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In this case, Frank Capra took a lot of credit for this film, It’s A Wonderful Life. It plays in the United States often, It’s a Christmas film. You can see Frank Capra’s name in big red letters on the bottom over there. It was actually written by this couple — a married couple who wrote for over 50 years together — Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich. I think they’re quite wonderful because they also wrote the Broadway play and the film production of The Diary of Anne Frank. They won a Pulitzer Prize for that work. Frank Capra has never won a Pulitzer Prize. I believe these are Hackett/Goodrich Films. They are not Frank Capra films. So the unbalance of the credits — the lack of credit — for such incredible work — such incredible craftsmanship, I think is quite sad. They also wrote The Thin Man movies which were adaptations of a book by Dashiell Hammett. There was a book written by this couple by their nephew called The Real Nick and Nora. So they had quite the career.
A Note About This Presentation
A clip from my keynote speech at the 10th Screenwriters´(hi)Stories Seminar for the interdisciplinary Graduation Program in “Education, Art, and History of Culture”, in Mackenzie Presbyterian University, at São Paulo, SP, Brazil, focused on the topic “Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered.” I was especially pleased with the passion these young scholars have toward screenwriting and it’s importance in transmitting culture across the man-made borders of our world.
To understand the world we have to understand its stories and to understand the world’s stories we must understand the world’s storytellers. A century ago and longer those people would have been the novelists of any particular country but since the invention of film, the storytellers who reach the most people with their ideas and their lessons have been the screenwriters. My teaching philosophy is that: Words matter, Writers matter, and Women writers matte, r so women writers are my focus because they have been the far less researched and yet they are over half the population. We cannot tell the stories of the people until we know what stories the mothers have passed down to their children. Those are the stories that last. Now is the time to research screenwriters of all cultures and the stories they tell because people are finally recognizing the work of writers and appreciating how their favorite stories took shape on the page long before they were cast, or filmed, or edited. But also because streaming services make the stories of many cultures now available to a much wider world than ever before.
Many thanks to Glaucia Davino for the invitation.
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