And an Angel Gets His Wings

What follows is the kind of old-fashioned story that isn’t produced anymore, one that probes the human heart, exalts the individual and finds radiance and glory even in the darkness.

So as a holiday gift, here’s the script for “It’s a Wonderful Column,” the classic that Frank Capra didn’t direct.

Close-up--George. He stares at his computer screen with swollen red eyes, distraught, shoulders sagging, body trembling, desperately trying to make sense of the e-mails calling him a “talentless bum,” a “VCR dope,” a blankety-blank “idiot,” a “godless, soulless heretic,” a “traitorous anti-American sausage” and many more names that cannot be printed in a family newspaper.

He doesn’t notice someone standing beside him.

Clarence: “Cheer up.”

George: “Who are you?”

Clarence: “Clarence Odbody. I’m your guardian angel. I’ve been sent down to save your column, George.”

George: “How do you know my name?”

Clarence: “Oh, I know all about you. I’ve watched your entire career from above.”

George: “Then you know that I’m a failure.”

Clarence: “Don’t talk like that. You don’t know the impact you’ve had. Why, your annual ‘Laverne & Shirley’ think pieces. Your ‘Nanny and the Professor’ retrospective. Your ‘Swamp Thing’ magnum opus. Your crusade to have Larry King host ‘Hollywood Squares.’ If it hadn’t been for you ... “

George: “Yeah, if it hadn’t been for me, everybody’d be a lot better off. I wish I’d never written a column.”

Clarence: “You musn’t say things like that. You ...

(Gets an idea.)

”... wait a minute. Wait a minute. That would work out.

(Glances up toward heaven.)

“What do you think? Yeah, that’ll do it. All right.

(To George:)

“You’ve got your wish. You’ve never written a column.”

George: “What did you say?”

Clarence: “You’ve never a written a column. See that Los Angeles Times reader cleaning out her bird cage?”

George: “She’s full of angst.”

Clarence: “She always lined the bottom of the cage with your column. But she can’t do that now with a column that never existed. And she isn’t comfortable having bird droppings on other parts of the paper.”

George: “I see.”

Clarence: “And look at those long faces in the Calendar section at The Times.”

George: “Those are copy editors. They always derive great joy from their work. Yet they’re now so grim.”

Clarence: “Don’t you understand, George? It’s due to your absence. How can they have joy? Because your column doesn’t exist, they have nothing to ridicule, no clumsy, ungrammatical sentences and exotic misspellings of yours to laugh at. Without your column, their lives are empty.”

George: “And that copy of the Washington Post next to them. It’s open to the front of the Style section, but the TV critic’s byline is a name I don’t recognize. Where is Tom Shales?”

Clarence: “Oh, he didn’t last long.”

Medium shot--George, horrified, leaps up and begins to pace.

George: “That’s impossible. He’s been a magical writer for years, so brilliant and perceptive that he won a Pulitzer Prize, and so widely respected and celebrated across the land that his confidence soared.”

Clarence: “Because of you. You were so inane that Shales looked like a champ in comparison. But you haven’t written a column, remember? With no national competitor to feel vastly superior to, he was a neurotic, insecure mess at the Post, unable to write a readable sentence.”

George: “Now shut up! Cut it out! You’re ... you’re ... crazy. That’s what I think. Either I’m off my nut or you are.”

Clarence: “It isn’t me.”

(George is completely befuddled.)

George: “The TV set in the newsroom. It’s turned to KTLA’s ‘Morning News,’ but someone else is giving the entertainment report. Where is the legendary Sam Rubin?”

Clarence: “Long gone and forgotten after flunking a brief trial. He lacked sparkle because, in the absence of you writing your column, he had no role models in entertainment reporting, no one to inspire him.”

George: “But he always denegrated me, especially after I called him a beanbag with lips.”

Clarence: “That was for show. He secretly agreed with your assessment of him, adored your prose and worshiped you.”

George: “I had no idea.”

Clarence: “Not that it matters now, for that’s been wiped away. Without your column and you as an icon, no legendary Sam.”

George: “I still think you’re screwy. I’m going home to see my wife. Do you understand that? And I’m going home alone.”

Clarence: “You’ll have a long trip. Because you never became a columnist, you weren’t hired by The Times. So you still live in Louisville, Ky. After the newspaper you worked for there folded, you were hired by a local TV station as an entertainment reporter, becoming so pompous and making such a fool of yourself on the air that your wife divorced you. You now live alone, cynical, embittered and driven by personal demons, spending your time listening to talk radio and writing nasty e-mails to columnists whose opinions you dislike.

(Glancing up toward heaven.)

“How am I doing? Thanks.”

George: “Clarence! Clarence! Help me, Clarence. Get me back my column. I want to write again. Please, let me write again.”

Clarence: “I guess you write a wonderful column after all, huh, George?”

George: “I guess I do.”

(Clarence looks up toward heaven and winks.)

*

Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.