Mr. Potter

I can't remember what it was, but he just immediately puts the IRS guy straight down.

What I love, just talking about Lionel Barrymore and Frank Capra and It's a Wonderful Life, the complete opposite of Potter, this character.

Oh,

yeah, completely.

I was saying

this last night.

The exact inverse of the Potter character.

He's the champion of the working class hero.

And then down at the bottom, you see ships marked asterisk did not return.

And when I first saw that photo, I just started weeping, thinking about... standing there sending your men off and then these airplanes that don't come back and so that's that's the experience that's the trauma that's the courage and the dedication that it took for him to do this and then when you come back home having gone through that what does it mean to be a storyteller again like you were just doing the real thing what does it mean to do that and as you enter act three of our story jimmy's wrestling with those questions And there was a fun moment in the article that Jimmy wrote again, where he says that Mr. Potter, the villain of It's Wonderful Life on set, in between takes, in between scenes, is pulling him aside and talking to him and counseling and mentoring and helping him work through some of these things that he's wrestling with.

and realizing that, yes, the war is real and the service is real and we have to do that, but we also have to be human and we have to come back home.

And to be a part of bringing healing to the world is that duty of a storyteller.

And it's a wonderful life right now where George Bailey is seeing through the lens of what what the town could be while he was hallucinating after having jumped into that that cold water.

And he sees, you know, evil Mr. Potter there plotting against the community and and building, you know, ugly and and evil.

unattainable tract homes for the people of Bedford Falls and, you know, sitting there at his desk counting money.

And we're about to enter Act 3.

What's going to happen in that

area? Well, this was the scary story I was alluding to with Mr.

Potter and that analogy of his wonderful life.

The Midtown core is an existential threat, actually, to Oakville.

It's interesting in a story when something is so on the nose that it either works or kind of ruins it for you.

Like in It's a Wonderful Life, Mr. Potter is like so evil.

To the people in that town.

Like hilariously evil at every turn.

Hans Gruber in Die Hard.

Like some villains are just so much that they're fun somehow.

The line that Heinz brother Brian and I have quoted to each other, perhaps you also, Kevin, but like when Jimmy Stewart yells at Mr. Potter, Merry Christmas, Mr. Potter.

And he's like, and Happy New Year to you in jail.

And Scrooge, where did Scrooge's soul sickness come from? It came from capitalism and greed and feeling unloved or putting himself in the position of, of denying opportunity for love.

And in It's a Wonderful Life, Mr. Potter is another Scrooge, but we know his story from Christmas Carol, so the focus is on George Bailey, who is even more relatable because he's one of us.

He's an everyman, and through circumstances partly beyond his control, his life becomes desperate and he comes to believe that he's better off dead than alive because of money.

It all becomes down to money and capitalism and greed.

And he undergoes this death and resurrection journey.

And what you were saying earlier on about remembering and dismemberment, and there's a lovely bit in the film where he is annihilated out of existence by Clarence.

And he goes on this underworld journey into Pottersville.

His hometown has turned into Pottersville and everyone's bitter and twisted and nasty.