Paging Clarence Oddbody

Phil Leigh writes a great newsletter, and blog, 'Inside Digital Media', and, last week, he posted a piece, on being pro e-book, illustrating it with what has become a very popular holiday tale;



A Christmas Lesson for Publishers

One February night in 1938 Philip Van Doren Stern had a dream. The 38 year-old published historian also had a deep interest in fantasy and the macabre. As with most dreams his morning recollections were vague and conflicting. It had something to do with a man who had never been born, or wished he had never been born.

Stern decided to write down his recollections. A narrative began to take shape and with later revisions became a short story he titled The Greatest Gift. It was a simple celebration of things taken for granted.

Regrettably he failed to interest a publisher over the next four years. Consequently, toward the end of 1943 Stern printed two hundred copies at his expense and enclosed one in each Christmas card envelope. One recipient was a Hollywood agent who asked if she might show it to some studios. Surprisingly, RKO bought the film rights for $10,000 in the spring of 1944. By December, Good Housekeeping finally published the story.
Hollywood screenwriters set to work on the manuscript until the essence of Stern’s story shrank into the Third Act. Eventually it would pass through nine writers, including Dorothy Parker and Frank Capra after Capra purchased RKO’s rights for $50,000.

The movie was finally released in 1946 but fell modestly short of break-even on its first run. It rose to 26th place in 1947 box office receipts. Although nominated for five Oscars it failed to win any. Thereafter the rights passed through a series of owners ending-up at Viacom.

During the 1980s local TV stations began to run it during the Christmas season. They regarded it as opportune low cost programming for time slots not allocated to the network shows. In 1984 an aged Frank Capra commented that the rise in popularity “was the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen”. He felt like “the parent of the kid who grows up to be President – but it’s the kid who did the work. (He) didn’t think of (the child) that way.”

By 1998 the American Film Institute ranked It’s a Wonderful Life as the 11th best movie of all time and rated George Bailey as the 9th most popular hero.

Over on Zoetrope's All Story site, ''The Great Gift' in it's entirety;

Here's the intro;

Unable to find a publisher for "The Greatest Gift," Philip Van Doren Stern printed two hundred copies of the story and used them as Christmas cards in 1943. From this humble beginning, a classic was born. Van Doren Stern's story captivated Frank Capra, who said he "had been looking for [it] all [his] life." Capra's beloved adaptation, It's a Wonderful Life, starring James Stewart, Donna Reed, and Lionel Barrymore, was released in 1946, and while the film, which received Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Director, didn't take home an Oscar, it has secured its place in the American holiday tradition.

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And, remember, as Clarence Oddbody inscribed in the book (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer) he left for George Bailey, that is solid, not just at Christmas, but all-year round;

"No man is a failure who has friends."

Good Post Alert: Russ Douthart's " Not So Wonderful Now"

Undoubtedly, over the past few weeks (perhaps longer), scores-of-thousands unknowingly invoked a line from "It's A Wonderful Life", by rubbing a lucky charm and saying "Wish I had a million dollars", only to be foiled by fate.

Maybe, a lucky one, or two, happened to have a friend ("Hee-Haw") named Sam Wainwright, and said friend was of the means to cable them $25,000.

Otherwise ...



Pottersville for them.

And, with the cratering economy, it's doubtful that cash registers' bells are going off as frequently, thereby, less angels are earning their wings.

In today's WAPO, Russ Douthart cranks it up a notch.

In his "Not So Wonderful Now - Looking for someone to blame in the worsening crisis? Let's go back to Bedford Falls", he takes our current economic woes and puts the movie's fictional, idyllic town's template over it.

Yes, that George Bailey -- the hero of Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life," the most popular man in Bedford Falls, the man so indispensable that he earned a private visitation from a guardian angel just to show him how dreadful a world without him would have been. It's easy to forget, so potent is the supernaturally charged final act of Capra's classic, that before he was visiting looking-glass worlds where he'd never been born or scampering through the snow and shouting "Merry Christmas!" till his lungs burst, Jimmy Stewart's George Bailey was actually a pretty savvy businessman. And it's even easier to forget the precise nature of his business: putting the downscale families of Bedford Falls into homes they couldn't quite afford to buy.

This is the substance of the great war between Bailey and Lionel Barrymore's Mr. Potter, the richest, meanest man in Bedford Falls. Potter is against easy credit and the suburban dream, against the rabble moving out of his tenements and buying homes, while the Bailey Building and Loan exists to make suburbia possible.

I could quote more, but it would be better if you go out to it and read for yourselves.

It's a very entertaining, and enlightening, piece.

And, Douthart ends it with perfect pitch.

Go read "Not So Wonderful Now - Looking for someone to blame in the worsening crisis? Let's go back to Bedford Falls"

Hee-Haw!


Bonus Clarence Oddbody Riffs

The Anonymous Liberal: The Bush Boom: Revisited

INTERVIEW WITH NOAM CHOMSKY: 'The United States Has Essentially a One-Party System'

David Goldstein and Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers: Private sector loans, not Fannie or Freddie, triggered crisis

Ring A Bell Today For John Edwards ... Let's Give Him Some Wings To Carry On Good Fight With ...

"Well, I've said too much. I . . . You're the Board here. You do what you want with this thing. Just one thing more, though. This town needs this measly one-horse institution if only to have some place where people can come without crawling to Potter ... "

Boy, it we want to run with a "It's A Wonderful Life" theme today, with John Edwards starring as George Bailey, we have to do some serious script doctoring.

We will need to write in two Mr. Potters!

I tuned in for a debate last evening and all I got was this lousy car wreck.

It was "Rock'em-Sock'em" robots last evening, in South Carolina, during the CNN Democratic Debate, and the Rock'em-Sock'em robot with HRC on her warm-up cape clearly got the shot on the jaw that had the other Rock'em-Sock'em robot's head shoot off its' shoulders.

And Obama's people may have some trouble pushing that head back down, to keep on fighting (or, better said, to begin raising his ire, as well as his political fists)


















Someone needs to sit down Barack Obama and explain that he's in a presidential campaign - and he is, presently, running against The CLINTONS (and yes, both of them).

Someone needs to explain that he only won the Iowa Caucus, not anything else, so the construction plans for that new, Utopian political landscape have to be kept on hold.

That someone needs to say again - and really accentuate - that he is running against THE CLINTONS!

Hunter S. Thompson, in his laser beam, spot-on "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail", about his view of the 1972 Presidential elections described the ego of a man running for president to that of "a moose in heat".

Well, there's two moose out there, ramming their antlers against anybody and anything that looks to be in their way on calling 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue home again.

And, in this rewrite of 'Wonderful Life', we have to flash way forward, and bring in a denizen of the future, something no one would ever dream to set foot in Bedford Falls.

For, it hasn't taken long in this campaign season for Hillary to reveal herself ... She tried the weepy thing in New Hampshire, and, for whatever gains that got her, it's not the right fit

Much like one of those machines in the Terminator movies, her skin started melting off last evening, revealing the steel frame, the death-focused machine, pounding, relentlessly on Obama, on his Illinois "present" voting record, his connections to a Chicago slum landlord, his (and still unbelievably) embrace of the late Gipper, Ronald Reagan.

And, clearly, almost tauntingly, defending her husband's spirited entry into the primaries, giving no indication that she plans to call him off (despite the DNC calls to play nice and have Bill go off and act like one of those lame presidents from that dreadful movie "My Fellow Americans").

Again, someone mention to Obama that he is running against THE CLINTONS!

They don't run away from blood, they look to draw it out ... They thrive on it ... They wade in it, take showers with it ... Drink it, so they can go out on the campaign trail and get some more ...

This isn't work for the Clintons, this is fun ... This is relaxing to them, as comfortable as sitting in a big, leather Barker Lounger on a lazy afternoon ... Forget gardening, or Sudoku, just give'em a political office to run for ...

And the more Obama whines about it, the more they will hit him ... And hit him ... And hit him ...

Hillary, from the beginning, has looked at the Democratic nomination and, eventually, winning the general election, as her entitlement, not a process she would actually have to work to attain.

So, that alone, has the Clinton's pissed off.

But Obama is a gamer, and in marching forward, singing about his own destiny to the White House, he goes and panders in Nevada, perhaps talking loudly so as to be overheard in neighboring California, reaching out to, maybe, pick-up a few independents and left-leaning Republicans, stomping on the Clinton Legacy, blowing kisses towards Reagan.

That bought Obama nothing but bringing a red-faced, steam-coming-out-of-his-ears, husband Bill into the mix, and, with the success they have had, he's in it to stay (and, if you want to see just how The Clintons outflanked and kicked Obama's ass in Las Vegas, you need to read Al Giordano's "Nevada: What Really Happened at the At-Large Caucuses?")

This goes all the way through Super-Duper Tuesday and into the convention.

If Obama doesn't know by now, that he is in a scratch-your-eyes-out fight, just follow the trail of his blood all the way to Denver, where Bill and Hillary will be waiting for him, fingers and lips stained red, looking for more.

John Who?

So, where does that leave our guy John Edwards, that "one-horse institution" of this years campaign?

The MSM has written him off (and last Friday, the Edwards' team released a most amusing video on it), Lawrence O'Donnell has done a smear job on him and all the pundits, when they do the election math, there's no slide rule calculations for Edwards sitting on the table, at least, none with his name on it.

With the historic opportunity to elect the first woman, or first black, to the office of the President, it certainly doesn't bode well for Edwards.

Despite the above-referenced battle being waged between Obama and THE CLINTONS, it's far to big, to far up the ladder, for Edwards to sneak in there - unless, miraculously, an unprecedented, Howard-Dean-Ned-Lamont-stars-aligning-just-at-the-right-time grassroots movement rises up, takes over the process and writes its' own, dynamic history.

I don't know about Obama, but I feel certain, The Clinton Machine won't allow that to happen.

However, if such a star-aligning movement wants something to put a stake-in-the-ground with, they got that today.

In an extraordinary letter, Martin Luther King III has urged John Edwards to stay in the race and carry on the legacy of his father;

"…I appreciate that on the major issues of health care, the environment, and the economy, you have framed the issues for what they are - a struggle for justice. And, you have almost single-handedly made poverty an issue in this election.

...So, I urge you: keep going. Ignore the pundits, who think this is a horserace, not a fight for justice. My dad was a fighter. As a friend and a believer in my father's words that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, I say to you: keep going. Keep fighting. My father would be proud."

(You can read the full text of the letter here)

If you didn't have the jarring foghorn, that raging conflagration of the Obama-Clinton battle, King's letter to Edwards is nearly tear-inducing, painting just as good, if not better than the sketching of Obama, as to where the political debate should be - not about tearfully finding one's voice, or idol worship of the piece-of-you-know-what the 40th President of the country was.

So, to bring us back to our Edwards-as-George-Bailey theme, we turn to the under-the-weather daughter, Zuzu;

ZUZU: Look, Daddy. Teacher says, every time a bell rings an angel gets his wings.

GEORGE (smiling) That's right, that's right

Ring a bell today for John Edwards ... Ring a lot of bells, so he can grab a pair of wings, and, as he has done so far in the campaign, go way up there and align those stars himself, and carry on the good fight.