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Why Wonderful Life Comes but Once a Year

Matt Alsdorf
Posted Tuesday, Dec. 21, 1999, at 10:37 PM ET

It's a Wonderful Life

aired on television last weekend--one of its only 1999 broadcasts. Just a few years ago, the movie seemed to be shown on a different channel almost every day throughout the Christmas season. What changed?

U.S. copyright law determines who may distribute, display, or reproduce a film, a book, a drawing--essentially anything "fixed in a permanent medium," as the lawyers like to say. Works not covered by copyrights--including ones with copyrights that have expired and those that never secured this protection--are said to be in the "public domain." These works, like the near-ancient Sherlock Holmes stories and some of Charlie Chaplin's silent films, can be reproduced, broadcast, and sold freely.

It's a Wonderful Life entered the public domain by accident. In 1946, when the movie was filmed, U.S. copyright protection lasted 28 years and could be renewed for another 28 years by filing some paperwork and paying a nominal fee. However, Republic Pictures, the original copyright owner and producer of Wonderful Life, neglected to renew the 1946 copyright in 1974. So, the film entered the public domain. Though a box-office flop on release, it became immensely popular on television thanks to repeated showings: Stations programmed it heavily during the holidays, paying no royalties to its producers, and more than 100 distributors sold the movie on tape.

Republic regained control of the lucrative property in 1993 by flexing a new Supreme Court ruling that determined that the holder of a copyright to a story from which a movie was made had certain property rights over the movie itself. Since Republic still owned the copyrighted story behind It's a Wonderful Life and had also purchased exclusive rights to the movie's copyrighted music, it was able to essentially yank the movie out of the public domain: It claimed that since Wonderful Life relied on these copyrighted works, the film could no longer be shown without the studio's blessing. (Technically, the film itself is not copyrighted. One could hypothetically replace the music, rearrange the footage, and sell or show the new product--but no one has done this.) In 1994, Republic* signed a "long-term" deal granting NBC exclusive rights to broadcast the movie, and the network typically does so between one and three times a year.

Wonderful Life won't re-enter the public domain for quite a while. Congress has repeatedly expanded copyright protections and made them effective retroactively. Most recently, at the behest of Disney and other large media corporations with soon-to-expire copyrights, Congress added 20 years to all existing copyright claims. They now stand at 95 years for copyrights held by corporations. (The copyright protection for individual writers and artists lasts 70 years beyond their deaths.) Thus, showings of Wonderful Life will remain limited well into the 21st century.

*In 1998 Republic's parent company, Spelling Entertainment (a subsidiary of Viacom), sold the rights to Republic's film library to Artisan Entertainment.

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Matt Alsdorf is a Slate editorial assistant.
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Highlights from the Fray:

The writer was incorrect when the article stated that none tried to repackage the movie. In reality Comedy Central intended a few years back to take the visual film and re-dub new language into it. However, the lawyers at Republic or NBC threatened a huge lawsuit against Comedy Central so the plan was scrapped at the last minute. Otherwise this was an excellent article.

--David Cunningham

(To reply, click here.)

(12/22)


Your discussion of the copyright situation on It's a Wonderful Life is correct enough, but I think you're wrong to regard the Republic copyright (rooted in the copyright of the musical score) as a tested, carved-in-stone legal concept. It's true no one has challenged it-but would you want to be the station manager at the UPN station in Provo who took on NBC's exclusive rights in court? In fact, the seemingly farfetched act you suggest would liberate the movie. Removing the music track is not so farfetched at all; the 1939 movie Love Affair has been released on video with its score replaced for exactly that reason. Surely It's a Wonderful Life would be even more worth the trouble, if any video distributor thought they could do it without immediately facing a battalion of high-priced lawyers.

The fact is that this same legal gambit has been used for years in the world of classic film distribution, and when the balance of power among competing parties was fairly even, it never stood up for very long. A famously shady and litigious film distributor-slash-pirate named Raymond Rohauer tried to gain control of, among other things, D.W.Griffith's Birth of a Nation (long since public domain) by buying up the rights to the Thomas Dixon novels it was loosely based on; he was pretty much laughed away by his rivals. The far more respectable Janus Films tried to assert exclusive rights to things like Pygmalion and Rules of the Game based on the creators' foreign copyrights, but was left merely appealing to the moral sense of college film programmers like myself by assuring us that they, unlike cheaper competitors, would actually pay royalties to the Shaw and Renoir families.

--Mike Gebert

(To reply, click here.)

(12/28)

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