The Wonderful Life of Frank Capra

In 1983, Michael Thomas was running the San Diego Film Society and invited legendary director Frank Capra, then 86, and his longtime cinematographer, Joseph Walker, to San Diego for a lecture and a screening of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.� The city where Capra met his wife, Lucille, while shooting a picture 50 years earlier held happy memories for him, and during the limousine ride through the winding mountains from his La Quinta residence, he reflected on his wonderful life--which began exactly 100 years ago, in Palermo, Sicily, on May 18, 1897--in this never-published interview.

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Question: Why didn’t you become an engineer after graduating from Caltech? How did you become a director?

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Capra: I couldn’t get a job. It was right after World War I and everything was closing down. I never saw a movie until I made one [the one-reel “Fultah Fisha’s Boarding House� in 1922, for which he was paid $75].

After that, I got a job for two years in a lab putting home movies together, editing them, for room and board. That was a great learning experience.

Q: You got your big break directing Harry Langdon, in “The Strong Man,� in 1926.

A: He was the sorriest case I ever met in show business. When his pictures became big and the critics began comparing him to Charlie Chaplin, it went to his head. His problem was that he thought he had created his own character but since he hadn’t, he didn’t understand the concept at all. I had been reading the book, “The Good Soldier Schweik,� and I thought that kind of character, the passive man-child who loves everybody, would fit Harry perfectly. With that moon face of his, he could wander through all these situations, but it was important that he not instigate any of them. He was just God’s own holy fool protected by his own innocence.

Well, when he got big, he thought he could do the thing all by himself, just like Chaplin--write, direct--but it was a disaster for him. Years later, when he was down on his luck, I saw him being directed by somebody who kept yelling at him, “Faster, Harry, faster!� Well, the one thing you did not say to Harry Langdon was to move faster.

Q: Speaking of Chaplin, was he an influence on your work?

A: Chaplin? [snorts] He was a bastard.

Q: What?!?

A: I mean, he was a great filmmaker and all, but the way he treated people. . . . I’ll never forget when Doug Fairbanks Sr. died in 1939, the motion picture academy wanted to award him a special posthumous Oscar, because he had been the first president of the academy. Well, he and Chaplin had been the best of friends, so Mary Pickford and Doug Jr. had wanted Chaplin to present the award.

Since I was president of the academy, they wanted me to go over to Catalina and ask him to present the Oscar. So I go down to Long Beach and sail over to where Chaplin had his yacht moored. We pulled up to the yacht and I met this big goon and I said, “I’m here to see Mr. Chaplin.� The lug disappears and then after a while returns and says, “Mr. Chaplin is not to be disturbed.� Well, I blew up. “You go and tell Mr. Chaplin that Mr. Frank Capra, the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, has just traveled for three hours to come to see him.� The guy disappears and then returned, saying, “Mr. Chaplin is not to be disturbed.�

So I go back to Long Beach, furious. . . . I’m sailing back, thinking, what am I going to tell Doug Jr. and Mary?

But Mary just said, “Don’t worry about it, Frank. We always knew Charlie was a little [expletive].� We got Doug Jr. to present the award.

Q: You were very involved with the academy during some critical times.

A: It was being used by the studio heads to try and destroy the guilds in the mid-’30s. And they were going to destroy the academy to do it. Well, I didn’t want to see that happen, I knew the Academy Awards are the best advertising for the film industry. So in 1935 we decided to try and unite the industry by honoring the man who started it all, D.W. Griffith. Except nobody knew where he was. I found him in a bar in Kentucky, dead drunk.

Well, we got him sobered up and brought him back to Hollywood and presented him with a special Oscar [in March 1936] and it worked; it helped to reunite the industry and save the academy.

Q: What does it take to be a director?

A: The ability to make quick decisions. Everybody’s asking you questions--�Where do I put this?,� “How do I play this scene?� Problems have to be solved and you have to be able to solve them immediately. If I take a penny and toss it, I’ll be right in predicting it 50% of the time. In show business, if you’re right 50% of the time, you’re ahead of the game. It doesn’t matter if you’re not right all the time, but you’ve got to make those snap decisions!

Q: Did you ever have any blowups on your sets?

A: I never bawled out anyone on the set--except once on [“Mr. Smith�], there was this English actor [Claude Rains] who I knew would be perfect for the part. He said to me, “I hear you like to improvise. I’ll have none of that, I must have all my lines 10 days in advance.� I really wanted him so I said sure thing.

Now one day we’re shooting this scene with Rains and Jimmy Stewart in a train, and it needs to be drawn out a little. So I sat down and typed out some dialogue for them. When I handed the pages to Rains he looked at it and says, “What’s this? It’s in my contract that I be given 10 days to learn my lines.�

Well, I exploded. “What the [expletive] are you, an actor or an accountant? If you’re going to be counting the minutes on this picture I want you off my set.� Now, we weren’t too far along in the shooting but I didn’t think he’d leave. Well, he learned the dialogue and the scene went fine.

On the last day of shooting he came up and put his arm around me. “I want to thank you,� he said. “For years I’ve had a mental block about having to learn my lines in advance because I was afraid I couldn’t learn them fast enough, and you broke me of that.�

Q: You co-wrote most of your scripts--why didn’t you sign them?

A: Why? I already had the name above the title. Besides, what’s a script? Words on paper. People don’t go to a movie to see words on paper. How you turn those words into life--that’s a director’s job.

Q: What directors’ work do you like?

A: There were a lot of directors whose work I liked--John Ford, Howard Hawks, Leo McCarey, Alfred Hitchcock--now, there was a fellow who liked to eat, and it showed. He sure knew how to make movies, though. I know a lot of people think that “Citizen Kane� is the greatest thing since the Second Coming, but nobody ever asked me about it.

The father of us all was D.W. Griffith. Everybody learned from him, and what happened to him--to be forgotten by the industry he created--was a real black mark on Hollywood.

Another director I liked was [Sergei] Eisenstein. I became friends with him when he came over to Hollywood and I saw him in Russia. He was a broken man because he had displeased Stalin. “Fronk,� he would say in that accent of his, “I am in zee doghouse.� He made some powerful films but I always thought they could have been better if, instead of the grand sweep of historical events, he could have concentrated on people. Individuals instead of the masses.

People talk to me about my political films and I stop them. I never made political films. I made films about people.

Q: You got some great performances from your actors. Was there a special method you had?

A: Some, like Frank Sinatra or Barbara Stanwyck, you couldn’t rehearse because they would leave their best work in rehearsals. With others you had to act as a morale booster. Jean Arthur used to burst into tears because she thought she was terrible. Gary Cooper was always insecure about his acting, so you had to give him confidence in himself, because he was a better actor than he realized.

Then you get someone like Jimmy Stewart, who’s a director’s dream. You don’t really direct an actor like Jimmy Stewart, you just stand back and watch him do his thing. Generally speaking, though, women make the best actors, and Stanwyck was the best I ever worked with.

Q: What about Gable? He won his only Oscar with you, for “It Happened One Night.�

A: That’s a funny story, because he didn’t want to do the picture. Louis B. Mayer wanted to punish him for asking for a raise by sending him over to little old Columbia Studios on Poverty Row. So, he shows up drunk one afternoon and comes into my office and says, “So this is what Siberia looks like.� I asked him, “Mr. Gable, would you like to take a look at the script?� And he said, “Buddy, I don’t give a [expletive] what you want to do with it� and then left. And that was my first meeting with Clark Gable.

Q: I’m always surprised at the “Capracorn� charge leveled at your films. They’re actually quite dark.

A: They are dark! “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington� deals with corruption and betrayal, he’s ready to say “the hell with America,� and throw it all away. “Meet John Doe� is about fascist manipulation of the common man. “It’s a Wonderful Life� deals with suicide.

But you’ve got to offer the audience some hope. We originally had “Meet John Doe� end with his jump off the bell tower on Christmas Eve, but the preview audiences just wouldn’t accept it.

Q: The continued appeal of “It’s a Wonderful Life� must be very gratifying.

A: It’s amazing how often I still get letters from people, thanking me for that movie and how it literally saved their life. I tell you, there’s something in that picture that I didn’t put there. It has a life of its own.

Q: You earned your wings with that one.

A: [chuckles] That’s right! I earned my wings.