As I explained yesterday, I’m going to appear in a play which tells the story of “It’s A Wonderful Life” as it would be presented on old-time radio. Actually, movies and radio scratched each others’ backs during the golden age. If you’ve ever read the trivia pages for old movies on the Internet Movie Database, you’ll note that many of them were turned into radio plays, using the top two or three stars from the original movie, surrounded (I presume) by the type of versatile radio utility players we’ll be channeling on stage.

IMDb says that there were, in fact, two such adaptations of “It’s A Wonderful Life,” both broadcast in 1947, not long after the movie was in theaters.

I was looking up old radio shows online – there are plenty, at sites like The Internet Archive, RadioLovers.com and the Old Time Radio Network. I haven’t found “It’s a Wonderful Life” yet, but I’m right now listening to another Jimmy Stewart classic: “The Philadelphia Story”, in a 1947 Screen Guild Theater adaptation with Stewart, Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in their original roles. The story is quite condensed – into a 30-minute radio show! — which works just fine for the audio format, although it requires some clunky exposition, both as dialogue and from the announcer at the beginning of each act. This seems to have been produced in front of a live audience. It’s one of three different radio adaptations mentioned by IMDb; the other two were 60 minutes in length, one with Ruth Hussey and Virginia Weidler in addition to Stewart, Grant and Hepburn, the other with only Stewart from the original cast.

In those days, of course, once a movie left the theater it was gone – the very biggest hits might possibly be rereleased, but everything else disappeared into the vaults once it ended its original run. There were no TV broadcasts, no DVDs, no way to re-view something you’d enjoyed seeing on the big screen, or catch up with something you’d missed. So these radio adaptations were, in their day, a nice bit of instant nostalgia, as well as a way for stars to promote themselves and their upcoming projects. The Screen Guild Theater adaptation of “The Philadelphia Story” ended with mentions of where you could see each of its three stars in current screen projects: Stewart’s current project at the time was … wait for it … “It’s A Wonderful Life.”

I have, on cassette tapes, the adaptation of the original 1977 “Star Wars” movie which was done for the BBC with Mark Hammill and Anthony Daniels reprising their film roles. The BBC approached George Lucas for permission and he agreed, but only if his alma mater USC was involved in the production. This was done as a serial, and actually includes scenes which were cut from the movie, emphasizing young Luke Skywalker’s admiration for, and later reunion with, Biggs, a neighbor on Tattooine who joins the rebel alliance. I haven’t listened to it since I originally bought it (I also heard it on public radio when it first aired in the 1970s, perhaps the first public radio I ever listened to). I need to break it out and give it a listen.