s cast is chock-full of seasoned comedy performers, including leads Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo but also featured older stars and early roles for younger actors.

  • Johnny Galecki – Rusty Griswold, went on to star in Roseanne before being cast as co-lead Dr. Leonard Hofstadter in The Big Bang Theory. He earned a Golden Globe nomination for Big Bang Theory.
  • Juliette LewisJuliette Lewis – Audrey, made more movies post Christmas Vacation including Natural Born Killers, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, and the 1991 remake of Cape Fear, for which she received a best-supporting actress Oscar nomination.
  • Julia Louis-Dreyfus was the Griswolds’ yuppie neighbor Margo Chester. Soon after Christmas  Vacation, she would debut on “Seinfeld” and the rest is television history.
  • Randy Quaid – Cousin Eddie, earned a best-supporting actor nomination. He was a Saturday Night Live member from 1985 to 1991. He also starred in the Roland Emmerich disaster sci-fi Independence Day.
  • E.G. MarshallE.G. Marshall – Art Smith, played the father to Ellen Griswald. Before his role in the Christmas classic, appeared in 1957’s 12 Angry Men. His TV credits include  The Defenders, The Cosby Show, and Chicago Hope. He died at the age of 84 in 1998.
  • Doris Roberts – Francis Smith (Clark’s Mother-in-law), career began in 1951. Her most notable role is probably as Ray Romano’s outspoken mother, Marie, in Everybody Loves Raymond. She died in 2016 at the age of 90.
  • Diane Ladd – Nora Griswold, the mother to Clark. her career started in the 1950s. Her credits include Gunsmoke, Alice, and The Love Boat and the movie Chinatown and Primary Colors.
  • Mae Questel – Bethany, Clark’s aunt. Her career began in 1930. She was the voice of both Betty Boop and Olive Oyl. She passed away at the age of 89 in January of 1998.

3. Christmas Vacation has ties to another holiday classic

Footage from the Frank Capra classic holiday movie It’s A Wonderful Life appears in the Christmas Vacation. In the scene where the Griswolds are putting up their tree, Capra’s 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life is on the TV. Christmas Vacation has another fun tie to It’s a Wonderful Life: Frank Capra’s grandson, Frank Capra III, is Christmas Vacation’s assistant director. 

2. Clark Griswold grew up in Samantha Stevens’s house

BewitchedClark’s childhood home is the same house featured on Bewitched as well as The New Gidget. It is part of the Warner Bros. backlot, located on what is known as Blondie Street. And if the home of their snooty neighbors, Todd and Margo, looks familiar, that’s because it’s where Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) and his family lived in Lethal Weapon.

9. Clark’s rant was fake

Beverly D’Angelo explained in a 2015 conversation with The Dinner Party Download, that Clark’s rant was scripted.

… this particular scene … was blocked in a way that would allow each of us to have around our necks a piece of rope that was attached to a big cue card. The rant was divided into sections so that he could go all the way through from the beginning to the end without a chance of forgetting his lines … If you watch it, you can see him. His eyes go from character to character as he’s going on in the speech because we’ve got the lines there.

 

8. Ellen Griswold lied to the cops

In the scene where Ellen Griswold apologizes to Mrs. Shirley—the wife of Clark’s boss/Eddie’s kidnapping victim—assuring her that “This is our family’s first kidnapping,” when, it was the second kidnapping that we know of. In the first Vacation film, the Griswolds force Lasky (John Candy), the security guard to open Wally World for them.

6. You can buy your own Dickie

Randy Quaid borrowed many of Cousin Eddie’s mannerisms from a guy he knew growing up in Texas, most notably his tendency toward tongue-clicking. But Eddie’s Dickie? That was an idea from Quaid’s wife. You can buy your own Cousin Eddie dickie at the National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation Collectibles, a website dedicated to all things Christmas Vacation.

5. Roger Ebert did not like Christmas Vacation

Though it has become a bona fide holiday classic, not everyone was a fan of Christmas Vacation. Roger Ebert gave it two stars out of five in his review of the film. Mr. Ebert described the movie as “curious in how close it comes to delivering on its material: Sequence after sequence seems to contain all the necessary material, to be well on the way toward a payoff, and then it somehow doesn’t work.”

Stay safe out there!

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Holidays | Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
| December 18, 2019
Comments Off on It’s A Wonderful Life – A Commie Plot?

It’s A Wonderful Life – A Commie Plot?

It's A Wonderful Life – A Commie Plot?

It’s A Wonderful Life is a holiday classic today. The film, which stars Jimmy Stewart, Donna Reed, and Lionel Barrymore was released in 1946 by RKO Radio Pictures. Despite legendary director Frank Capra, claims it was his best movie, it was a box-office flop.

FBIEven though the movie was a commercial failure, that did not stop the Feds. The Smithsonian reports that from its release until 1956, It’s A Wonderful Life was deemed a communist plot against the U.S. by J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation. An FBI agent was assigned to watch the film as part of the FBI’s program to detect and neutralize Commie influences in Hollywood (PDF). The FBI agent reportedly said the film was “very entertaining.”

Even though it was entertaining for the Hollywood G-Man it was not good enough for the Bureau. The FBI focused on It’s a Wonderful Life because it suspected director Frank Capra, lifelong Republican, of left-wing sympathies. The Bureau believed that the 1939 Capra movie, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, was a socialist film.

Red ScareThe Washington Post reports that the FBI believed that two of It’s a Wonderful Life screenwriters were Communists. Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, “were very close to known Communists and on one occasion in the recent past … practically lived with known Communists and were observed” eating lunch every day with “known Communists.”

As a result of this report, the film underwent further FBI scrutiny. Professor at Franklin and Marshall College, John A. Noakes told The Smithsonian that the FBI “also identified what they considered a malignant undercurrent in the film.”  The FBI scrutiny found, “those responsible for making It’s a Wonderful Life had employed two common tricks used by Communists to inject propaganda into the film.”

In his article “Bankers and common men in Bedford Falls.” Professor Noakes identifies the two common “devices” or tricks, the FBI saw in It’s a Wonderful Life. 

1- Values or institutions judged to be particularly American are smeared or presented as evil in a movie.

2- Values or institutions judged to be particularly anti-American or pro-Communist are glorified in a movie.

The FBI believed the Christmas classic was guilty of using Communist trick 1 by discrediting bankers. In a 1947 FBI memo, the Hollywood G-Man said that the poor depiction of the movie’s antagonist banker Henry F. Potter “represented a rather obvious attempt to discredit bankers.”  The report continued by saying that the depiction was a deliberate ploy to ensure that Potter was the most hated character in the movie.

The FBI report also claimed the movie “deliberately maligned the upper class, attempting to show the people who had money were mean and despicable characters.”

An unnamed Bureau “expert” who knew better than three-time Academy Award winner Frank Capra, said that instead of demonizing Potter, the film should have shown that he was only following the rules issued by State Bank Examiners about making loans.

The FBI also believed the movie was guilty of using Communist trick 2 by defending the common man. Professor Noakes points to the scenes where George Bailey defends loans made by the Bailey Brothers Building and Loan to working men that want a decent home. These scenes challenged the status quo and thus were considered “Communist.” In the post-World War II paranoia, even the idea of a community bank could be read as Communist.

Further, George Bailey’s deep unhappiness in a quintessentially American small-town life was viewed by the FBI as also Communist. The FBI report characterized George Bailey’s depression and existential crisis as a “subtle attempt to magnify the problems of the so-called ‘common man’ in society.”

Because of these factors, the FBI handed over the results of its investigation to the U.S. Congresses’ House Un-American Activities Committee. The HUAC was an investigative subcommittee established to weed out organizations and individuals with suspected communist ties. Best known for its leader, U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) lasting from the late 1940s through the 1950s. The HUAC had a hearing on It’s A Wonderful Life.

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Of course, we could focus on the deeper issues of It’s a Wonder Life, like the FBI Communist hunters playing fast and loose with the truth or the not surprisingly still relevant commentary on too big to fail banks.

Or

It’s a Wonderful Life is simply a classic holiday movie you watch on Christmas – at least until Die Hard, Scrooged or A Christmas Story come on.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Holidays | Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
| December 12, 2018
Comments Off on Do You Know the Grinch

Do You Know the Grinch

Do You Know the GrinchFor many people, one of the holiday traditions is at least one viewing of 1966 animated classic How the Grinch Stole Christmas. The How the Grinch Stole Christmas TV show was adapted from Dr. Seuss’s equally famous children’s book by legendary animator Chuck Jones. Mental Floss dug deep into how the Grinch stole Christmas and here are some facts about the TV special that will surely make your heart grow three sizes this holiday season.

In the Army

How the Grinch Stole ChristmasThe Army started the Grinch. During World War II, Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel joined the United States Army Air Forces and served in the Animation Department for the First Motion Picture Unit, a unit commanded by Frank Capra, tasked with creating various training and pro-war propaganda films. It was here that Major Geisel found himself working closely with Chuck Jones cartoon artist on an instructional cartoon called Private Snafu. Originally classified as for-military personnel-only, Private Snafu featured a bumbling protagonist who helped illustrate the dos and don’t’s of Army safety and security protocols.

The special almost didn’t happen. Television specials of the past, like How the Grinch Stole Christmas, had to rely on company sponsorship to get made. How the Grinch Stole Christmas struggled to find a benefactor. With storyboards in hand, Chuck Jones, creator of some of my favorite Looney Tunes, pitched the story to more than two dozen potential sponsors until he finally found his sponsor in an unlikely source: the Foundation for Commercial Banks. “I thought that was very odd because one of the great lines in there is that the Grinch says, ”‘Perhaps Christmas doesn’t come from a store,’” Mr. Jones said of the surprise endorsement. “I never thought of a banker endorsing that kind of a line. But they overlooked it, so we went ahead and made the picture.”

How the Grinch Stole ChristmasIts budget was massive. Coming in at over $300,000, or $2.2 million in today’s dollars, the special’s budget was unheard of at the time for a 26-minute cartoon adaptation. It took 10 months to complete because as Mr. Jones explained the animators would create 3 drawings per foot for children’s shows, but the Grinch was drawn with 15 drawings per foot. The Grinch included 25,000 drawings and 200 backgrounds, “You have to do this for believability,” Mr. Jones wrote.

No credit for The famous voice actor and singer. Thurl Ravenscroft, best known for providing the voice of Kellogg’s Tony the Tiger, wasn’t given credit for his work in How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Because of this, most viewers wrongly assumed Boris Karloff, the narrator of the special also sang “You’re A Mean One Mr. Grinch.”

Max is a filler. Because reading the book out loud only takes about 12 minutes, Mr. Jones had the challenge of extending the story. In order to extend the show, Chuck Jones explained to TNT that he turned to Max the dog.

Grinch ugly sweaterThat whole center section where Max is tied up to the sleigh, and goes down through the mountainside, and has all those problems getting down there, was good comic business as it turns out … But it was all added; it was not part of the book.

Mr. Jones would go on to name Max as his favorite character from the special, as he felt that he directly represented the audience.

The Grinch’s green color was inspired by a rental car. In the original book, the big green grump is illustrated as black and white, with hints of pink and red. Rumor has it that Mr. Jones was inspired to give the Grinch his iconic coloring after he rented a car that was painted an ugly shade of green.

The Grinch was censoredThe Grinch was censored. Over the years, How the Grinch Stole Christmas was edited to shorten its running time (to allow for more commercials). However, one edit—which ran for several years—censored the line “You’re a rotter, Mr. Grinch” from the song “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.” Additionally, the shot in which the Grinch smiles creepily just before approaching the bed filled with young Whos was deemed inappropriate for certain networks and was removed.

The Grinch’s success led to re-do’s

Two less memorable Grinch tales were produced to exploit the popularity of the Christmas special. Halloween is Grinch Night aired in 1977 and tells the story of the Grinch making his way down to Whoville to scare all the Whos on Halloween. In 1982’s The Grinch Grinches The Cat in the Hat, the green guy finds himself wanting to renew his mean spirit by picking on the Cat in the Hat. In addition, there have been several re-makes:

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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