Seek to Misconstrue + a
Failure: The Blog 
February 2012
- Unfinished, But Inhabited
- The Success of Failure, via CNN
- Einstein Actually Had Excellent Grades
- The Physics of Discarded Paper
- The Power of Failing
January 2012
- Offensive Advertising, Increased Sales?
- I Sold Out For Millions, Then Worked At McDonald's
- Steve Jobs on Failure
- The Famous Western Failure
- Thank Goodness for Drug Addicts
December 2011
- It's a Wonderful Failure
- Stadium Destroyed, Reborn
- Failure to Trust the Astronauts
- Failure and the Baggy Pants Tradition
- Failure at The Happiest Place on Earth
- Saving What Was Lost
- FailureBank: A Social Learning Utility
November 2011
- A Thanksgiving Failure
- Harriet Tubman's Clever Lie
- The Failures of Lemieux
- Failed to Return a Text
- Admitting Failure
- A Leaders Job: Support Failure
October 2011
It’s a Wonderful Failure
Frank Capra’s holiday classic It’s a Wonderful Life was in fact a tremendous failure. At least, until it became an essential piece of Americana.
The story comes from Wikipedia, which notes:
Despite initially being considered a box office flop due to high production costs and stiff competition at the time of its release, the film has come to be regarded as a classic and a staple of Christmas television around the world. Theatrically, the films break-even point was actually $6.3 million, approximately twice the production cost, a figure it never came close to achieving in its initial release. An appraisal in 2006 reported: “Although it was not the complete box-office failure that today everyone believes … it was initially a major disappointment and confirmed, at least to the studios, that Capra was no longer capable of turning out the populist features that made his films the must-see, money-making events they once were.”
So why did this one movie become popular? It turns out it was because of another failure! From The Filmsite:
It was actually a box-office flop at the time of its release, and only became the Christmas movie classic in the 1970s due to repeated television showings at Christmas-time when its copyright protection slipped and it fell into the public domain in 1974 and TV stations could air it for free.
All of the other major holiday films were too expensive to show. Therefore, the unpopular It’s a Wonderful Life became popular by accident!
Not only did the movie do poorly when it was first released and become popular due to a failure to renew copyright, the story of the film itself is about failure. The main character George Bailey gives up his own dreams of traveling the world to manage the family business after his father dies. He fails to join in the war effort overseas due to a disability. And about halfway through the film, George contemplates the most serious failure of all: suicide. It’s only though all of this darkness and the guidance of his guardian angel that he realizes what a wonderful life he has had.
Failure is the secret to success. Sometimes things have to go wrong for us to realize how they can go right.
