The Name Above The Title: An Autobiography - Frank Capra

Fan of film?

The next time you stand at the end of a film you’ve enjoyed to watch the credits roll, go straight to your nearest library or rare/old book store and ask them to show you to (or order) The Name Above The Title: An Autobiography by Frank Capra.

No luck there?  Try Amazon!

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Frank+Capra+autobiograph&i=stripbooks&ref=nb_sb_noss_2

There is no better primer of the history of Hollywood than this engaging, anecdotal, masterpiece told by the man who was there not only to see it all---but to do it all.

As his NY Times obituary (1897-1991) states so eloquently Capra not only was known as the director of It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, You Can't Take It with You, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Arsenic and Old Lace, and It's a Wonderful Life, he was also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, as well as a behind-the-scene force in the Director's Guild, the Motion Picture Academy, and the Producer's Guild.

And as we turn the pages of this elderly autobiography, we get to know, through his genius for storytelling, Hollywood’s iconic studio heads, editors, directors, and writers---from the famous and infamous actors to the key grips.

He takes us along for a career ride from the silent films, to the talkies, to the Golden Age. We meet Mack Sennett, Charlie Chaplin, and Buster Keaton. We walk the set with him; megaphone in hand, as he directs the likes of Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Jean Harlow, Barbara Stanwick, Katherine Hepburn, Loretta Young, Claudette Colbert, and Bette Davis.

The Capra film/career opens with our autobiographer bluffing his way into silent movies in 1922. With no background in the making of films, he went into directing and producing a successful one-reeler. Taking it in from there, he went on to perfect his skills, jumping from props man to gag writer to producing and directing.

How visual is his writing? Close your eyes and Capra’s story, not unlike a moving picture, comes to life.  And for a director who was known for his optimistic, idealistic, sentimental and patriotic films he, in this autobiography, gives us an entertaining and informative dose of  inside Hollywood wars that would eventually make him shout “Cut!” and walk off the set.  Which in fact, he did, during his fights with Max Sennett and Harry Cohn.  For several years this genius held out against the studios (Columbia) and didn’t work for a day.

During WWII Capra was called upon to produce documentary films---one an Oscar winner. Prelude to War would introduce America to the rhyme and reasons for the fight that lay ahead. And speaking of war, there were times when he went into battle with superior officers in an effort to tell the story as he saw it. Threatened by court marshals, not only would these stories, originally produced exclusively for military showings, would at FDR’s direction, eventually play in the U.S. and in theaters around the world.  

Oh, the title for his autobiography?  Capra, who won three Oscars in the 1930s and 1940s, was one of the first Hollywood directors to see his name appear on marquees above the movie’s title.

Now, before you go to the internet or Netflicks to order videos of Capra’s classics, here to whet your appetite from the autobiography, are a few pullouts from Capra’s wonderful Past Page Turner.

Max Sennett (The Father of Film Slapstick).  Capra worked for Sennett as a gag writer.

In the time-honored weapons for annoying the frauds---the banana peel, the snowball hitting the high hat, the slapstick, and the inflated bladder---were too few and too tame for Mack the Momus.

The banana peel he added such slippery messes as spilled wallpaper paste. He rolled the proverbial snowball---and gathered; flowerpots, bricks, bags of flower, streams from fire hoses. To the token slap of the inflated bladder he added the crunch of maces, bed slats, Billy clubs, loose floor boards, stepped-on rakes.

But even with these additions audience interest palled at too much of the same. Insatiable moviegoers demanded bigger and funnier violence.  Sennett obliged with higher pratfalls, huge rubber mallets the size of small kegs, vases and statues of thin breakaway plaster to smash on people’s heads. Furniture to hurl was built of light yucca or balsa wood that splintered on contact.  Windows to dive through were made of transparent candy and bricks to throw were fashioned of felt.

Ha! But audiences began to sense the new props were phony. Mayhem-in-ersatz lost its punch---and its laughs. A new prop was needed: Something that demolished dignity yet looked real---and more important---was real to audiences

They found it! When Ford Sterling, during a scene in a bakery shop, spontaneously picked up a pie ---and threw it: Eureka! The Pie! It was safe, utterly devastating---and everyone knew it was the Real Custard. The mallet is dead---Long live the Pie! Burlesque had found its ultimate weapon against pomposity---at Sennett’s by accident.

Harry Cohn:

Here his friend Briskin introduces an unknown Capra as a potential director to Columbia’s powerful Harry Cohn

“Harry, this is Frank Capra. He---“

Cohn looks up from the phone and says to Briskin, “Okay—okay---okay--! It’s a deal, it’s a deal. Scram!”

“But Harry don’t you wanna hear the---“
“For Chrissaake, Sam, will you get your ass outta here. I’m busy. Put ‘em to work.”

That was my introduction to Harry Cohn, one of the damndest, one of the biggest, and one of the most controversial characters Hollywood has ever known.

As we were leaving, practical minded Briskin summed up the bizarre goings-on with this comment. “Crazy day today---even for this joint.”

Jimmy Stewart:   

Capra often selected his actors without the aid of screen tests---he just knew he knew.

For the main roles there was little interviewing. Jimmy Stewart and Jean Arthur were made to order natural team---the simon-pure idealist, and the cynical, fed-up-with-politics Washington secretary with a dormant heart of gold. They were signed up at the very inception of the project.

Later, a bit of Capra creativity:

Jimmy Stewart had to be hoarse for the final hours of his filibuster. He found it difficult to fake hoarseness, particularly when called upon to project his voice from the back row of the Senate floor. We called in a throat doctor. “Doc, we know you can reduce hoarseness, but can you induce it>” that’s a switch he laughed. “Yes, I think I can.”

Twice a day Jimmy’s throat was swab bed  with vile mercury solution that swelled and irritated his vocal cords. The result was astonishing, No amount of acting could possibly simulate Jimmy’s intense, pathetic efforts to speak through red swollen cords.

It Happened One Night:  

Bus films were becoming regular fare in Hollywood and had not done well at the box office.  And when the word of mouth smash hit It Happened One Night opened, the critics were less than kind and then….five Oscars!

Astonishingly enough, the news about It Happened One Night (starring Clark Gable and Claudine Colbert featuring that famous hitchhiking scene which helped put both actors on the Hollywood map) was not that it made the “classic” ranks, but that it ever got made at all. A film about the making of It Happened One Night would have been much funnier than the picture itself. It would have furnished comical proof of two Hollywood adages: The only rule in filmmaking is that there are no rules, and the only prediction is that all predictions are by guess and by God until the film plays the theaters. And who would have it any other way? Uncertainty is the fun of it all; the door that can’t be locked by film rajahs against adventuresome newcomers.

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town:

Capra was advised by studio heads that he couldn’t play Mr. Deeds (Gary Cooper, a bumpkin who had suddenly inherited20 million dollars) as that same tuba playing hick whose hobby was chasing fire trucks, not after he learned that he was rich.  But Capra held fast to his vision for the Cooper character.

I had learned what all committed filmmakers learn---to go for broke on your own gut judgments, for gut decisions are of a piece with your talents. And talents are not self-acquired, but gifts from on high.

….Did this new “dedication” affects my picture making, or my relationship with other creative minds? Yes, it did---drastically. Beginning with Mr. Deeds goes to town my films had to say something. And whenever they said had to come from those ideas inside me “that were hurting to come out.”  No more would I accept scripts hurriedly written and count on my ability to “juggle  many balls I the air”  to make films entertaining ; no more would I brag about my powers to “shoot the phone book” and make it funny…..and regardless of differences with studio heads, screenwriters, or actors---the thought, heart, and substance of a film were mine.

You Can't Take It with You: You can’t Take it with You had to be my next film. But---producer Sam Harris’s asking price was staggering: two hundred thousand dollars! Harry Cohn’s sequel blew out the phone fuses. “Tell that goniff Harris I wouldn’t shell out two hundred G’s for the second coming!”

Then came the year of exile and lawsuits---Cohn bought me You Can’t Take it with You (the Broadway play) for two hundred thousand dollars!  The record price made theatrical headlines.

Why this mania to film Kaufman and Hart’s play? Because it was a laugh riot? Pulitzer Prize play? Of course/ But I also saw something deeper, something greater. Hidden in You Can’t Take It With You was a golden opportunity to dramatize Love Thy Neighbor in living drama. What the language of film might say more entertainingly to movie audience—it could prove, in theatrical conflict that Christ’s spiritual law can be the most powerful sustaining force in anyone’s life.

The conflict: Devour thy neighbor versus love thy neighbor. The weapons: a bank full of money against a household of love. The stakes: the future happiness of two young people, a Kirby son and a Vanderhof granddaughter; and more important, the viability of a lamb when confronted by a lion.

But you may ask can a defenseless lamb cope with a lion armed with fangs and claws and a willingness to use them? He can. And how he does, was, for me, a new dramatic format that I used in practically all my future films.

Arsenic and Old Lace

Having purchased the rights to the play Arsenic and Old Lace, Capra rounded up an all-star team of actors (Carry Grant) and paid them handsomely to shoot the film almost overnight. He just let the comedy run wild, knowing this Broadway smash hit couldn’t fail as a film and that he’d make a small fortune by taking the deal on a box office percentage basis.  He then learned that this guaranteed classic was tied up contractually by Jack Warner and couldn’t be shown in public theaters for four years.

In a blackout in London it was easy to recognize American soldiers ‘voices in Piccadilly Circus, or in Grosvenor Square.  A couple of times, listening to GI’s horse playing around, I heard them shout: “Charge!

Soon after, at the RAF mess in Pinewood, several British flyers came running up to my table, brandishing imaginary cutlasses and yelling: “Charge!”

I pointed my finger at them and cried out: “You guys have seen Arsenic and Old Lace---right?”

“Righto!” And we laughed our bloody heads off, we did,

Old softy Jack Warner had released the film to all our armed forces a full year before he could play it in public theaters. Batty Teddy Roosevelt’s “Charge!” up the stairs became a catchword where ever Americans wore uniforms. Late on the Los Angeles Dodger baseball fans took it up as a call to action.  Other baseball fans followed, until today, “Charge!” is a familiar battle cry for home-team rooters in several sports.

You will probably remember the big plot to make Arsenic and Old Lace on a percentage basis so that I wouldn’t have to dig in tot the old sock to keep my family going while was in uniform. How did that plot work out?  A disaster. The picture was not played in theaters until 1944. Then it made money so fast my first percentage check was for $232,000!  Great! Oh, sure. The federal and State income taxes on it added up to $205,000!

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington:

After attending a White House press conference in preparation for the producing of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, having just watched FDR answer world shaking questions regarding WWII, Capra had second thoughts about the wisdom of his film.

“Panic hit me. Japan was slicing up the colossus of China, piece by piece. The Nazi panzers had rolled into Austria and Czecholoslovakia; their thunder echoed over Europe.  England and France shuddered. The Russian bear growled ominously in the Kremlin. The Black cloud of war hung over the chancelleries of the world. Official Washington from the President down was in the process of making hard, torturing decisions.

And here was I, in the process of making a satire about government officials; a comedy about a callow, hayseed Senator who comes to Washington carrying a crate of homing pigeon----to send messages back to Ma---and disrupts important Senate deliberations with a filibuster.

Capra leaves the press conference shaken, again doubting the wisdom of the film, He is now caught in a pre-production panic and wanders off, ending up at the Lincoln Memorial.

“ and there in the most majestic shrine we have in America, sat the colossal marble figure of our greatest man---rumpled, lanky, homely---his eyes daily filling the hearts of thousands of Americans with deep, deep compassion that seemed to well out of from his own great soul; eyes that seemed to say, “Friend, I have seen it all. It is good.” 

Along with dozens of tourists I read the words that were carved on the memorial wall, the words of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. I heard the voice of a child reciting the words. There next to me, an eight year old boy was holding the hand of a very old man---whose body and sight were failing---and reading him Lincoln’s inspirational words in a voice as clear and innocent as a bell.

“I went back (then) to Hollywood to get to work on Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.  The panic was over. It is never untimely to yank the rope of freedom’s bell.”

Highest non-battlefield Military Honor.

Capra, angry about being called in by his superiors on his last day, is “drummed” out of the Army with a bit of a surprise

“I remember General Marshall uncoiling a parchment from its binding ribbon and reading words, some which I caught: “….the United states of America…greeting…the President…Act of congress….awarded the Distinguished Service Medal…Capra…Signal Corps…meritorious….distinguished…duties ….of great responsibilities…1945…Secretary of War…”

Then General Marshall picked up more parchment and read a longer citation of my Army efforts.  But I was beyond hearing.

The Distinguished Service Medal…me!  The highest award the Army can bestow outside of actual combat.  General Pershing had received the Distinguished Service Medal, and General Eisenhower, and General Marshall.

And now General Marshall is coming over to pin that great honor on me. Camera bulbs flash…I look like a bum…I flush with shame.  The general shakes my hand…other generals surround me…pump my hand …don’t break now…frank McCarthy rescues me…leads me to his office and out into hall…I walk down the hall…like a zombie….citations in one hand, medal box in the other…got into the first washroom…into a cubical…lock the door…sit on the toilet seat…and cry like a baby…

Okay, now get your hands on The Name above the Title. So vivid and visual is Capra’s writing that you’ll hear him shout, “Cut!” and “Roll ‘Um!”