Fairy lights, camera, action

FAIRY lights, camera, action!

- TOM STICHBURY

Christmas Day may be over but there’s still plenty of time for settling on the sofa with your nearest and dearest and arguing over which Christmas movie to pop on - there are a lot to choose from.

Here, TOM STICHBURY unwraps the secrets, stories and surprising shenanigans behind some of Hollywood's, or rather, Jollywood’s, biggest holiday hits...

THAT'S snow-business: Arguably the greatest Christmas film of all time, Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life (1946) was in fact shot during a scorching summer heatwave in California.

That's why you can see leading man James Stewart and co sweating in certain scenes. Crew created a new type of artificial snow, using water, soap, foamite and sugar, as the old go-to method (cornflakes painted white) proved too noisy.

The Oscar-nommed classic initially bombed at the box office, falling $525,000 short of its break-even point.

Arach-ho-ho-ho-phobia: Home Alone star Daniel Stern, aka Marv, one half of the bungling Wet Bandits alongside Joe Pesci, had to overcome his fear of spiders for the 1990 flick.

He was understandably an incy-wincy bit nervous when director Chris Columbus pushed for a real-life tarantula called Barry to crawl across his face for the caper’s most shriek-tastic set-piece.