The 3-Act Paradigm at Work: It's a Wonderful Life

written by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, & Frank Capra


It's a Wonderful Life is a classic movie, of course, but also a very interesting one to study for its innovative use of the 3-act paradigm and its ability to maintain interest with smaller high quality scenes.

Structural Analysis

  1. Hook (0-3 min.)
    • Everyone is Bedford Falls is praying for George Bailey. An angel, Clarence, will be sent down to answer their prayers - and also to earn his wings.
  2. Complication (28 min.)
    • After Clarence gets a background course on George (4-28 min.), the adult George is ready to go off on an exotic trip when his father has a stroke, forcing him to stay home. George wants nothing more than to leave Bedford Falls.
  3. Call to Action (34 min.)
    • George buries his father. The mean-spirited Potter is about to take over Bailey Building and Loan when the board votes him down on the condition that George stay and run the company. Although he's about to leave for college, George agrees in order to save his father's company.
  4. Act One Plot Point (52-8 min.)
    • About to leave on his honeymoon with Mary, George sees a run on the bank. Mary offers the honeymoon money, and they save the day and keep in business.
  5. Midpoint Plot Point (80 min.)
    • Uncle Billy loses an $8000 deposit on Christmas eve, with a bank inspector at the office. Unless they replace it, the company will go bankrupt.
  6. Act Two Plot Point (104 min.)
    • Clarence jumps into the river so the distraught George will save him, rather than jumping himself. George wishes he had never been born, and Clarence grants the wish.
  7. Climax and Resolution (121 min.)
    • Seeing how different Bedford Falls and Mary and others he has touched would have been without him, George prays to live again, to have everything return to normal. The many people George has helped chip in to save his company. A man is as rich as the friends he has.

    Notes

    It's a Wonderful Life pushes its major dramatic beats back about 24 minutes for the background flashback. This works because the flashback itself is filled with entertaining scenes - and because the initial hook is strong and unusual. Take away this "real time" and the components fall in more traditional order: complication at 4 min., call at 10 min., PPI at 28-34 min., midpoint at 56 min, and PPII at 80 min.

    The flashback doesn't end til the end of act two, when the story time at the beginning of the movie is reached. Act Three, then, is mainly George learning what the world would be like without him: Bedford Falls would be named Pottersville, a town full of bars; the druggist he saved from catastrophe would be an ex-con and rummy; his house would be abandoned, never renovated; his uncle would be in an insane asylum; his little brother would have died at 9, because George never rescued him, and therefore all the men the brother saved in the war would also have died; and his wife Mary would be an old-maid librarian.

    This is a difficult structure that in less skilled hands would have been disastrous but it works beautifully here because interest in the movie never wanes and because the focus - Clarence's charge to save George - is never far from our attention.


    MODULE 4: SCREENWRIGHT: the craft of screenwriting

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