Frank Capra bluffed his way into movies with no experience at all
A Sicilian immigrant who crossed the Atlantic in steerage at five, Frank Capra trained as a chemical engineer, drifted through flophouses, then lied about having film experience to land his first directing job. That engineering degree later gave him a rare edge when sound arrived and most of Hollywood was fumbling in the dark.
Francesco Rosario Capra was born in 1897 in Bisacquino, near Palermo, the youngest of seven children of a fruit grower. In 1903 the family made a 13-day crossing on the steamship Germania in the cheapest berths, an ordeal Capra remembered as degrading, and settled in an Italian enclave on the East Side of Los Angeles. He sold newspapers for a decade, then paid his way through the California Institute of Technology by playing banjo in nightclubs and doing laundry, graduating in chemical engineering in 1918.
Success did not follow. After Army service teaching maths to artillerymen and a bout of Spanish flu, he spent a jobless year feeling like a failure, then wandered the West hopping freight trains and taking odd jobs, including poker and selling oil stocks. Nearly broke while peddling Elbert Hubbard's books, he read about a new San Francisco studio in an old gymnasium, pretended he had come from Hollywood, and was paid $75 to direct a one-reel short. Shot in two days with amateurs for $1,700, it sold to Pathé for $3,500.
He then learned the trade from the ground up as a prop man, editor, title writer and gag writer for the Our Gang comedies, and wrote and directed for the comedian Harry Langdon until the two fell out after Long Pants (1927). Harry Cohn rehired him at Columbia in 1928, then a struggling Poverty Row studio. Capra made nine films in his first year there, rose from $1,000 per picture to $25,000 a year, and became the first director to have his name placed above a film's title.
Sound was his opening. Where many studio heads dismissed talkies as a fad, Capra had been stunned by Al Jolson singing in The Jazz Singer, and his technical training let him handle the new equipment. Through the 1930s he won three Best Director Oscars from six nominations, with films such as It Happened One Night (1934). After wartime propaganda work on the Why We Fight series, It's a Wonderful Life (1946) disappointed at first, only to be reappraised decades later.
Source: Frank Capra
