By SUSAN KING
TIMES STAFF WRITER

The executive producer of ABC Family's holiday movie "Three Days" is a huge fan of Frank Capra movies, especially the director's 1946 Christmas perennial "It's a Wonderful Life." So while a TV packaging agent at Creative Artists Agency four years ago, Ira Pincus fell in love with "Three Days," written by Robert Tate Miller and Eric Tuchman. The script, he says, reflected the spirit and the tone of the Capra yuletide classic.
     But he couldn't convince anybody else that it would make a perfect TV movie. Excuses ran from "we already have a Christmas movie" to "it's too soft," he says. Finally last year, Pincus discovered that the executives at ABC Family, then known as Fox Family Channel, shared his enthusiasm. "They loved it just as much as me," Pincus says. "It's all in the timing, and as long as you don't give up, the good ones get made."
     Kristin Davis of "Sex and the City," Reed Diamond, late of "Homicide: Life on the Street," and former "Saturday Night Live" regular Tim Meadows star in the romantic drama about second chances. Diamond plays a high-powered literary agent, Andrew Farmer, who has been married for 10 years to his childhood sweetheart, Beth (Davis). Andrew, though, has very little time for his free-spirited wife and has been making romantic overtures to a beautiful colleague at work.
     When Beth is killed after she is struck by a car before Christmas, Andrew is devastated. At the hospital, he is visited by a most unusual angel (Meadows) who gives the widower a special gift—Andrew can relive the last three days. The catch is Andrew can't change fate unless he gives the perfect, greatest gift to Beth.
     Timing also played a big part in Diamond's participation in the film. "A year ago at Christmastime I was watching 'It's a Wonderful Life' and I said, [to myself] 'This is what I want to be doing,' " Diamond says. "Those [classic holiday movies] dealt with so much, and they tackled issues beautifully. I wanted to make a movie like this, and two weeks later, they offered me this movie, and I thought, 'This is perfect.' I feel in a lot of ways this is the closest I have played to myself."
     Davis, who plays the former art dealer Charlotte on HBO's saucy and naughty "Sex and the City," admits that she has never been a huge fan of Christmas films, at least not the sappy ones. "I like the darker ones like 'It's a Wonderful Life'—just like everybody does. I never thought to myself, 'I want to make a Christmas movie.' "
     But just as with Pincus and Diamond, the script cast a spell on her. "I really liked the story," Davis says. "I thought it unusual for a movie-of-the-week because it has this darker undertone and because the bad things happen so quickly."
     Davis originally turned down the project. "But it lingered in my mind," she says. "To me, what it really was about was love and what is important in life." And it was totally different from "Sex and the City."
     "I guess because we play these characters in 'Sex and the City' where inherently in the format of the show they are not necessarily going to find happy relationships, I wanted to do something where I did find a happy relationship. It appealed to me that my character was all about her husband rather than all about her job."
     "Three Days" was not filmed on a Hollywood back lot that had been decorated in fake snow, but during the last winter in Nova Scotia, Canada. "You can't beat the look of real snow," Pincus says. "On the other hand, it was zero degrees. Half the movie was shot at night. I have to say Kristin, Reed and Tim were troopers. They never complained."