Script To Screen: “It’s A Wonderful Life”

A memorable scene from the 1946 movie It’s A Wonderful Life, screenplay Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett and Frank Capra, story by Philip Van Doren Stern.

Setup: After experiencing what the world would have been like had he not been born, George Bailey has a change of heart…

Here is the movie version of the scene:

The scene marks a notable turn in George’s personal transformation: from 
“I wish I had never been born” to “I want to live again.” Note:

One of the single best things you can do to learn the craft of screenwriting is to read the script while watching the movie. After all a screenplay is a blueprint to make a movie and it’s that magic of what happens between printed page and final print that can inform how you approach writing scenes. That is the purpose of Script to Screen, a Go Into The Story series where we analyze a memorable movie scene and the script pages that inspired it.