When Frank Capra came across the project that would become “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the RKO studio couldn’t hand it to him fast enough. The story, called “The Greatest Gift,” had been written by a Pennsylvania author named Philip Stern in 1939, who spent four years trying (and failing) to get it published before including it in his private Christmas cards to family and friends in 1943. When RKO got wind of the story, they thought they could turn it into a Cary Grant movie and picked up the rights in 1944.

Three failed scripts later, they were so eager to unload the project onto Capra’s production company that they sold it for the same $10,000 they had paid to acquire it, and threw in the three scripts for free. Capra brought in a team of writers to “polish” the script, and the resulting movie opened in New York 68 years ago on December 20, 1946.

The story of George Bailey’s peek at a world without him is probably the most-loved holiday film ever made. But like many Hollywood classics, it took a while to get there. When the film entered general release in January 1947, receipts were underwhelming. (The movie’s high production costs, thanks to the elaborate set that created an entire “Bedford Falls” at a California movie ranch, were partly to blame.) Reviews were mixed, though generally positive. And on Oscar night, the film entered with five nods including Best Picture, but only walked away with a single statue, for Technical Achievement. (The technical breakthrough that impressed Hollywood so much was a new method of creating fake chemical snow on movie sets. The old method of crushed corn flakes had made so much noise when actors walked on it that dubbed dialogue had to be added for snow scenes.)

One factor that might have saved the film’s reputation was a simple quirk in copyright enforcement. The rights to “It’s a Wonderful Life” have bounced around over the years, and thanks to a clerical error by the copyright holder in 1974, the film was believed to have entered the public domain for over a decade. This resulted in a proliferation of home video releases by different companies, and airings by hundreds of local TV stations. During the 1980’s, the story was seemingly everywhere during the holidays. Republic Pictures has since claimed copyright on the film through a convoluted Supreme Court case, and today only NBC is allowed to show “It’s a Wonderful Life” on TV.

Capra himself seemed as thrilled as anyone to see the movie’s popularity pick up. It was his personal favorite of his own movies, and he screened it for his family privately over the holidays. He told the Wall Street Journal in 1984 “It's the damnedest thing I've ever seen. The film has a life of its own now, and I can look at it like I had nothing to do with it. I'm like a parent whose kid grows up to be president. I'm proud... but it's the kid who did the work. I didn't even think of it as a Christmas story when I first ran across it. I just liked the idea.” When he died in 1991 at age 94, the movie he had believed in 45 years earlier had stood the test of time. It still has.

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