re: It's a Wonderful Life

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I can't remember a time when it wasn't shown on NBC

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THIS YEAR, the Grinch didn't steal Christmas. NBC bought it and, in some ways, ruined it. If the tree at Rockefeller Center represents everything good about the holiday when it comes to network-TV involvement, last Saturday's NBC telecast of "It's a Wonderful Life," for the second year in a row, symbolized the sort of greedy shortsightedness and stinginess that only a Scrooge could love. For the last decade and more, until recently, Frank Capra's 1946 movie was a holiday TV staple shown just about everywhere you turned on local TV stations, cable superstations and even major cable outlets. It would run uncut and uninterrupted on some, and bursting with commercial interruptions and choppy edits on others. Some tasteless cretins even showed a colorized version, but whichever version you wanted, it was out there somewhere. The reason had a lot less to do with the heartfelt desires of programers to entertain and inspire their viewers than it did with the fact that the film's copyright had lapsed, which meant that, once a station or network purchased a print, they could show it for nothing. And at Christmastime, isn't pure profit the best holiday gift of all? A revived copyright claim by Republic Pictures, the original studio, changed things two years ago. Suddenly, "It's a Wonderful Life," starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed, was sold to NBC, on an exclusive basis. Beginning last December, the holiday chestnut became a once-a-year, one-showing, one-network TV event, like "The Wizard of Oz. ...

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