Welcome to Pottersville

One last holiday post. 

David Goldman writing for CNN: 

A soaking wet George Bailey and Clarence, warming up by the fire in the toll house on the bridge, discuss why Clarence jumped into the freezing water. It was to help George, Clarence tells him.

“Only one way you can help me,” George says sarcastically. “You don’t happen to have 8,000 bucks on you?”

The film then cuts to an elated George running through town, gleefully shouting “Merry Christmas” to the “You are Now in Bedford Falls” sign, Mr. Potter, the bank examiner and eventually his family.

Wait, what?

That’s the surprise you got if you selected the “abridged” version of the Christmas classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” on Amazon Prime Video. By the thousands of confused and outraged comments posted on social media on Christmas Day — you weren’t alone if you did.

Amazon streams the full version of the movie for Prime members, but the abridged version is available free for anyone, with ads. The abridged version cuts about a half hour out of the 1946 Frank Capra film’s runtime, axing the entire “Pottersville” scene, where Clarence the angel (second class) guides George through an alternate reality in which he never existed.

Of course, the movie makes no sense without that pivotal part of the story. So why cut it?

Copyright law. Well, an interpretation of it, anyway.

The idea here is that the sequence where George sees what the world would have been without him came from the short story "the Greatest Gift," which is why you have to pay Paramount if you want to air the original, which is especially strange since Paramount doesn't own that story and the people who do own it would rather it was still in the public domain.

The owners of the film in 1974 (it had changed hands probably a half dozen times since Capra was forced to close Liberty Films, at least in part because It’s a Wonderful Life bombed at the box office) had forfeited their rights by failing to renew the copyright, then had done absolutely nothing about it for a couple of decades before suddenly starting to call TV stations and threaten them with legal action if they continued to play the film without paying royalties. 

This extraordinary action was not based on a recent court ruling or a new development in the case. The extremely dubious justification for clawing the beloved movie back out of the public domain was that, while they had allowed the film’s copyright to lapse, the family of the author of the original short story had continued to renew their copyright which somehow related to the ruling on Stewart v. Abend despite that case involved a very different rights issue and had nothing to do with the public domain. The bottom line was Republic/Paramount had money and lots of lawyers.

Just to be clear, the children and grandchildren of the author, who do undisputedly own those rights and possibly the film rights as well) and who still license the property for reprints and stage productions, had nothing to do with this and, as far as I can tell, are quite unhappy with this turn of events.

The decision to claw the movie out of the public domain (something that should never be allowed to happen) had everything to do with a couple of developments that occurred during those twenty years, one of which everyone knows and the other almost no one talks about.

The first was that It’s a Wonderful Life went from a largely forgotten commercial flop to a cultural institution—and arguably the definitive Christmas movie—primarily due to broadcast television and, a few years later, cable stations putting it into heavy rotation during the holiday season, at least in part because it was now in the public domain (there are lots of ironies in this story).

Keep in mind that through the 1970s, and probably well into the 1980s, TV stations all had a room full of reels of film, and pretty much any movie or old TV show you saw that wasn’t a network feed came from that room. This gave stations an incentive to get the most out of a print of a movie, particularly if they didn’t have to pay to air it.

The other big development was the Mickey Mouse Protection Act of 1976, when Disney laid siege to Washington with an army of lobbyists to prevent its spokes-critter from entering the public domain. Suddenly, old IP had a greatly extended copyright, making it considerably more valuable.

While it would be an overstatement to say that the studio simply didn’t bother to renew the copyright, they certainly would have been less likely to be so careless had they known what was coming. It’s a bit like losing a lottery ticket before versus after learning it was a winner. It is not surprising that they were desperate to get that ticket back; it is surprising—and more to the point damning—that they did it so easily.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the story of It’s a Wonderful Life is one of an evil big business trying to establish a monopoly in order to exploit the public. The past fifty years have seen corporations effectively gut antitrust laws, push through more and more monopolies, greatly undermine the public domain, and attack the very idea of ownership itself (we live in a world where farmers are often not allowed to own either the tractors they drive or the crops they grow, and that is just the pointy end of the spear).

If we don’t live in Pottersville now, that is certainly where we’ve been heading for a long time.