Book Review: It's a Wonderful Time by Doug Stebleton

Sometimes it's harder to review a book because you place unrealistic expectations on that book.

This is one of those books.

It's a Wonderful Time is fine - five out of ten hot dogs. A guy in the movie industry who's obsessed with the 40s SOMEHOW gets thrown back in time to 1946 just as Frank Capra is making It's a Wonderful Life is an intriguing enough concept for a trifle. I'm pretty sure the author is also a guy obsessed with the 40s who is trying to make a somewhat political statement here - the main character doesn't really have much of an arc or seem to change in any way, and although the book does a bit of work being evenhanded about life in the 40s (car emissions stank, clothes were itchy, it was much harder for black people - although this is quickly yada yada'd away), the scales in this book definitely tilt in favor of the "woke-free" 40s. The time-travel stuff borrows heavily from the Back To the Future - and just because you have the main character mention Back To the Future doesn't absolve you of stealing from Back To the Future. The villain in the piece has little real motivation to make It's a Wonderful Life a harder, grittier, Snyderverse movie - yes, post-WWII audiences were looking for more realism in movies, but the parts he was trying to add on (and the lengths he went to get them added) were ridiculous. The book is heavily researched on how 40s movies, and It's a Wonderful Life in particular, were made, but kind of leads a main plot point in the wrong direction - the main character keeps telling Frank Capra how successful this movie would be and how it would become a classic, but he should also have prepared Capra for the fact that it would bomb at the box office and bankrupt Capra's Liberty Studios and wouldn't be recognized as a classic until it entered public domain in the 70s and was run non-stop during Christmas time (this might sound like nitpicking - but if you're going to go through the trouble to describe what it was like working at Liberty Studios day-to-day AND have the main character be the one responsible for the copyright expiring so quickly, you should make sure to mention it wouldn't be an instant success).

Still, for a quick and easy read, the action moves and the movie stuff was fun, so not bad.

Here's the problem, though. I'm writing this on 12/30/22. I finished this book about a week ago. Christmas time. It was my Christmas read. A book based on the making of It's a Wonderful Life. A pantheon Christmas movie. And you're not going to put any Christmas stuff in the book?!?!

Look, the movie was obviously not filmed necessarily at Christmas time; but you couldn't fit in at least one "The spirit of Christmas is with us all year long..." type of message? Inconceivable!

Luckily, I found an alternative Christmas book just in time....