FRANK CAPRA MAKES HIS POINT

Frank Capra visited the AFI Conservatory on April 5, 1977, one month shy of his 80th birthday. The legendary director, known for such American film classics as 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), ARSENIC AND OLD LACE (1944) and IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946), shared his experiences with Fellows at the AFI Conservatory.

"From the very beginning my main concern was to be in control of everything: the story, the directing, the cameraman, the sound, the music. I couldn't see how anybody else could insert music I didn't want, or edit one way and photograph another. I thought all these constituents were an integral part of the film and had to come through me. I wanted to control the film even though I didn't write the music or do the actual developing. A battle emerged in Hollywood between individual and assembly-line picture makers. I could only accept art when it was an extension of the individual, not the committee.

Back in the 1930s, if you'd been smart, you wouldn't have done what I did. Anybody could get complete control over his picture from beginning to end if he was stupid enough to want it, because the chances of it being a hit were really pretty low, maybe one out of ten. You can get better odds on a crooked wheel.

So if you wanted complete control, everybody was very glad to give it to you because most people didn't want complete control – they wanted alibis. They wanted to say, ‘They gave me a lousy script. They gave me a lousy cast. They butchered it in the cutting room.'

During my first years in film I said, ‘My God, if they pay me for this crap I'm doing they must be nuts.' All I was hoping to get was enough money together so I could go back to Caltech and get a doctorate in physics. Film executives didn't mean much to me. They were just people who were silly enough to pay me for my kind of stuff. I'd say, ‘It's crazy, a graduate of Caltech who's never seen the inside of a studio, who's never been backstage, is making films.'

It was probably IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT that changed my mind. When it shook that old Oscar tree, then I finally said, ‘Wait a minute, maybe I'm pretty good at this. Maybe this is what I should be doing.'

From then on I began to think of cinema seriously, in the sense that maybe I could use it for a purpose besides being entertaining. And so I made my first picture in which I tried to say something that was socially important, MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN, and from then on I tried to use films to make a social point."