Frank Capra(1897-1991)
- Director
- Writer
- Producer
One of seven children, Frank Capra was born on May 18, 1897, in
Bisacquino, Sicily. On May 10, 1903, his family left for America aboard
the ship Germania, arriving in New York on May 23rd. "There's no
ventilation, and it stinks like hell. They're all miserable. It's the
most degrading place you could ever be," Capra said about his Atlantic
passage. "Oh, it was awful, awful. It seems to always be storming,
raining like hell and very windy, with these big long rolling Atlantic
waves. Everybody was sick, vomiting. God, they were sick. And the poor
kids were always crying."
The family boarded a train for the trip to California, where Frank's
older brother Benjamin was living. On their journey, they subsisted on
bread and bananas, as their lack of English made it impossible for them
to ask for any other kind of foodstuffs. On June 3, the Capra family
arrived at the Southern Pacific station in Los Angeles, at the time, a
small city of approximately 102,000 people. The family stayed with
Capra's older brother Benjamin, and on September 14, 1903, Frank began
his schooling at the Castelar Elementary school.
In 1909, he entered Los Angeles' Manual Arts High School. Capra made
money selling newspapers in downtown L.A. after school and on
Saturdays, sometimes working with his brother Tony. When sales were
slow, Tony punched Frank to attract attention, which would attract a
crowd and make Frank's papers sell quicker. Frank later became part of
a two-man music combo, playing at various places in the red light
district of L.A., including brothels, getting paid a dollar per night,
performing the popular songs. He also worked as a janitor at the high
school in the early mornings. It was at high school that he became
interested in the theater, typically doing back-stage work such as
lighting.
Capra's family pressured him to drop out of school and go to work, but
he refused, as he wanted to partake fully of the American Dream, and
for that he needed an education. Capra later reminisced that his family
"thought I was a bum. My mother would slap me around; she wanted me to
quit school. My teachers would urge me to keep going....I was going to
school because I had a fight on my hands that I wanted to win."
Capra graduated from high school on January 27, 1915, and in September
of that year, he entered the Throop College of Technology (later the
California Institute of Technology) to study chemical engineering. The
school's annual tuition was $250, and Capra received occasional
financial support from his family, who were resigned to the fact they
had a scholar in their midst. Throop had a fine arts department, and
Capra discovered poetry and the essays of Montaigne, which he fell in
love with, while matriculating at the technical school. He then decided
to write.
"It was a great discovery for me. I discovered language. I discovered
poetry. I discovered poetry at Caltech, can you imagine that? That was
a big turning point in my life. I didn't know anything could be so
beautiful." Capra penned "The Butler's Failure," about an English
butler provoked by poverty to murder his employer, then to suicide."
Capra was singled out for a cash award of $250 for having the highest
grades in the school. Part of his prize was a six-week trip across the
U.S. and Canada. When Capra's father, Turiddu, died in 1916, Capra
started working at the campus laundry to make money.
After the U.S. Congress declared War on Germany on April 6, 1917, Capra
enlisted in the Army, and while he was not a naturalized citizen yet,
he was allowed to join the military as part of the Coastal Artillery.
Capra became a supply officer for the student soldiers at Throop, who
have been enrolled in a Reserve Officers Training Corps program. At his
enlistment, Capra discovered he was not an American citizen; he became
naturalized in 1920.
On September 15, 1918, Capra graduated from Throop with his bachelor's
degree, and was inducted into the U.S. Army on October 18th and shipped
out to the Presidio at San Francisco. An armistice ending the fighting
of World War One would be declared in less than a month. While at the
Presidio, Capra became ill with the Spanish influenza that claimed 20
million lives worldwide. He was discharged from the Army on December
13th and moved to his brother Ben's home in L.A. While recuperating,
Capra answered a cattle call for extras for
John Ford's film "The
The Outcasts of Poker Flat (1919)
(Capra, cast as a laborer in the Ford picture, introduced himself to
the film's star, Harry Carey. Two decades
later, Capra, designated the #1 director in Hollywood by "Time"
magazine, would cast Carey and his movie actress wife Olive in
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
for which Carey won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination).
While living at his mother's house, Capra took on a wide variety of
manual laboring jobs, including errand boy and ditch digger, even
working as an orange tree pruner at 20 cents a day. He continued to be
employed as an extra at movie studios and as a prop buyer at an
independent studio at Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street, which later
became the home of Columbia Pictures, where Capra would make his
reputation as the most successful movie director of the 1930s. Most of
his time was spent unemployed and idle, which gave credence to his
family's earlier opposition to him seeking higher education. Capra
wrote short stories but was unable to get them published. He eventually
got work as a live-in tutor for the son of "Lucky" Baldwin, a rich
gambler. (He later used the Baldwin estate as a location for
Dirigible (1931)).
Smitten by the movie bug, in August of that year, Capra, former actor
W. M. Plank, and financial backer Ida May Heitmann incorporated the
Tri-State Motion Picture Co. in Nevada. Tri-State produced three short
films in Nevada in 1920,
Don't Change Your Husband (1919),
The Pulse of Life (1917), and
The Scar of Love (1920), all directed by Plank, and possibly based on
story treatments written by Capra. The films were failures, and Capra
returned to Los Angeles when Tri-State broke up. In March 1920, Capra
was employed by CBC Film Sales Co., the corporate precursor of Columbia
Films, where he also worked as an editor and director on a series
called "Screen Snapshots." He quit CBC in August and moved to San
Francisco, but the only jobs he could find were that of bookseller and
door-to-door salesman. Once again seeming to fulfill his family's
prophecy, he turned to gambling, and also learned to ride the rails
with a hobo named Frank Dwyer. There was also a rumor that he became a
traveling salesman specializing in worthless securities, according to a
"Time" magazine story "Columbia's Gem" (August 8, 1938 issue, V.32, No.
6).
Still based in San Francisco in 1921, producer
Walter Montague hired Capra for $75 per
week to help direct the short movie
The Ballad of Fisher's Boarding House (1922),
which was based on a poem by
Rudyard Kipling. Montague, a former
actor, had the dubious idea that foggy San Francisco was destined to
become the capital of movies, and that he could make a fortune making
movies based on poems. Capra helped Montague produced the one-reeler,
which was budgeted at $1,700 and subsequently sold to the Pathe
Exchange for $3,500. Capra quit Montague when he demanded that the next
movie be based upon one of his own poems.
Unable to find another professional filmmaking job, Capra hired himself
out as a maker of shorts for the public-at-large while working as an
assistant at Walter Ball's film lab. Finally, in October 1921, the Paul
Gerson Picture Corp. hired him to help make its two-reel comedies,
around the time that he began dating the actress Helen Edith Howe, who
would become his first wife. Capra continued to work for both Ball and
Gerson, primarily as a cutter. On November 25, 1923, Capra married
Helen Howell, and the couple soon moved to Hollywood.
Hal Roach hired Capra as a gag-writer
for the "Our Gang" series in January, 1924. After writing the gags for
five "Our Gang" comedies in seven weeks, he asked Roach to make him a
director. When Roach refused (he somewhat rightly felt he had found the
right man in director Bob McGowan),
Capra quit. Roach's arch rival Mack Sennett
subsequently hired him as a writer, one of a six-man team that wrote
for silent movie comedian
Harry Langdon, the last major star
of the rapidly disintegrating Mack Sennett Studios, and reigning
briefly as fourth major silent comedian after
Charles Chaplin,
Buster Keaton, and
Harold Lloyd. Capra began working
with the Harry Langdon production
unit as a gag writer, first credited on the short
Plain Clothes (1925).
As Harry Langdon became more
popular, his production unit at Sennett had moved from two- to
three-reelers before Langdon, determined to follow the example of
Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, went into features. After making his first
feature-length comedy,
His First Flame (1927) for
Sennett, Langdon signed a three-year contract with
Sol Lesser's First National Pictures to
annually produce two feature-length comedies at a fixed fee per film.
For a multitude of reasons Mack Sennett was
never able to retain top talent. On September 15, 1925,
Harry Langdon left Sennett in an
egotistical rage, taking many of his key production personnel with him.
Sennett promoted Capra to director but fired him after three days in
his new position. In addition to the Langdon comedies, Capra had also
written material for other Sennett films, eventually working on
twenty-five movies.
After being sacked by Sennett, Capra was hired as a gag-writer by
Harry Langdon, working on
Langdon's first First National feature-length film,
Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926).
The movie was directed by
Harry Edwards who had directed all
of Harry Langdon's films at
Sennett. His first comedy for First National,
Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926)
did well at the box office, but it had ran over budget, which came out
of Langdon's end. Harry Edwards was sacked, and for his next picture,
The Strong Man (1926), Langdon
promoted Capra to director, boosting his salary to $750 per week. The
movie was a hit, but trouble was brewing among members of the
Harry Langdon company. Langdon was
increasingly believing his own press.
His marriage with Helen began to unravel when it is discovered that she
had a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy that had to be terminated. In
order to cope with the tragedy, Capra became a work-a-holic while Helen
turned to drink. The deterioration of his marriage was mirrored by the
disintegration of his professional relationship with
Harry Langdonduring the making of
the new feature, Long Pants (1927).
The movie, which was released in March 1927, proved to be Capra's last
with Harry Langdon, as the
comedian soon sacked Capra after its release. Capra later explained the
principle of Langdon comedies to James Agee,
"It is the principal of the brick: If there was a rule for writing
Langdon material, it was this: his only ally was God.
Harry Langdon might be saved by a
brick falling on a cop, but it was verboten that he in any way
motivated the bricks fall."
During the production of
Long Pants (1926), Capra had a falling
out with Langdon. Screenwriter
Arthur Ripley's dark sensibility
did not mesh well with that of the more optimistic Capra, and
Harry Langdon usually sided with
Ripley. The picture fell behind schedule and went over budget, and
since Langdon was paid a fixed fee for each film, this represented a
financial loss to his own Harry Langdon Corp. Stung by the financial
set-back, and desiring to further emulate the great Chaplin,
Harry Langdon made a fateful
decision: He fired Capra and decided to direct himself. (Langdon's next
three movies for First National were dismal failures, the two surviving
films being very dark and grim black comedies, one of which,
The Chaser (1928), touched on the
subject of suicide. It was the late years of the Jazz Age, a time of
unprecedented prosperity and boundless bonhomie, and the critics, and
more critically, the ticket-buying public, rejected Harry. In 1928,
First National did not pick up his contract. The Harry Langdon Corp.
soon went bankrupt, and his career as the "fourth major silent
comedian" was through, just as sound was coming in.)
In April of 1927, Capra and his wife Helen split up, and Capra went off
to New York to direct
For the Love of Mike (1927)
for First National, his first picture with
Claudette Colbert. The
director and his star did not get along, and the film went over budget.
Subsequently, First National refused to pay Capra, and he had to
hitchhike back to Hollywood. The film proved to be Capra's only genuine
flop.
By September 1927, he was back working as a writer for
Mack Sennett, but in October, he was hired
as a director by Columbia Pictures President and Production Chief
Harry Cohn for $1,000. The event was
momentous for both of them, for at Columbia Capra would soon become the
#1 director in Hollywood in the 1930s, and the success of Capra's films
would propel the Poverty Row studio into the major leagues. But at
first, Cohn was displeased with him. When viewing the first three days
of rushes of his first Columbia film,
That Certain Thing (1928),
Cohn wanted to fire him as everything on the first day had been shot in
long shot, on the second day in medium shot, and on the third day in
close-ups.
"I did it that way for time," Capra later recalled. "It was so easy to
be better than the other directors, because they were all dopes. They
would shoot a long shot, then they would have to change the setup to
shoot a medium shot, then they would take their close-ups. Then they
would come back and start over again. You lose time, you see, moving
the cameras and the big goddamn lights. I said, 'I'll get all the long
shots on that first set first, then all the medium shots, and then the
close-ups.' I wouldn't shoot the whole scene each way unless it was
necessary. If I knew that part of it was going to play in long shot, I
wouldn't shoot that part in close-up. But the trick was not to move
nine times, just to move three times. This saved a day, maybe two
days."
Cohn decided to stick with Capra (he was ultimately delighted at the
picture and gave Capra a $1,500 bonus and upped his per-picture
salary), and in 1928, Cohn raised his salary again, now to to $3,000
per picture after he made several successful pictures, including
Submarine (1928).
The Younger Generation (1929),
the first of a series of films with higher budgets to be directed by
Capra, would prove to be his first sound film, when scenes were reshot
for dialogue. In the summer of that year, he was introduced to a young
widow, Lucille Warner Reyburn (who became Capra's second wife
Lou Capra). He also met a transplanted stage
actress, Barbara Stanwyck, who had been
recruited for the talkie but had been in three successive unsuccessful
films and wanted to return to the New York stage.
Harry Cohn wanted Stanwyck to appear
in Capra's planned film,
Ladies of Leisure (1930), but
the interview with Capra did not go well, and Capra refused to use her.
Stanwyck went home crying after being dismissed by Capra, and her
husband, a furious Frank Fay, called Capra up.
In his defense, Capra said that Stanwyck didn't seem to want the part.
According to Capra's 1961 autobiography, "The Name Above the Title,"
Fay said, "Frank, she's young, and shy, and she's been kicked around
out here. Let me show you a test she made at Warner's." After viewing
her Warners' test for The Noose (1928),
Capra became enthusiastic and urged Cohn to sign her. In January of
1930, Capra began shooting
Ladies of Leisure (1930) with
Stanwyck in the lead. The movies the two made together in the early
'30s established them both on their separate journeys towards becoming
movieland legends. Though Capra would admit to falling in love with his
leading lady, it was Lucille Warner Reyburn who became the second Mrs.
Capra.
"You're wondering why I was at that party. That's my racket. I'm a
party girl. Do you know what that is?"
Stanwyck played a working-class "party girl" hired as a model by the
painter Jerry, who hails from a wealthy family. Capra had written the
first draft of the movie before screenwriter
Jo Swerling took over. Swerling thought the
treatment was dreadful. According to Capra, Swerling told
Harry Cohn, when he initially had
approached about adapting the play "Ladies of the Evening" into Capra's
next proposed film, "I don't like Hollywood, I don't like you, and I
certainly don't like this putrid piece of gorgonzola somebody gave me
to read. It stunk when Belasco produced it as
Ladies of Leisure (1930), and
it will stink as Ladies of Leisure, even if your little tin Jesus does
direct it. The script is inane, vacuous, pompous, unreal, unbelievable and incredibly dull."
Capra, who favored extensive rehearsals before shooting a scene,
developed his mature directorial style while collaborating with
Stanwyck, a trained stage actress whose performance steadily
deteriorated after rehearsals or retakes. Stanwyck's first take in a
scene usually was her best. Capra started blocking out scenes in
advance, and carefully preparing his other actors so that they could
react to Stanwyck in the first shot, whose acting often was
unpredictable, so they wouldn't foul up the continuity. In response to
this semi-improvisatory style, Capra's crew had to boost its level of
craftsmanship to beyond normal Hollywood standards, which were forged
in more static and prosaic work conditions. Thus, the professionalism
of Capra's crews became better than those of other directors. Capra's
philosophy for his crew was, "You guys are working for the actors,
they're not working for you."
After "Ladies of Leisure," Capra was assigned to direct
Platinum Blonde (1931) starring
Jean Harlow. The script had been the
product of a series of writers, including
Jo Swerling (who was given credit for
adaptation), but was polished by Capra and
Robert Riskin (who was given
screen credit for the dialogue). Along with
Jo Swerling, Riskin would rank as one of
Capra's most important collaborators, ultimately having a hand in 13
movies. (Riskin wrote nine screenplays for Capra, and Capra based four
other films on Riskin's work.)
Riskin created a hard-boiled newspaperman, Stew Smith for the film, a
character his widow, the actress Fay Wray, said
came closest to Riskin of any character he wrote. A comic character,
the wise-cracking reporter who wants to lampoon high society but finds
himself hostage to the pretensions of the rich he had previously mocked
is the debut of the prototypical "Capra" hero. The dilemma faced by
Stew, akin to the immigrant's desire to assimilate but being rejected
by established society, was repeated in
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936)
and in Meet John Doe (1941).
Capra, Stanwyck, Riskin and Jo Swerling all
were together to create Capra's next picture,
The Miracle Woman (1931), a
story about a shady evangelist. With
John Meehan, Riskin wrote the play
that the movie is based on, "Bless You, Sister," and there is a
possibly apocryphal story that has Riskin at a story conference at
which Capra relates the treatment for the proposed film. Capra,
finished, asked Riskin for his input, and Riskin replied, "I wrote that
play. My brother and I were stupid enough to produce it on Broadway. It
cost us almost every cent we had. If you intend to make a picture of
it, it only proves one thing: You're even more stupid than we were."
Jo Swerling adapted Riskin's play, which he
and his brother Everett patterned after
Sinclair Lewis' "Elmer Gantry." Like the
Lewis novel, the play focuses on the relationship between a lady
evangelist and a con man. The difference, though, is that the nature of
the relationship is just implied in Riskin's play (and the Capra film).
There is also the addition of the blind war-vet as the moral conscience
of the story; he is the pivotal character, whereas in Lewis' tale, the
con artist comes to have complete control over the evangelist after
eventually seducing her. Like some other Capra films,
The Miracle Woman (1931) is
about the love between a romantic, idealizing man and a cynical, bitter
woman. Riskin had based his character on lady evangelist Uldine Utley,
while Stanwyck based her characterization on
Aimee Semple McPherson.
Recognizing that he had something in his star director,
Harry Cohn took full advantage of the
lowly position his studio had in Hollywood. Both Warner Brothers and
mighty MGM habitually lent Cohn their troublesome stars -- anyone
rejecting scripts or demanding a pay raise was fodder for a loan out to
Cohn's Poverty Row studio. Cohn himself was habitually loathe to sign
long-term stars in the early 1930s (although he made rare exceptions to
Peter Lorre and
The Three Stooges) and was delighted
to land the talents of any top flight star and invariably assigned them
to Capra's pictures. Most began their tenure in purgatory with
trepidation but left eagerly wanting to work with Capra again.
In 1932, Capra decided to make a motion picture that reflected the
social conditions of the day. He and Riskin wrote the screenplay for
American Madness (1932), a
melodrama that is an important precursor to later Capra films, not only
with
It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
which shares the plot device of a bank run, but also in the depiction
of the irrationality of a crowd mentality and the ability of the
individual to make a difference. In the movie, an idealistic banker is
excoriated by his conservative board of directors for making loans to
small businesses on the basis of character rather than on sounder
financial criteria. Since the Great Depression is on, and many people
lack collateral, it would be impossible to productively lend money on
any other criteria than character, the banker argues. When there is a
run on the bank due to a scandal, it appears that the board of
directors are rights the bank depositors make a run on the bank to take
out their money before the bank fails. The fear of a bank failure
ensures that the failure will become a reality as a crowd mentality
takes over among the clientèle. The board of directors refuse to pledge
their capital to stave off the collapse of the bank, but the banker
makes a plea to the crowd, and just like George Bailey's depositors in
It's a Wonderful Life (1946),
the bank is saved as the fears of the crowd are ameliorated and
businessmen grateful to the banker pledge their capital to save the
bank. The board of directors, impressed by the banker's character and
his belief in the character of his individual clients (as opposed to
the irrationality of the crowd), pledge their capital and the bank run
is staved off and the bank is saved.
In his biography, "The Name Above the Picture," Capra wrote that before
American Madness (1932), he had
only made "escapist" pictures with no basis in reality. He recounts how
Poverty Row studios, lacking stars and production values, had to resort
to "gimmick" movies to pull the crowds in, making films on au courant
controversial subjects that were equivalent to "yellow journalism."
What was more important than the subject and its handling was the
maturation of Capra's directorial style with the film. Capra had become
convinced that the mass-experience of watching a motion picture with an
audience had the psychological effect in individual audience members of
slowing down the pace of a film. A film that during shooting and then
when viewed on a movieola editing device and on a small screen in a
screening room among a few professionals that had seemed normally paced
became sluggish when projected on the big screen. While this could have
been the result of the projection process blowing up the actors to such
large proportions, Capra ultimately believed it was the effect of mass
psychology affecting crowds since he also noticed this "slowing down"
phenomenon at ball games and at political conventions. Since
American Madness (1932) dealt
with crowds, he feared that the effect would be magnified.
He decided to boost the pace of the film, during the shooting. He did
away with characters' entrances and exits that were a common part of
cinematic "grammar" in the early 1930s, a survival of the "photoplays"
days. Instead, he "jumped" characters in and out of scenes, and
jettisoned the dissolves that were also part of cinematic grammar that
typically ended scenes and indicated changes in time or locale so as
not to make cutting between scenes seem choppy to the audience.
Dialogue was deliberately overlapped, a radical innovation in the early
talkies, when actors were instructed to let the other actor finish his
or her lines completely before taking up their cue and beginning their
own lines, in order to facilitate the editing of the sound-track. What
he felt was his greatest innovation was to boost the pacing of the
acting in the film by a third by making a scene that would normally
play in one minute take only 40 seconds.
When all these innovations were combined in his final cut, it made the
movie seem normally paced on the big screen, though while shooting
individual scenes, the pacing had seemed exaggerated. It also gave the
film a sense of urgency that befitted the subject of a financial panic
and a run on a bank. More importantly, it "kept audience attention
riveted to the screen," as he said in his autobiography. Except for
"mood pieces," Capra subsequently used these techniques in all his
films, and he was amused by critics who commented on the "naturalness"
of his direction.
Capra was close to completely establishing his themes and style. Justly
accused of indulging in sentiment which some critics labeled
"Capra-corn," Capra's next film,
Lady for a Day (1933) was an
adaptation of Damon Runyon's 1929 short
story "Madame La Gimp" about a nearly destitute apple peddler whom the
superstitious gambler Dave the Dude (portrayed by Warner Brothers star
Warren William) sets up in high style so
she and her daughter, who is visiting with her finance, will not be
embarrassed. Dave the Dude believes his luck at gambling comes from his
ritualistically buying an apple a day from Annie, who is distraught and
considering suicide to avoid the shame of her daughter seeing her
reduced to living on the street. The Dude and his criminal confederates
put Annie up in a luxury apartment with a faux husband in order to
establish Annie in the eyes of her daughter as a dignified and
respectable woman, but in typical Runyon fashion, Annie becomes more
than a fake as the masquerade continues.
Robert Riskin wrote the first four
drafts of Lady for a Day (1933),
and of all the scripts he worked on for Capra, the film deviates less
from the script than any other. After seeing the movie, Runyon sent a
telegraph to Riskin praising him for his success at elaborating on the
story and fleshing out the characters while maintain his basic story.
Lady for a Day (1933) was the
favorite Capra film of John Ford, the
great filmmaker who once directed the unknown extra. The movie cost
$300,000 and was the first of Capra's oeuvre to attract the attention
of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, getting a Best
Director nomination for Capra, plus nods for Riskin and Best Actress.
The movie received Columbia's first Best Picture nomination, the studio
never having attracted any attention from the Academy before
Lady for a Day (1933). (Capra's
last film was the flop remake of
Lady for a Day (1933) with
Bette Davis and
Glenn Ford,
Pocketful of Miracles (1961))
Capra reunited with Stanwyck and produced his first universally
acknowledged classic,
The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932),
a film that now seems to belong more to the oeuvre of
Josef von Sternberg than it does to
Frank Capra. With "General Yen," Capra had consciously set out to make
a movie that would win Academy Awards. Frustrated that the innovative,
timely, and critically well-received
American Madness (1932) had not
received any recognition at the Oscars (particularly in the director's
category in recognition of his innovations in pacing), he vented his
displeasure to Columbia boss Cohn.
"Forget it," Cohn told Capra, as recounted in his autobiography. "You
ain't got a Chinaman's chance. They only vote for that arty junk."
Capra set out to boost his chances by making an arty film featuring a
"Chinaman" that confronted that major taboo of American cinema of the
first half of the century, miscegenation.
In the movie, the American missionary Megan Davis is in China to marry
another missionary. Abducted by the Chinese Warlord General Yen, she is
torn away from the American compound that kept her isolated from the
Chinese and finds herself in a strange, dangerous culture. The two fall
in love despite their different races and life-views. The film ran up
against the taboo against miscegenation embedded in the Motion Picture
Producers and Distributors Association's Production Code, and while
Megan merely kisses General Yen's hand in the picture, the fact that
she was undeniably in love with a man from a different race attracted
the vituperation of many bigots.
Having fallen for Megan, General Yen engenders her escape back to the
Americans before willingly drinking a poisoned cup of tea, his
involvement with her having cost him his army, his wealth, and now his
desire to live.
The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932)
marks the introduction of suicide as a Capra theme that will come back
repeatedly, most especially in George Bailey's breakdown on the snowy
bridge in
It's a Wonderful Life (1946).
Despair often shows itself in Capra films, and although in his
post-"General Yen" work, the final reel wraps things up in a happy way,
until that final reel, there is tragedy, cynicism, heartless
exploitation, and other grim subject matter that Capra's audiences must
have known were the truth of the world, but that were too grim to face
when walking out of a movie theater. When pre-Code movies were
rediscovered and showcased across the United States in the 1990s, they
were often accompanied by thesis about how contemporary audiences
"read" the films (and post-1934 more Puritanical works), as the movies
were not so frank or racy as supposed. There was a great deal of
signaling going on which the audience could read into, and the same
must have been true for Capra's films, giving lie to the fact that he
was a sentimentalist with a saccharine view of America. There are few
films as bitter as those of Frank Capra before the final reel.
Despair was what befell Frank Capra, personally, on the night of March
16, 1934, which he attended as one of the Best Director nominees for
Lady for a Day (1933). Capra had
caught Oscar fever, and in his own words, "In the interim between the
nominations and the final voting...my mind was on those Oscars." When
Oscar host Will Rogers opened the
envelope for Best Director, he commented, "Well, well, well. What do
you know. I've watched this young man for a long time. Saw him come up
from the bottom, and I mean the bottom. It couldn't have happened to a
nicer guy. Come on up and get it, Frank!"
Capra got up to go get it, squeezing past tables and making his way to
the open dance floor to accept his Oscar. "The spotlight searched
around trying to find me.
'Over here!' I waved. Then it suddenly swept
away from me -- and picked up a flustered man standing on the other
side of the dance floor -
Frank Lloyd!"
Frank Lloyd went up to the dais to
accept HIS Oscar while a voice in back of Capra yelled, "Down in
front!"
Capra's walk back to his table amidst shouts of "Sit down!" turned into
the "Longest, saddest, most shattering walk in my life. I wished I
could have crawled under the rug like a miserable worm. When I slumped
in my chair I felt like one. All of my friends at the table were
crying."
That night, after Lloyd's
Cavalcade (1933), beat
Lady for a Day (1933) for Best
Picture, Capra got drunk at his house and passed out. "Big 'stupido,'"
Capra thought to himself, "running up to get an Oscar dying with
excitement, only to crawl back dying with shame. Those crummy Academy
voters; to hell with their lousy awards. If ever they did vote me one,
I would never, never, NEVER show up to accept it."
Capra would win his first of three Best Director Oscars the next year,
and would show up to accept it. More importantly, he would become the
president of the Academy in 1935 and take it out of the labor relations
field a time when labor strife and the formation of the talent guilds
threatened to destroy it.
The International Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences had been
the brainchild of Louis B. Mayer in 1927
(it dropped the "International" soon after its formation). In order to
forestall unionization by the creative talent (directors, actors and
screenwriters) who were not covered by the Basic Agreement signed in
1926, Mayer had the idea of forming a company union, which is how the
Academy came into being. The nascent Screen Writers Union, which had
been created in 1920 in Hollywood, had never succeeded in getting a
contract from the studios. It went out of existence in 1927, when labor
relations between writers and studios were handled by the Academy's
writers' branch.
The Academy had brokered studio-mandated pay-cuts of 10% in 1927 and
1931, and massive layoffs in 1930 and 1931. With the inauguration of
President Franklin D. Roosevelt on March 4, 1933, Roosevelt took no
time in attempting to tackle the Great Depression. The day after his
inauguration, he declared a National Bank Holiday, which hurt the movie
industry as it was heavily dependent on bank loans.
Louis B. Mayer, as president of the
Association of Motion Picture Producers, Inc. (the co-equal arm of the
Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association charged with
handling labor relations) huddled with a group from the Academy (the
organization he created and had long been criticized for dominating, in
both labor relations and during the awards season) and announced a 50%
across-the-board pay cut. In response, stagehands called a strike for
March 13th, which shut down every studio in Hollywood.
After another caucus between Mayer and the Academy committee, a
proposal for a pay-cut on a sliding-scale up to 50% for everyone making
over $50 a week; which would only last for eight weeks, was
inaugurated. Screen writers resigned en masse from the Academy and
joined a reformed Screen Writers Guild, but most employees had little
choice and went along with it. All the studios but Warner Bros. and Sam
Goldwyn honored the pledge to restore full salaries after the eight
weeks, and Warners production chief
Darryl F. Zanuck resigned in protest
over his studio's failure to honor its pledge. A time of bad feelings
persisted, and much anger was directed towards the Academy in its role
as company union.
The Academy, trying to position itself as an independent arbiter, hired
the accounting firm of Price Waterhouse for the first time to inspect
the books of the studios. The audit revealed that all the studios were
solvent, but Harry Warner refused to budge and Academy President
'Conrad Nagel' resigned, although some said he was forced out after a
vote of no-confidence after arguing Warner's case. The Academy
announced that the studio bosses would never again try to impose a
horizontal salary cut, but the usefulness of the Academy as a company
union was over.
Under Roosevelt's New Deal, the self-regulation imposed by the National
Industrial Relations Act (signed into law on June 16th) to bring
business sectors back to economic health was predicated upon
cartelization, in which the industry itself wrote its own regulatory
code. With Hollywood, it meant the re-imposition of paternalistic labor
relations that the Academy had been created to wallpaper over. The last
nail in the company union's coffin was when it became public knowledge
that the Academy appointed a committee to investigate the continued
feasibility of the industry practice of giving actors and writers
long-term contracts. High salaries to directors, actors, and screen
writers was compensation to the creative people for producers refusing
to ceded control over creative decision-making. Long-term contracts
were the only stability in the Hollywood economic set-up up creative
people,. Up to 20%-25% of net earnings of the movie industry went to
bonuses to studio owners, production chiefs, and senior executives at
the end of each year, and this created a good deal of resentment that
fueled the militancy of the SWG and led to the formation of the Screen
Actors Guild in July 1933 when they, too, felt that the Academy had
sold them out.
The industry code instituted a cap on the salaries of actors,
directors, and writers, but not of movie executives; mandated the
licensing of agents by producers; and created a reserve clause similar
to baseball where studios had renewal options with talent with expired
contracts, who could only move to a new studio if the studio they had
last been signed to did not pick up their option.
The SWG sent a telegram to FDR in October 1933 denouncing this policy,
arguing that the executives had taken millions of dollars of bonuses
while running their companies into receivership and bankruptcy. The SWG
denounced the continued membership of executives who had led their
studios into financial failure remaining on the corporate boards and in
the management of the reorganized companies, and furthermore protested
their use of the NIRA to write their corrupt and failed business
practices into law at the expense of the workers.
There was a mass resignation of actors from the Academy in October
1933, with the actors switching their allegiance to SAG. SAG joined
with the SWG to publish "The Screen Guilds Magazine," a periodical
whose editorial content attacked the Academy as a company union in the
producers' pocket. SAG President Eddie Cantor, a friend of Roosevelt
who had bee invited to spend the Thanksgiving Day holiday with the
president, informed him of the guild's grievances over the NIRA code.
Roosevelt struck down many of the movie industry code's anti-labor
provisions by executive order.
The labor battles between the guilds and the studios would continue
until the late 1930s, and by the time Frank Capra was elected president
of the Academy in 1935, the post was an unenviable one. The Screen
Directors Guild was formed at King Vidor's house on January 15, 1936,
and one of its first acts was to send a letter to its members urging
them to boycott the Academy Awards ceremony, which was three days away.
None of the guilds had been recognized as bargaining agents by the
studios, and it was argued to grace the Academy Awards would give the
Academy, a company union, recognition. Academy membership had declined
to 40 from a high of 600, and Capra believed that the guilds wanted to
punish the studios financially by depriving them of the good publicity
the Oscars generated.
But the studios couldn't care less. Seeing that the Academy was
worthless to help them in its attempts to enforce wage cuts, it too
abandoned the Academy, which it had financed. Capra and the Board
members had to pay for the Oscar statuettes for the 1936 ceremony. In
order to counter the boycott threat, Capra needed a good publicity
gimmick himself, and the Academy came up with one, voting
D.W. Griffith an honorary Oscar,
the first bestowed since one had been given to
Charles Chaplin at the first Academy
Awards ceremony.
The Guilds believed the boycott had worked as only 20 SAG members and
13 SWG members had showed up at the Oscars, but Capra remembered the
night as a victory as all the winners had shown up. However, 'Variety'
wrote that "there was not the galaxy of stars and celebs in the
director and writer groups which distinguished awards banquets in
recent years." "Variety" reported that to boost attendance, tickets had
been given to secretaries and the like.
Bette Davis and
Victor McLaglen had showed up to accept
their Oscars, but McLaglen's director and screenwriter,
John Ford and
Dudley Nichols, both winners like
McLaglen for The Informer (1935),
were not there, and Nichols became the first person to refuse an
Academy Award when he sent back his statuette to the Academy with a
note saying he would not turn his back on his fellow writers in the
SWG. Capra sent it back to him. Ford, the treasurer of the SDG, had not
showed up to accept his Oscar, he explained, because he wasn't a member
of the Academy. When Capra staged a ceremony where Ford accepted his
award, the SDG voted him out of office.
To save the Academy and the Oscars, Capra convinced the board to get it
out of the labor relations field. He also democratized the nomination
process to eliminate studio politics, opened the cinematography and
interior decoration awards to films made outside the U.S., and created
two new acting awards for supporting performances to win over SAG.
By the 1937 awards ceremony, SAG signaled its pleasure that the Academy
had mostly stayed out of labor relations by announcing it had no
objection to its members attending the awards ceremony. The ceremony
was a success, despite the fact that the Academy had to charge
admission due to its poor finances. Frank Capra had saved the Academy
of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and he even won his second Oscar
that night, for directing
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936).
At the end of the evening, Capra announced the creation of the
Irving Thalberg Memorial Award to honor
"the most consistent high level of production achievement by an
individual producer." It was an award he himself was not destined to
win.
By the 1938 awards, the Academy and all three guilds had buried the
hatchet, and the guild presidents all attended the ceremony: SWG
President Dudley Nichols, who finally had
accepted his Oscar, SAG President Robert Montgomery, and SDG President
King Vidor. Capra also had introduced the
secret ballot, the results of which were unknown to everyone but the
press, who were informed just before the dinner so they could make
their deadlines. The first Irving Thalberg Award was given to long-time
Academy supporter and anti-Guild stalwart
Darryl F. Zanuck by
Cecil B. DeMille, who in his
preparatory remarks, declared that the Academy was "now free of all
labor struggles."
But those struggles weren't over. In 1939, Capra had been voted
president of the SDG and began negotiating with AMPP President 'Joseph
Schenck', the head of 20th Century-Fox, for the industry to recognize
the SDG as the sole collective bargaining agent for directors. When
Schenck refused, Capra mobilized the directors and threatened a strike.
He also threatened to resign from the Academy and mount a boycott of
the awards ceremony, which was to be held a week later. Schenck gave
in, and Capra won another victory when he was named Best Director for a
third time at the Academy Awards, and his movie,
You Can't Take It with You (1938),
was voted Best Picture of 1938.
The 1940 awards ceremony was the last that Capra presided over, and he
directed a documentary about them, which was sold to Warner Bros' for
$30,000, the monies going to the Academy. He was nominated himself for
Best Director and Best Picture for
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939),
but lost to the
Gone with the Wind (1939)
juggernaut. Under Capra's guidance, the Academy had left the labor
relations field behind in order to concentrated on the awards
(publicity for the industry), research and education.
"I believe the guilds should more or less conduct the operations and
functions of this institution," he said in his farewell speech. He
would be nominated for Best Director and Best Picture once more with
It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
in 1947, but the Academy would never again honor him, not even with an
honorary award after all his service.
(Bob Hope, in contrast, received four
honorary awards, including a lifetime membership in 1945, and the Jean
Hersholt Humanitarian award in 1960 from the Academy.) The SDG
(subsequently renamed the Directors Guild of America after its 1960
with the Radio and Television Directors Guild and which Capra served as
its first president from 1960-61), the union he had struggled with in
the mid-1930s but which he had first served as president from 1939 to
1941 and won it recognition, voted him a lifetime membership in 1941
and a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1959.
Whenever Capra convinced studio boss
Harry Cohn to let him make movies
with more controversial or ambitious themes, the movies typically lost
money after under-performing at the box office.
The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932)
and Lost Horizon (1937) were both
expensive, philosophically minded pictures that sought to reposition
Capra and Columbia into the prestige end of the movie market. After the
former's relative failure at the box office and with critics, Capra
turned to making a screwball comedy, a genre he excelled at, with
It Happened One Night (1934).
Bookended with
You Can't Take It with You (1938),
these two huge hits won Columbia Best Picture Oscars and Capra Best
Director Academy Awards. These films, along with
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936),
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939),
and
It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
are the heart of Capra's cinematic canon. They are all classics and
products of superb craftsmanship, but they gave rise to the canard of
"Capra-corn." One cannot consider Capra without taking into account
The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932),
American Madness (1932), and
Meet John Doe (1941), all three
dark films tackling major issues, Imperialism, the American plutocracy,
and domestic fascism. Capra was no Pollyanna, and the man who was
called a "dago" by Mack Sennett and who
went on to become one of the most unique, highly honored and successful
directors, whose depictions of America are considered Americana
themselves, did not live his cinematic life looking through a
rose-colored range-finder
In his autobiography "The Name Above the Title," Capra says that at the
time of American Madness (1932),
critics began commenting on his "gee-whiz" style of filmmaking. The
critics attacked "gee whiz" cultural artifacts as their fabricators
"wander about wide-eyed and breathless, seeing everything as larger
than life." Capra's response was "Gee whiz!"
Defining Hollywood as split between two camps, "Mr. Up-beat" and "Mr.
Down-beat," Capra defended the up-beat gee whiz on the grounds that,
"To some of us, all that meets the eye IS larger than life, including
life itself. Who ca match the wonder of it?"
Among the artists of the "Gee-Whiz:" school were
Ernest Hemingway,
Homer, and
Paul Gauguin, a novelist who lived a heroic
life larger than life itself, a poet who limned the lives of gods and
heroes, and a painter who created a mythic Tahiti, the Tahiti that he
wanted to find. Capra pointed to Moses and the apostles as examples of
men who were larger than life. Capra was proud to be "Mr. Up-beat"
rather than belong to "the 'ashcan' school" whose "films depict life as
an alley of cats clawing lids off garbage cans, and man as less noble
than a hyena. The 'ash-canners,' in turn, call us Pollyannas, mawkish
sentimentalists, and corny happy-enders."
What really moves Capra is that in America, there was room for both
schools, that there was no government interference that kept him from
making a film like
American Madness (1932). (While
Ambassador to the Court of St. James,
Joseph P. Kennedy had asked
Harry Cohn to stop exporting
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
to Europe as it portrayed American democracy so negatively.) About Mr.
Up-beat and Mr-Downbeat and "Mr. In-between," Capra says, "We all
respect and admire each other because the great majority freely express
their own individual artistry unfettered by subsidies or strictures
from government, pressure groups, or ideologists."
In the period 1934 to 1941, Capra the created the core of his canon
with the classics
It Happened One Night (1934),
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936),
You Can't Take It with You (1938),
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
and Meet John Doe (1941), wining
three Best Director Oscars in the process. Some cine-historians call
Capra the great American propagandist, he was so effective in creating
an indelible impression of America in the 1930s. "Maybe there never was
an America in the thirties,"
John Cassavetes was quoted as
saying. "Maybe it was all Frank Capra."
After the United States went to war in December 1941, Frank Capra
rejoined the Army and became an actual propagandist. His "Why We Fight"
series of propaganda films were highly lauded for their remarkable
craftsmanship and were the best of the U.S. propaganda output during
the war. Capra's philosophy, which has been variously described as a
kind of Christian socialism (his films frequently feature a male
protagonist who can be seen a Christ figure in a story about redemption
emphasizing New Testament values) that is best understood as an
expression of humanism, made him an ideal propagandist. He loved his
adopted country with the fervor of the immigrant who had realized the
American dream. One of his propaganda films,
The Negro Soldier (1944), is a
milestone in race relations.
Capra, a genius in the manipulation of the first form of "mass media,"
was opposed to "massism." The crowd in a Capra film is invariably
wrong, and he comes down on the side of the individual, who can make a
difference in a society of free individuals. In an interview, Capra
said he was against "mass entertainment, mass production, mass
education, mass everything. Especially mass man. I was fighting for, in
a sense, the preservation of the liberty of the individual person
against the mass."
Capra had left Columbia after "Mr. Smith" and formed his own production
company. After the war, he founded Liberty Films with
John Ford and made his last
masterpiece,
It's a Wonderful Life (1946).
Liberty folded prior to its release (another Liberty film,
William Wyler's masterpiece,
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
was released through United Artists). Though Capra received his sixth
Oscar nomination as best director, the movie flopped at the box office,
which is hard to believe now that the film is considered must-see
viewing each Christmas. Capra's period of greatness was over, and after
making three under-whelming films from 1948 to '51 (including a remake
of his earlier
Broadway Bill (1934)), Capra didn't
direct another picture for eight years, instead making a series of
memorable semi-comic science documentaries for television that became
required viewing for most 1960's school kids. His last two movies,
A Hole in the Head (1959) and
Pocketful of Miracles (1961)
his remake of
Lady for a Day (1933) did little
to enhance his reputation.
But a great reputation it was, and is. Capra's films withstood the test
of time and continue to be as beloved as when they were embraced by the
movie-going "masses" in the 1930s. It was the craftsmanship: Capra was
undeniably a master of his medium. The great English novelist Graham
Greene, who supported himself as a film critic in the 1930s, loved
Capra's films due to their sense of responsibility and of common life,
and due to his connection with his audience. (Capra, according to the
1938 "Time" article, believed that what he liked would be liked by
moviegoers). In his review of
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936),
Greene elucidated the central theme of Capra's movies: "Goodness and
simplicity manhandled in a deeply selfish and brutal world."
But it was Capra's great mastery over film that was the key to his
success. Comparing Capra to Dickens in a not wholly flattering review
of
You Can't Take It with You (1938),
Green found Capra "a rather muddled and sentimental idealist who feels
-- vaguely -- that something is wrong with the social system" (807).
Commenting on the improbable scene in which Grandpa Vanderhof persuades
the munitions magnate Anthony P. Kirby to give everything up and play
the harmonica, Greene stated:
"It sounds awful, but it isn't as awful as all that, for Capra has a
touch of genius with a camera: his screen always seems twice as big as
other people's, and he cuts as brilliantly as Eisenstein (the climax
when the big bad magnate takes up his harmonica is so exhilarating in
its movement that you forget its absurdity). Humour and not wit is his
line, a humor that shades off into whimsicality, and a kind of popular
poetry which is apt to turn wistful. We may groan and blush as he cuts
his way remorselessly through all finer values to the fallible human
heart, but infallibly he makes his appeal - to that great soft organ
with its unreliable goodness and easy melancholy and baseless optimism.
The cinema, a popular craft, can hardly be expected to do more."
Capra was a populist, and the simplicity of his narrative structures,
in which the great social problems facing America were boiled down to
scenarios in which metaphorical boy scouts took on corrupt political
bosses and evil-minded industrialists, created mythical America of
simple archetypes that with its humor, created powerful films that
appealed to the elemental emotions of the audience. The immigrant who
had struggled and been humiliated but persevere due to his inner
resolution harnessed the mytho-poetic power of the movie to create
proletarian passion plays that appealed to the psyche of the New Deal
movie-goer. The country during the Depression was down but not out, and
the ultimate success of the individual in the Capra films was a bracing
tonic for the movie audience of the 1930s. His own personal history,
transformed on the screen, became their myths that got them through the
Depression, and when that and the war was over, the great filmmaker
found himself out of time. Capra, like
Charles Dickens, moralized political and
economic issues. Both were primarily masters of personal and moral
expression, and not of the social and political. It was the emotional
realism, not the social realism, of such films as
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939),
which he was concerned with, and by focusing on the emotional and moral
issues his protagonists faced, typically dramatized as a conflict
between cynicism and the protagonist's faith and idealism, that made
the movies so powerful, and made them register so powerfully with an
audience.
Bisacquino, Sicily. On May 10, 1903, his family left for America aboard
the ship Germania, arriving in New York on May 23rd. "There's no
ventilation, and it stinks like hell. They're all miserable. It's the
most degrading place you could ever be," Capra said about his Atlantic
passage. "Oh, it was awful, awful. It seems to always be storming,
raining like hell and very windy, with these big long rolling Atlantic
waves. Everybody was sick, vomiting. God, they were sick. And the poor
kids were always crying."
The family boarded a train for the trip to California, where Frank's
older brother Benjamin was living. On their journey, they subsisted on
bread and bananas, as their lack of English made it impossible for them
to ask for any other kind of foodstuffs. On June 3, the Capra family
arrived at the Southern Pacific station in Los Angeles, at the time, a
small city of approximately 102,000 people. The family stayed with
Capra's older brother Benjamin, and on September 14, 1903, Frank began
his schooling at the Castelar Elementary school.
In 1909, he entered Los Angeles' Manual Arts High School. Capra made
money selling newspapers in downtown L.A. after school and on
Saturdays, sometimes working with his brother Tony. When sales were
slow, Tony punched Frank to attract attention, which would attract a
crowd and make Frank's papers sell quicker. Frank later became part of
a two-man music combo, playing at various places in the red light
district of L.A., including brothels, getting paid a dollar per night,
performing the popular songs. He also worked as a janitor at the high
school in the early mornings. It was at high school that he became
interested in the theater, typically doing back-stage work such as
lighting.
Capra's family pressured him to drop out of school and go to work, but
he refused, as he wanted to partake fully of the American Dream, and
for that he needed an education. Capra later reminisced that his family
"thought I was a bum. My mother would slap me around; she wanted me to
quit school. My teachers would urge me to keep going....I was going to
school because I had a fight on my hands that I wanted to win."
Capra graduated from high school on January 27, 1915, and in September
of that year, he entered the Throop College of Technology (later the
California Institute of Technology) to study chemical engineering. The
school's annual tuition was $250, and Capra received occasional
financial support from his family, who were resigned to the fact they
had a scholar in their midst. Throop had a fine arts department, and
Capra discovered poetry and the essays of Montaigne, which he fell in
love with, while matriculating at the technical school. He then decided
to write.
"It was a great discovery for me. I discovered language. I discovered
poetry. I discovered poetry at Caltech, can you imagine that? That was
a big turning point in my life. I didn't know anything could be so
beautiful." Capra penned "The Butler's Failure," about an English
butler provoked by poverty to murder his employer, then to suicide."
Capra was singled out for a cash award of $250 for having the highest
grades in the school. Part of his prize was a six-week trip across the
U.S. and Canada. When Capra's father, Turiddu, died in 1916, Capra
started working at the campus laundry to make money.
After the U.S. Congress declared War on Germany on April 6, 1917, Capra
enlisted in the Army, and while he was not a naturalized citizen yet,
he was allowed to join the military as part of the Coastal Artillery.
Capra became a supply officer for the student soldiers at Throop, who
have been enrolled in a Reserve Officers Training Corps program. At his
enlistment, Capra discovered he was not an American citizen; he became
naturalized in 1920.
On September 15, 1918, Capra graduated from Throop with his bachelor's
degree, and was inducted into the U.S. Army on October 18th and shipped
out to the Presidio at San Francisco. An armistice ending the fighting
of World War One would be declared in less than a month. While at the
Presidio, Capra became ill with the Spanish influenza that claimed 20
million lives worldwide. He was discharged from the Army on December
13th and moved to his brother Ben's home in L.A. While recuperating,
Capra answered a cattle call for extras for
John Ford's film "The
The Outcasts of Poker Flat (1919)
(Capra, cast as a laborer in the Ford picture, introduced himself to
the film's star, Harry Carey. Two decades
later, Capra, designated the #1 director in Hollywood by "Time"
magazine, would cast Carey and his movie actress wife Olive in
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
for which Carey won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination).
While living at his mother's house, Capra took on a wide variety of
manual laboring jobs, including errand boy and ditch digger, even
working as an orange tree pruner at 20 cents a day. He continued to be
employed as an extra at movie studios and as a prop buyer at an
independent studio at Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street, which later
became the home of Columbia Pictures, where Capra would make his
reputation as the most successful movie director of the 1930s. Most of
his time was spent unemployed and idle, which gave credence to his
family's earlier opposition to him seeking higher education. Capra
wrote short stories but was unable to get them published. He eventually
got work as a live-in tutor for the son of "Lucky" Baldwin, a rich
gambler. (He later used the Baldwin estate as a location for
Dirigible (1931)).
Smitten by the movie bug, in August of that year, Capra, former actor
W. M. Plank, and financial backer Ida May Heitmann incorporated the
Tri-State Motion Picture Co. in Nevada. Tri-State produced three short
films in Nevada in 1920,
Don't Change Your Husband (1919),
The Pulse of Life (1917), and
The Scar of Love (1920), all directed by Plank, and possibly based on
story treatments written by Capra. The films were failures, and Capra
returned to Los Angeles when Tri-State broke up. In March 1920, Capra
was employed by CBC Film Sales Co., the corporate precursor of Columbia
Films, where he also worked as an editor and director on a series
called "Screen Snapshots." He quit CBC in August and moved to San
Francisco, but the only jobs he could find were that of bookseller and
door-to-door salesman. Once again seeming to fulfill his family's
prophecy, he turned to gambling, and also learned to ride the rails
with a hobo named Frank Dwyer. There was also a rumor that he became a
traveling salesman specializing in worthless securities, according to a
"Time" magazine story "Columbia's Gem" (August 8, 1938 issue, V.32, No.
6).
Still based in San Francisco in 1921, producer
Walter Montague hired Capra for $75 per
week to help direct the short movie
The Ballad of Fisher's Boarding House (1922),
which was based on a poem by
Rudyard Kipling. Montague, a former
actor, had the dubious idea that foggy San Francisco was destined to
become the capital of movies, and that he could make a fortune making
movies based on poems. Capra helped Montague produced the one-reeler,
which was budgeted at $1,700 and subsequently sold to the Pathe
Exchange for $3,500. Capra quit Montague when he demanded that the next
movie be based upon one of his own poems.
Unable to find another professional filmmaking job, Capra hired himself
out as a maker of shorts for the public-at-large while working as an
assistant at Walter Ball's film lab. Finally, in October 1921, the Paul
Gerson Picture Corp. hired him to help make its two-reel comedies,
around the time that he began dating the actress Helen Edith Howe, who
would become his first wife. Capra continued to work for both Ball and
Gerson, primarily as a cutter. On November 25, 1923, Capra married
Helen Howell, and the couple soon moved to Hollywood.
Hal Roach hired Capra as a gag-writer
for the "Our Gang" series in January, 1924. After writing the gags for
five "Our Gang" comedies in seven weeks, he asked Roach to make him a
director. When Roach refused (he somewhat rightly felt he had found the
right man in director Bob McGowan),
Capra quit. Roach's arch rival Mack Sennett
subsequently hired him as a writer, one of a six-man team that wrote
for silent movie comedian
Harry Langdon, the last major star
of the rapidly disintegrating Mack Sennett Studios, and reigning
briefly as fourth major silent comedian after
Charles Chaplin,
Buster Keaton, and
Harold Lloyd. Capra began working
with the Harry Langdon production
unit as a gag writer, first credited on the short
Plain Clothes (1925).
As Harry Langdon became more
popular, his production unit at Sennett had moved from two- to
three-reelers before Langdon, determined to follow the example of
Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, went into features. After making his first
feature-length comedy,
His First Flame (1927) for
Sennett, Langdon signed a three-year contract with
Sol Lesser's First National Pictures to
annually produce two feature-length comedies at a fixed fee per film.
For a multitude of reasons Mack Sennett was
never able to retain top talent. On September 15, 1925,
Harry Langdon left Sennett in an
egotistical rage, taking many of his key production personnel with him.
Sennett promoted Capra to director but fired him after three days in
his new position. In addition to the Langdon comedies, Capra had also
written material for other Sennett films, eventually working on
twenty-five movies.
After being sacked by Sennett, Capra was hired as a gag-writer by
Harry Langdon, working on
Langdon's first First National feature-length film,
Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926).
The movie was directed by
Harry Edwards who had directed all
of Harry Langdon's films at
Sennett. His first comedy for First National,
Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926)
did well at the box office, but it had ran over budget, which came out
of Langdon's end. Harry Edwards was sacked, and for his next picture,
The Strong Man (1926), Langdon
promoted Capra to director, boosting his salary to $750 per week. The
movie was a hit, but trouble was brewing among members of the
Harry Langdon company. Langdon was
increasingly believing his own press.
His marriage with Helen began to unravel when it is discovered that she
had a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy that had to be terminated. In
order to cope with the tragedy, Capra became a work-a-holic while Helen
turned to drink. The deterioration of his marriage was mirrored by the
disintegration of his professional relationship with
Harry Langdonduring the making of
the new feature, Long Pants (1927).
The movie, which was released in March 1927, proved to be Capra's last
with Harry Langdon, as the
comedian soon sacked Capra after its release. Capra later explained the
principle of Langdon comedies to James Agee,
"It is the principal of the brick: If there was a rule for writing
Langdon material, it was this: his only ally was God.
Harry Langdon might be saved by a
brick falling on a cop, but it was verboten that he in any way
motivated the bricks fall."
During the production of
Long Pants (1926), Capra had a falling
out with Langdon. Screenwriter
Arthur Ripley's dark sensibility
did not mesh well with that of the more optimistic Capra, and
Harry Langdon usually sided with
Ripley. The picture fell behind schedule and went over budget, and
since Langdon was paid a fixed fee for each film, this represented a
financial loss to his own Harry Langdon Corp. Stung by the financial
set-back, and desiring to further emulate the great Chaplin,
Harry Langdon made a fateful
decision: He fired Capra and decided to direct himself. (Langdon's next
three movies for First National were dismal failures, the two surviving
films being very dark and grim black comedies, one of which,
The Chaser (1928), touched on the
subject of suicide. It was the late years of the Jazz Age, a time of
unprecedented prosperity and boundless bonhomie, and the critics, and
more critically, the ticket-buying public, rejected Harry. In 1928,
First National did not pick up his contract. The Harry Langdon Corp.
soon went bankrupt, and his career as the "fourth major silent
comedian" was through, just as sound was coming in.)
In April of 1927, Capra and his wife Helen split up, and Capra went off
to New York to direct
For the Love of Mike (1927)
for First National, his first picture with
Claudette Colbert. The
director and his star did not get along, and the film went over budget.
Subsequently, First National refused to pay Capra, and he had to
hitchhike back to Hollywood. The film proved to be Capra's only genuine
flop.
By September 1927, he was back working as a writer for
Mack Sennett, but in October, he was hired
as a director by Columbia Pictures President and Production Chief
Harry Cohn for $1,000. The event was
momentous for both of them, for at Columbia Capra would soon become the
#1 director in Hollywood in the 1930s, and the success of Capra's films
would propel the Poverty Row studio into the major leagues. But at
first, Cohn was displeased with him. When viewing the first three days
of rushes of his first Columbia film,
That Certain Thing (1928),
Cohn wanted to fire him as everything on the first day had been shot in
long shot, on the second day in medium shot, and on the third day in
close-ups.
"I did it that way for time," Capra later recalled. "It was so easy to
be better than the other directors, because they were all dopes. They
would shoot a long shot, then they would have to change the setup to
shoot a medium shot, then they would take their close-ups. Then they
would come back and start over again. You lose time, you see, moving
the cameras and the big goddamn lights. I said, 'I'll get all the long
shots on that first set first, then all the medium shots, and then the
close-ups.' I wouldn't shoot the whole scene each way unless it was
necessary. If I knew that part of it was going to play in long shot, I
wouldn't shoot that part in close-up. But the trick was not to move
nine times, just to move three times. This saved a day, maybe two
days."
Cohn decided to stick with Capra (he was ultimately delighted at the
picture and gave Capra a $1,500 bonus and upped his per-picture
salary), and in 1928, Cohn raised his salary again, now to to $3,000
per picture after he made several successful pictures, including
Submarine (1928).
The Younger Generation (1929),
the first of a series of films with higher budgets to be directed by
Capra, would prove to be his first sound film, when scenes were reshot
for dialogue. In the summer of that year, he was introduced to a young
widow, Lucille Warner Reyburn (who became Capra's second wife
Lou Capra). He also met a transplanted stage
actress, Barbara Stanwyck, who had been
recruited for the talkie but had been in three successive unsuccessful
films and wanted to return to the New York stage.
Harry Cohn wanted Stanwyck to appear
in Capra's planned film,
Ladies of Leisure (1930), but
the interview with Capra did not go well, and Capra refused to use her.
Stanwyck went home crying after being dismissed by Capra, and her
husband, a furious Frank Fay, called Capra up.
In his defense, Capra said that Stanwyck didn't seem to want the part.
According to Capra's 1961 autobiography, "The Name Above the Title,"
Fay said, "Frank, she's young, and shy, and she's been kicked around
out here. Let me show you a test she made at Warner's." After viewing
her Warners' test for The Noose (1928),
Capra became enthusiastic and urged Cohn to sign her. In January of
1930, Capra began shooting
Ladies of Leisure (1930) with
Stanwyck in the lead. The movies the two made together in the early
'30s established them both on their separate journeys towards becoming
movieland legends. Though Capra would admit to falling in love with his
leading lady, it was Lucille Warner Reyburn who became the second Mrs.
Capra.
"You're wondering why I was at that party. That's my racket. I'm a
party girl. Do you know what that is?"
Stanwyck played a working-class "party girl" hired as a model by the
painter Jerry, who hails from a wealthy family. Capra had written the
first draft of the movie before screenwriter
Jo Swerling took over. Swerling thought the
treatment was dreadful. According to Capra, Swerling told
Harry Cohn, when he initially had
approached about adapting the play "Ladies of the Evening" into Capra's
next proposed film, "I don't like Hollywood, I don't like you, and I
certainly don't like this putrid piece of gorgonzola somebody gave me
to read. It stunk when Belasco produced it as
Ladies of Leisure (1930), and
it will stink as Ladies of Leisure, even if your little tin Jesus does
direct it. The script is inane, vacuous, pompous, unreal, unbelievable and incredibly dull."
Capra, who favored extensive rehearsals before shooting a scene,
developed his mature directorial style while collaborating with
Stanwyck, a trained stage actress whose performance steadily
deteriorated after rehearsals or retakes. Stanwyck's first take in a
scene usually was her best. Capra started blocking out scenes in
advance, and carefully preparing his other actors so that they could
react to Stanwyck in the first shot, whose acting often was
unpredictable, so they wouldn't foul up the continuity. In response to
this semi-improvisatory style, Capra's crew had to boost its level of
craftsmanship to beyond normal Hollywood standards, which were forged
in more static and prosaic work conditions. Thus, the professionalism
of Capra's crews became better than those of other directors. Capra's
philosophy for his crew was, "You guys are working for the actors,
they're not working for you."
After "Ladies of Leisure," Capra was assigned to direct
Platinum Blonde (1931) starring
Jean Harlow. The script had been the
product of a series of writers, including
Jo Swerling (who was given credit for
adaptation), but was polished by Capra and
Robert Riskin (who was given
screen credit for the dialogue). Along with
Jo Swerling, Riskin would rank as one of
Capra's most important collaborators, ultimately having a hand in 13
movies. (Riskin wrote nine screenplays for Capra, and Capra based four
other films on Riskin's work.)
Riskin created a hard-boiled newspaperman, Stew Smith for the film, a
character his widow, the actress Fay Wray, said
came closest to Riskin of any character he wrote. A comic character,
the wise-cracking reporter who wants to lampoon high society but finds
himself hostage to the pretensions of the rich he had previously mocked
is the debut of the prototypical "Capra" hero. The dilemma faced by
Stew, akin to the immigrant's desire to assimilate but being rejected
by established society, was repeated in
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936)
and in Meet John Doe (1941).
Capra, Stanwyck, Riskin and Jo Swerling all
were together to create Capra's next picture,
The Miracle Woman (1931), a
story about a shady evangelist. With
John Meehan, Riskin wrote the play
that the movie is based on, "Bless You, Sister," and there is a
possibly apocryphal story that has Riskin at a story conference at
which Capra relates the treatment for the proposed film. Capra,
finished, asked Riskin for his input, and Riskin replied, "I wrote that
play. My brother and I were stupid enough to produce it on Broadway. It
cost us almost every cent we had. If you intend to make a picture of
it, it only proves one thing: You're even more stupid than we were."
Jo Swerling adapted Riskin's play, which he
and his brother Everett patterned after
Sinclair Lewis' "Elmer Gantry." Like the
Lewis novel, the play focuses on the relationship between a lady
evangelist and a con man. The difference, though, is that the nature of
the relationship is just implied in Riskin's play (and the Capra film).
There is also the addition of the blind war-vet as the moral conscience
of the story; he is the pivotal character, whereas in Lewis' tale, the
con artist comes to have complete control over the evangelist after
eventually seducing her. Like some other Capra films,
The Miracle Woman (1931) is
about the love between a romantic, idealizing man and a cynical, bitter
woman. Riskin had based his character on lady evangelist Uldine Utley,
while Stanwyck based her characterization on
Aimee Semple McPherson.
Recognizing that he had something in his star director,
Harry Cohn took full advantage of the
lowly position his studio had in Hollywood. Both Warner Brothers and
mighty MGM habitually lent Cohn their troublesome stars -- anyone
rejecting scripts or demanding a pay raise was fodder for a loan out to
Cohn's Poverty Row studio. Cohn himself was habitually loathe to sign
long-term stars in the early 1930s (although he made rare exceptions to
Peter Lorre and
The Three Stooges) and was delighted
to land the talents of any top flight star and invariably assigned them
to Capra's pictures. Most began their tenure in purgatory with
trepidation but left eagerly wanting to work with Capra again.
In 1932, Capra decided to make a motion picture that reflected the
social conditions of the day. He and Riskin wrote the screenplay for
American Madness (1932), a
melodrama that is an important precursor to later Capra films, not only
with
It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
which shares the plot device of a bank run, but also in the depiction
of the irrationality of a crowd mentality and the ability of the
individual to make a difference. In the movie, an idealistic banker is
excoriated by his conservative board of directors for making loans to
small businesses on the basis of character rather than on sounder
financial criteria. Since the Great Depression is on, and many people
lack collateral, it would be impossible to productively lend money on
any other criteria than character, the banker argues. When there is a
run on the bank due to a scandal, it appears that the board of
directors are rights the bank depositors make a run on the bank to take
out their money before the bank fails. The fear of a bank failure
ensures that the failure will become a reality as a crowd mentality
takes over among the clientèle. The board of directors refuse to pledge
their capital to stave off the collapse of the bank, but the banker
makes a plea to the crowd, and just like George Bailey's depositors in
It's a Wonderful Life (1946),
the bank is saved as the fears of the crowd are ameliorated and
businessmen grateful to the banker pledge their capital to save the
bank. The board of directors, impressed by the banker's character and
his belief in the character of his individual clients (as opposed to
the irrationality of the crowd), pledge their capital and the bank run
is staved off and the bank is saved.
In his biography, "The Name Above the Picture," Capra wrote that before
American Madness (1932), he had
only made "escapist" pictures with no basis in reality. He recounts how
Poverty Row studios, lacking stars and production values, had to resort
to "gimmick" movies to pull the crowds in, making films on au courant
controversial subjects that were equivalent to "yellow journalism."
What was more important than the subject and its handling was the
maturation of Capra's directorial style with the film. Capra had become
convinced that the mass-experience of watching a motion picture with an
audience had the psychological effect in individual audience members of
slowing down the pace of a film. A film that during shooting and then
when viewed on a movieola editing device and on a small screen in a
screening room among a few professionals that had seemed normally paced
became sluggish when projected on the big screen. While this could have
been the result of the projection process blowing up the actors to such
large proportions, Capra ultimately believed it was the effect of mass
psychology affecting crowds since he also noticed this "slowing down"
phenomenon at ball games and at political conventions. Since
American Madness (1932) dealt
with crowds, he feared that the effect would be magnified.
He decided to boost the pace of the film, during the shooting. He did
away with characters' entrances and exits that were a common part of
cinematic "grammar" in the early 1930s, a survival of the "photoplays"
days. Instead, he "jumped" characters in and out of scenes, and
jettisoned the dissolves that were also part of cinematic grammar that
typically ended scenes and indicated changes in time or locale so as
not to make cutting between scenes seem choppy to the audience.
Dialogue was deliberately overlapped, a radical innovation in the early
talkies, when actors were instructed to let the other actor finish his
or her lines completely before taking up their cue and beginning their
own lines, in order to facilitate the editing of the sound-track. What
he felt was his greatest innovation was to boost the pacing of the
acting in the film by a third by making a scene that would normally
play in one minute take only 40 seconds.
When all these innovations were combined in his final cut, it made the
movie seem normally paced on the big screen, though while shooting
individual scenes, the pacing had seemed exaggerated. It also gave the
film a sense of urgency that befitted the subject of a financial panic
and a run on a bank. More importantly, it "kept audience attention
riveted to the screen," as he said in his autobiography. Except for
"mood pieces," Capra subsequently used these techniques in all his
films, and he was amused by critics who commented on the "naturalness"
of his direction.
Capra was close to completely establishing his themes and style. Justly
accused of indulging in sentiment which some critics labeled
"Capra-corn," Capra's next film,
Lady for a Day (1933) was an
adaptation of Damon Runyon's 1929 short
story "Madame La Gimp" about a nearly destitute apple peddler whom the
superstitious gambler Dave the Dude (portrayed by Warner Brothers star
Warren William) sets up in high style so
she and her daughter, who is visiting with her finance, will not be
embarrassed. Dave the Dude believes his luck at gambling comes from his
ritualistically buying an apple a day from Annie, who is distraught and
considering suicide to avoid the shame of her daughter seeing her
reduced to living on the street. The Dude and his criminal confederates
put Annie up in a luxury apartment with a faux husband in order to
establish Annie in the eyes of her daughter as a dignified and
respectable woman, but in typical Runyon fashion, Annie becomes more
than a fake as the masquerade continues.
Robert Riskin wrote the first four
drafts of Lady for a Day (1933),
and of all the scripts he worked on for Capra, the film deviates less
from the script than any other. After seeing the movie, Runyon sent a
telegraph to Riskin praising him for his success at elaborating on the
story and fleshing out the characters while maintain his basic story.
Lady for a Day (1933) was the
favorite Capra film of John Ford, the
great filmmaker who once directed the unknown extra. The movie cost
$300,000 and was the first of Capra's oeuvre to attract the attention
of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, getting a Best
Director nomination for Capra, plus nods for Riskin and Best Actress.
The movie received Columbia's first Best Picture nomination, the studio
never having attracted any attention from the Academy before
Lady for a Day (1933). (Capra's
last film was the flop remake of
Lady for a Day (1933) with
Bette Davis and
Glenn Ford,
Pocketful of Miracles (1961))
Capra reunited with Stanwyck and produced his first universally
acknowledged classic,
The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932),
a film that now seems to belong more to the oeuvre of
Josef von Sternberg than it does to
Frank Capra. With "General Yen," Capra had consciously set out to make
a movie that would win Academy Awards. Frustrated that the innovative,
timely, and critically well-received
American Madness (1932) had not
received any recognition at the Oscars (particularly in the director's
category in recognition of his innovations in pacing), he vented his
displeasure to Columbia boss Cohn.
"Forget it," Cohn told Capra, as recounted in his autobiography. "You
ain't got a Chinaman's chance. They only vote for that arty junk."
Capra set out to boost his chances by making an arty film featuring a
"Chinaman" that confronted that major taboo of American cinema of the
first half of the century, miscegenation.
In the movie, the American missionary Megan Davis is in China to marry
another missionary. Abducted by the Chinese Warlord General Yen, she is
torn away from the American compound that kept her isolated from the
Chinese and finds herself in a strange, dangerous culture. The two fall
in love despite their different races and life-views. The film ran up
against the taboo against miscegenation embedded in the Motion Picture
Producers and Distributors Association's Production Code, and while
Megan merely kisses General Yen's hand in the picture, the fact that
she was undeniably in love with a man from a different race attracted
the vituperation of many bigots.
Having fallen for Megan, General Yen engenders her escape back to the
Americans before willingly drinking a poisoned cup of tea, his
involvement with her having cost him his army, his wealth, and now his
desire to live.
The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932)
marks the introduction of suicide as a Capra theme that will come back
repeatedly, most especially in George Bailey's breakdown on the snowy
bridge in
It's a Wonderful Life (1946).
Despair often shows itself in Capra films, and although in his
post-"General Yen" work, the final reel wraps things up in a happy way,
until that final reel, there is tragedy, cynicism, heartless
exploitation, and other grim subject matter that Capra's audiences must
have known were the truth of the world, but that were too grim to face
when walking out of a movie theater. When pre-Code movies were
rediscovered and showcased across the United States in the 1990s, they
were often accompanied by thesis about how contemporary audiences
"read" the films (and post-1934 more Puritanical works), as the movies
were not so frank or racy as supposed. There was a great deal of
signaling going on which the audience could read into, and the same
must have been true for Capra's films, giving lie to the fact that he
was a sentimentalist with a saccharine view of America. There are few
films as bitter as those of Frank Capra before the final reel.
Despair was what befell Frank Capra, personally, on the night of March
16, 1934, which he attended as one of the Best Director nominees for
Lady for a Day (1933). Capra had
caught Oscar fever, and in his own words, "In the interim between the
nominations and the final voting...my mind was on those Oscars." When
Oscar host Will Rogers opened the
envelope for Best Director, he commented, "Well, well, well. What do
you know. I've watched this young man for a long time. Saw him come up
from the bottom, and I mean the bottom. It couldn't have happened to a
nicer guy. Come on up and get it, Frank!"
Capra got up to go get it, squeezing past tables and making his way to
the open dance floor to accept his Oscar. "The spotlight searched
around trying to find me.
'Over here!' I waved. Then it suddenly swept
away from me -- and picked up a flustered man standing on the other
side of the dance floor -
Frank Lloyd!"
Frank Lloyd went up to the dais to
accept HIS Oscar while a voice in back of Capra yelled, "Down in
front!"
Capra's walk back to his table amidst shouts of "Sit down!" turned into
the "Longest, saddest, most shattering walk in my life. I wished I
could have crawled under the rug like a miserable worm. When I slumped
in my chair I felt like one. All of my friends at the table were
crying."
That night, after Lloyd's
Cavalcade (1933), beat
Lady for a Day (1933) for Best
Picture, Capra got drunk at his house and passed out. "Big 'stupido,'"
Capra thought to himself, "running up to get an Oscar dying with
excitement, only to crawl back dying with shame. Those crummy Academy
voters; to hell with their lousy awards. If ever they did vote me one,
I would never, never, NEVER show up to accept it."
Capra would win his first of three Best Director Oscars the next year,
and would show up to accept it. More importantly, he would become the
president of the Academy in 1935 and take it out of the labor relations
field a time when labor strife and the formation of the talent guilds
threatened to destroy it.
The International Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences had been
the brainchild of Louis B. Mayer in 1927
(it dropped the "International" soon after its formation). In order to
forestall unionization by the creative talent (directors, actors and
screenwriters) who were not covered by the Basic Agreement signed in
1926, Mayer had the idea of forming a company union, which is how the
Academy came into being. The nascent Screen Writers Union, which had
been created in 1920 in Hollywood, had never succeeded in getting a
contract from the studios. It went out of existence in 1927, when labor
relations between writers and studios were handled by the Academy's
writers' branch.
The Academy had brokered studio-mandated pay-cuts of 10% in 1927 and
1931, and massive layoffs in 1930 and 1931. With the inauguration of
President Franklin D. Roosevelt on March 4, 1933, Roosevelt took no
time in attempting to tackle the Great Depression. The day after his
inauguration, he declared a National Bank Holiday, which hurt the movie
industry as it was heavily dependent on bank loans.
Louis B. Mayer, as president of the
Association of Motion Picture Producers, Inc. (the co-equal arm of the
Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association charged with
handling labor relations) huddled with a group from the Academy (the
organization he created and had long been criticized for dominating, in
both labor relations and during the awards season) and announced a 50%
across-the-board pay cut. In response, stagehands called a strike for
March 13th, which shut down every studio in Hollywood.
After another caucus between Mayer and the Academy committee, a
proposal for a pay-cut on a sliding-scale up to 50% for everyone making
over $50 a week; which would only last for eight weeks, was
inaugurated. Screen writers resigned en masse from the Academy and
joined a reformed Screen Writers Guild, but most employees had little
choice and went along with it. All the studios but Warner Bros. and Sam
Goldwyn honored the pledge to restore full salaries after the eight
weeks, and Warners production chief
Darryl F. Zanuck resigned in protest
over his studio's failure to honor its pledge. A time of bad feelings
persisted, and much anger was directed towards the Academy in its role
as company union.
The Academy, trying to position itself as an independent arbiter, hired
the accounting firm of Price Waterhouse for the first time to inspect
the books of the studios. The audit revealed that all the studios were
solvent, but Harry Warner refused to budge and Academy President
'Conrad Nagel' resigned, although some said he was forced out after a
vote of no-confidence after arguing Warner's case. The Academy
announced that the studio bosses would never again try to impose a
horizontal salary cut, but the usefulness of the Academy as a company
union was over.
Under Roosevelt's New Deal, the self-regulation imposed by the National
Industrial Relations Act (signed into law on June 16th) to bring
business sectors back to economic health was predicated upon
cartelization, in which the industry itself wrote its own regulatory
code. With Hollywood, it meant the re-imposition of paternalistic labor
relations that the Academy had been created to wallpaper over. The last
nail in the company union's coffin was when it became public knowledge
that the Academy appointed a committee to investigate the continued
feasibility of the industry practice of giving actors and writers
long-term contracts. High salaries to directors, actors, and screen
writers was compensation to the creative people for producers refusing
to ceded control over creative decision-making. Long-term contracts
were the only stability in the Hollywood economic set-up up creative
people,. Up to 20%-25% of net earnings of the movie industry went to
bonuses to studio owners, production chiefs, and senior executives at
the end of each year, and this created a good deal of resentment that
fueled the militancy of the SWG and led to the formation of the Screen
Actors Guild in July 1933 when they, too, felt that the Academy had
sold them out.
The industry code instituted a cap on the salaries of actors,
directors, and writers, but not of movie executives; mandated the
licensing of agents by producers; and created a reserve clause similar
to baseball where studios had renewal options with talent with expired
contracts, who could only move to a new studio if the studio they had
last been signed to did not pick up their option.
The SWG sent a telegram to FDR in October 1933 denouncing this policy,
arguing that the executives had taken millions of dollars of bonuses
while running their companies into receivership and bankruptcy. The SWG
denounced the continued membership of executives who had led their
studios into financial failure remaining on the corporate boards and in
the management of the reorganized companies, and furthermore protested
their use of the NIRA to write their corrupt and failed business
practices into law at the expense of the workers.
There was a mass resignation of actors from the Academy in October
1933, with the actors switching their allegiance to SAG. SAG joined
with the SWG to publish "The Screen Guilds Magazine," a periodical
whose editorial content attacked the Academy as a company union in the
producers' pocket. SAG President Eddie Cantor, a friend of Roosevelt
who had bee invited to spend the Thanksgiving Day holiday with the
president, informed him of the guild's grievances over the NIRA code.
Roosevelt struck down many of the movie industry code's anti-labor
provisions by executive order.
The labor battles between the guilds and the studios would continue
until the late 1930s, and by the time Frank Capra was elected president
of the Academy in 1935, the post was an unenviable one. The Screen
Directors Guild was formed at King Vidor's house on January 15, 1936,
and one of its first acts was to send a letter to its members urging
them to boycott the Academy Awards ceremony, which was three days away.
None of the guilds had been recognized as bargaining agents by the
studios, and it was argued to grace the Academy Awards would give the
Academy, a company union, recognition. Academy membership had declined
to 40 from a high of 600, and Capra believed that the guilds wanted to
punish the studios financially by depriving them of the good publicity
the Oscars generated.
But the studios couldn't care less. Seeing that the Academy was
worthless to help them in its attempts to enforce wage cuts, it too
abandoned the Academy, which it had financed. Capra and the Board
members had to pay for the Oscar statuettes for the 1936 ceremony. In
order to counter the boycott threat, Capra needed a good publicity
gimmick himself, and the Academy came up with one, voting
D.W. Griffith an honorary Oscar,
the first bestowed since one had been given to
Charles Chaplin at the first Academy
Awards ceremony.
The Guilds believed the boycott had worked as only 20 SAG members and
13 SWG members had showed up at the Oscars, but Capra remembered the
night as a victory as all the winners had shown up. However, 'Variety'
wrote that "there was not the galaxy of stars and celebs in the
director and writer groups which distinguished awards banquets in
recent years." "Variety" reported that to boost attendance, tickets had
been given to secretaries and the like.
Bette Davis and
Victor McLaglen had showed up to accept
their Oscars, but McLaglen's director and screenwriter,
John Ford and
Dudley Nichols, both winners like
McLaglen for The Informer (1935),
were not there, and Nichols became the first person to refuse an
Academy Award when he sent back his statuette to the Academy with a
note saying he would not turn his back on his fellow writers in the
SWG. Capra sent it back to him. Ford, the treasurer of the SDG, had not
showed up to accept his Oscar, he explained, because he wasn't a member
of the Academy. When Capra staged a ceremony where Ford accepted his
award, the SDG voted him out of office.
To save the Academy and the Oscars, Capra convinced the board to get it
out of the labor relations field. He also democratized the nomination
process to eliminate studio politics, opened the cinematography and
interior decoration awards to films made outside the U.S., and created
two new acting awards for supporting performances to win over SAG.
By the 1937 awards ceremony, SAG signaled its pleasure that the Academy
had mostly stayed out of labor relations by announcing it had no
objection to its members attending the awards ceremony. The ceremony
was a success, despite the fact that the Academy had to charge
admission due to its poor finances. Frank Capra had saved the Academy
of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and he even won his second Oscar
that night, for directing
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936).
At the end of the evening, Capra announced the creation of the
Irving Thalberg Memorial Award to honor
"the most consistent high level of production achievement by an
individual producer." It was an award he himself was not destined to
win.
By the 1938 awards, the Academy and all three guilds had buried the
hatchet, and the guild presidents all attended the ceremony: SWG
President Dudley Nichols, who finally had
accepted his Oscar, SAG President Robert Montgomery, and SDG President
King Vidor. Capra also had introduced the
secret ballot, the results of which were unknown to everyone but the
press, who were informed just before the dinner so they could make
their deadlines. The first Irving Thalberg Award was given to long-time
Academy supporter and anti-Guild stalwart
Darryl F. Zanuck by
Cecil B. DeMille, who in his
preparatory remarks, declared that the Academy was "now free of all
labor struggles."
But those struggles weren't over. In 1939, Capra had been voted
president of the SDG and began negotiating with AMPP President 'Joseph
Schenck', the head of 20th Century-Fox, for the industry to recognize
the SDG as the sole collective bargaining agent for directors. When
Schenck refused, Capra mobilized the directors and threatened a strike.
He also threatened to resign from the Academy and mount a boycott of
the awards ceremony, which was to be held a week later. Schenck gave
in, and Capra won another victory when he was named Best Director for a
third time at the Academy Awards, and his movie,
You Can't Take It with You (1938),
was voted Best Picture of 1938.
The 1940 awards ceremony was the last that Capra presided over, and he
directed a documentary about them, which was sold to Warner Bros' for
$30,000, the monies going to the Academy. He was nominated himself for
Best Director and Best Picture for
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939),
but lost to the
Gone with the Wind (1939)
juggernaut. Under Capra's guidance, the Academy had left the labor
relations field behind in order to concentrated on the awards
(publicity for the industry), research and education.
"I believe the guilds should more or less conduct the operations and
functions of this institution," he said in his farewell speech. He
would be nominated for Best Director and Best Picture once more with
It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
in 1947, but the Academy would never again honor him, not even with an
honorary award after all his service.
(Bob Hope, in contrast, received four
honorary awards, including a lifetime membership in 1945, and the Jean
Hersholt Humanitarian award in 1960 from the Academy.) The SDG
(subsequently renamed the Directors Guild of America after its 1960
with the Radio and Television Directors Guild and which Capra served as
its first president from 1960-61), the union he had struggled with in
the mid-1930s but which he had first served as president from 1939 to
1941 and won it recognition, voted him a lifetime membership in 1941
and a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1959.
Whenever Capra convinced studio boss
Harry Cohn to let him make movies
with more controversial or ambitious themes, the movies typically lost
money after under-performing at the box office.
The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932)
and Lost Horizon (1937) were both
expensive, philosophically minded pictures that sought to reposition
Capra and Columbia into the prestige end of the movie market. After the
former's relative failure at the box office and with critics, Capra
turned to making a screwball comedy, a genre he excelled at, with
It Happened One Night (1934).
Bookended with
You Can't Take It with You (1938),
these two huge hits won Columbia Best Picture Oscars and Capra Best
Director Academy Awards. These films, along with
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936),
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939),
and
It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
are the heart of Capra's cinematic canon. They are all classics and
products of superb craftsmanship, but they gave rise to the canard of
"Capra-corn." One cannot consider Capra without taking into account
The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932),
American Madness (1932), and
Meet John Doe (1941), all three
dark films tackling major issues, Imperialism, the American plutocracy,
and domestic fascism. Capra was no Pollyanna, and the man who was
called a "dago" by Mack Sennett and who
went on to become one of the most unique, highly honored and successful
directors, whose depictions of America are considered Americana
themselves, did not live his cinematic life looking through a
rose-colored range-finder
In his autobiography "The Name Above the Title," Capra says that at the
time of American Madness (1932),
critics began commenting on his "gee-whiz" style of filmmaking. The
critics attacked "gee whiz" cultural artifacts as their fabricators
"wander about wide-eyed and breathless, seeing everything as larger
than life." Capra's response was "Gee whiz!"
Defining Hollywood as split between two camps, "Mr. Up-beat" and "Mr.
Down-beat," Capra defended the up-beat gee whiz on the grounds that,
"To some of us, all that meets the eye IS larger than life, including
life itself. Who ca match the wonder of it?"
Among the artists of the "Gee-Whiz:" school were
Ernest Hemingway,
Homer, and
Paul Gauguin, a novelist who lived a heroic
life larger than life itself, a poet who limned the lives of gods and
heroes, and a painter who created a mythic Tahiti, the Tahiti that he
wanted to find. Capra pointed to Moses and the apostles as examples of
men who were larger than life. Capra was proud to be "Mr. Up-beat"
rather than belong to "the 'ashcan' school" whose "films depict life as
an alley of cats clawing lids off garbage cans, and man as less noble
than a hyena. The 'ash-canners,' in turn, call us Pollyannas, mawkish
sentimentalists, and corny happy-enders."
What really moves Capra is that in America, there was room for both
schools, that there was no government interference that kept him from
making a film like
American Madness (1932). (While
Ambassador to the Court of St. James,
Joseph P. Kennedy had asked
Harry Cohn to stop exporting
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
to Europe as it portrayed American democracy so negatively.) About Mr.
Up-beat and Mr-Downbeat and "Mr. In-between," Capra says, "We all
respect and admire each other because the great majority freely express
their own individual artistry unfettered by subsidies or strictures
from government, pressure groups, or ideologists."
In the period 1934 to 1941, Capra the created the core of his canon
with the classics
It Happened One Night (1934),
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936),
You Can't Take It with You (1938),
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
and Meet John Doe (1941), wining
three Best Director Oscars in the process. Some cine-historians call
Capra the great American propagandist, he was so effective in creating
an indelible impression of America in the 1930s. "Maybe there never was
an America in the thirties,"
John Cassavetes was quoted as
saying. "Maybe it was all Frank Capra."
After the United States went to war in December 1941, Frank Capra
rejoined the Army and became an actual propagandist. His "Why We Fight"
series of propaganda films were highly lauded for their remarkable
craftsmanship and were the best of the U.S. propaganda output during
the war. Capra's philosophy, which has been variously described as a
kind of Christian socialism (his films frequently feature a male
protagonist who can be seen a Christ figure in a story about redemption
emphasizing New Testament values) that is best understood as an
expression of humanism, made him an ideal propagandist. He loved his
adopted country with the fervor of the immigrant who had realized the
American dream. One of his propaganda films,
The Negro Soldier (1944), is a
milestone in race relations.
Capra, a genius in the manipulation of the first form of "mass media,"
was opposed to "massism." The crowd in a Capra film is invariably
wrong, and he comes down on the side of the individual, who can make a
difference in a society of free individuals. In an interview, Capra
said he was against "mass entertainment, mass production, mass
education, mass everything. Especially mass man. I was fighting for, in
a sense, the preservation of the liberty of the individual person
against the mass."
Capra had left Columbia after "Mr. Smith" and formed his own production
company. After the war, he founded Liberty Films with
John Ford and made his last
masterpiece,
It's a Wonderful Life (1946).
Liberty folded prior to its release (another Liberty film,
William Wyler's masterpiece,
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
was released through United Artists). Though Capra received his sixth
Oscar nomination as best director, the movie flopped at the box office,
which is hard to believe now that the film is considered must-see
viewing each Christmas. Capra's period of greatness was over, and after
making three under-whelming films from 1948 to '51 (including a remake
of his earlier
Broadway Bill (1934)), Capra didn't
direct another picture for eight years, instead making a series of
memorable semi-comic science documentaries for television that became
required viewing for most 1960's school kids. His last two movies,
A Hole in the Head (1959) and
Pocketful of Miracles (1961)
his remake of
Lady for a Day (1933) did little
to enhance his reputation.
But a great reputation it was, and is. Capra's films withstood the test
of time and continue to be as beloved as when they were embraced by the
movie-going "masses" in the 1930s. It was the craftsmanship: Capra was
undeniably a master of his medium. The great English novelist Graham
Greene, who supported himself as a film critic in the 1930s, loved
Capra's films due to their sense of responsibility and of common life,
and due to his connection with his audience. (Capra, according to the
1938 "Time" article, believed that what he liked would be liked by
moviegoers). In his review of
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936),
Greene elucidated the central theme of Capra's movies: "Goodness and
simplicity manhandled in a deeply selfish and brutal world."
But it was Capra's great mastery over film that was the key to his
success. Comparing Capra to Dickens in a not wholly flattering review
of
You Can't Take It with You (1938),
Green found Capra "a rather muddled and sentimental idealist who feels
-- vaguely -- that something is wrong with the social system" (807).
Commenting on the improbable scene in which Grandpa Vanderhof persuades
the munitions magnate Anthony P. Kirby to give everything up and play
the harmonica, Greene stated:
"It sounds awful, but it isn't as awful as all that, for Capra has a
touch of genius with a camera: his screen always seems twice as big as
other people's, and he cuts as brilliantly as Eisenstein (the climax
when the big bad magnate takes up his harmonica is so exhilarating in
its movement that you forget its absurdity). Humour and not wit is his
line, a humor that shades off into whimsicality, and a kind of popular
poetry which is apt to turn wistful. We may groan and blush as he cuts
his way remorselessly through all finer values to the fallible human
heart, but infallibly he makes his appeal - to that great soft organ
with its unreliable goodness and easy melancholy and baseless optimism.
The cinema, a popular craft, can hardly be expected to do more."
Capra was a populist, and the simplicity of his narrative structures,
in which the great social problems facing America were boiled down to
scenarios in which metaphorical boy scouts took on corrupt political
bosses and evil-minded industrialists, created mythical America of
simple archetypes that with its humor, created powerful films that
appealed to the elemental emotions of the audience. The immigrant who
had struggled and been humiliated but persevere due to his inner
resolution harnessed the mytho-poetic power of the movie to create
proletarian passion plays that appealed to the psyche of the New Deal
movie-goer. The country during the Depression was down but not out, and
the ultimate success of the individual in the Capra films was a bracing
tonic for the movie audience of the 1930s. His own personal history,
transformed on the screen, became their myths that got them through the
Depression, and when that and the war was over, the great filmmaker
found himself out of time. Capra, like
Charles Dickens, moralized political and
economic issues. Both were primarily masters of personal and moral
expression, and not of the social and political. It was the emotional
realism, not the social realism, of such films as
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939),
which he was concerned with, and by focusing on the emotional and moral
issues his protagonists faced, typically dramatized as a conflict
between cynicism and the protagonist's faith and idealism, that made
the movies so powerful, and made them register so powerfully with an
audience.