Biography Book Corner #1: Frank Capra's "The Name Above the Title"— Chapter 10: "Burn the First Two Reels"

This blog entry will be my first in a series of ongoing irregularly posted entries highlighting individual chapters of biographies and autobiographies of film personnel. It's meant to be a blog version of grabbing a book off the shelf that catches your eye— at a friend's house or the book store— and reading a chapter of it. The summarization of the chatper below may inspire the reader to take a look at the book for themselves, or at the very least, it will supply some info on a classic film.


The "Burn the First Two Reels" chapter of Capra's autobiography, The Name Above the Title deals with the 1937 classic Lost Horizon. Below, a summary.


• Capra was invited by Columbia studio head Harry Cohn (along with others) to see a Stanford-U.S.C. football game in Palo Alto, and browsing in Union Station's newstand he came upon James Hilton's book, bought it, read it, and dreamed about it that night.

• At breakfast the next morning Capra told Cohn he wanted him to option the book and that he wanted $2 million for the budget— five times the cost of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. Cohn agreed on a six-month option on the book, but said he'd wait to see how Deeds did before greenlighting Lost Horizon. When Deeds was a success, Cohn decided to take the gamble.

• Famed explorer, writer, and photographer of Tibet, Harrison Forman served as technical advisor.

• The Tibetans were played by Pala Indians from the San Diego Mountains.

• Henry Eichman, a California collector of rare, authentic Tibetan trumpets and horns, loaned the production his antique instruments.

• Ronald Colman was Capra's only choice for the lead. He felt that the others on the plane should be "familiar faces" too because they represented the "known" world, and that the inhabitants of Shangri-La should be unknowns (including newcomers Jane Wyatt [with Colman, on right] and Margo).

• The casting of the High Lama was originally given to a 90-year-old stage performer who had never been in movies, but after a successful screen test, he died ("The long hoped-for Hollywood call had come. He smiled, and died.") [The next candidate, Henry B. Walthall, the Little Colonel of The Birth of a Nation, died before he could be tested.]

• Stage actor Sam Jaffe got the part of the High Lama— his whispery line readings were initially a problem since the microphones were left wide open to pick up his dialogue and the occasional stomach rumble from a crew member was heard.

• The snow sequences were filmed in a industrial cold storage warehouse, which caused such technical issues as fogged film and short-circuiting cables. ("With wind machines, snow machines, and back-projection machines we conjured up the Arctic rigors of the Himalayas.")

• Capra hired Dimitri Tiomkin (who he strongly believed in) for his first movie score; Capra, though, had Max Steiner conduct the orchestra, knowing that had Steiner disliked the score he would have stepped in himself. Capra was ecstatic with Tiomkin's score, however. [NOTE: Tiomkin has a few earlier screen credits.]

• At the first screening in the studio projection room, everyone was pleased including Cohn. At the Santa Barbara preview, the film was met with laughter and walk-outs. ("The preview was a shambles. Lost Horizon was an unshowable, unreleaseable motion picture.")

• Capra made a bold decision in deleting and burning the first two reels of Lost Horizon— amounting to twenty minutes screen time— and asked Cohn for a new preview screening. [NOTE: Capra's claim of cutting the first two reels is considered an oversimplification of what really happened. Film historians believe that Capra did indeed cut twenty minutes of the film but that it included more sophisticated cutting than simply deleting the opening. The early part of the film, was, however, cut. It was a prologue in which Ronald Colman begins to tell his story on a cruise ship. The footage, which Capra claims to have burned, has never been recovered.]

• The new preview, in San Pedro, was a success; "the audience was spellbound."

• Columbia's "class" VP, "bon vivant" Nate Spingold, marketed the film to the world's literati according to Capra and thusly "put [the] Poverty Row [studios] on the map."

• Capra concludes his chapter saying (without much in the way of modesty), that he pioneered the beginning of the "one man, one film" concept versus the "committee" method of Louis B. Mayer.

Here, Capra is on Cavett talking about the Santa Barbara preview:

Frank Capra's "Our Mr. Sun" (1956) and Other TV Docs

From 1956-58, Frank Capra wrote, directed, and produced a series of four television documentaries that aired several months apart for the Bell Telephone System. They were: Our Mr. Sun (1956), on the composition of the sun, its effects on the Earth, and the use of solar energy; Hemo the Magnificent (1957), about the circulatory system in the human body; The Strange Case of Cosmic Rays (1957), about the effect of cosmic rays on the Earth; and The Unchained Goddess (1958), about weather study.

The first of the series, Our Mr. Sun, is available on the Internet Archive. The third, The Strange Case of Cosmic Rays, is on You Tube. I watched Our Mr. Sun and although was bored through the first twenty minutes or so, I then got into it, particularly the talk of solar energy (coming back around these days). I ultimately found it charming and interesting. It was also nice that Lionel Barrymore was one of the voices, a reuniting with Capra since It's A Wonderful Life, and surely one of his last performances (he died in 1954). The Strange Case of Cosmic Rays, despite the presence of the Bil and Cora Baird puppets, is dull. An eye-opening one-minute excerpt of The Unchained Goddess is on You Tube which addresses global warming a la An Inconvenient Truth. (All four are available on DVD.)

Link to Our Mr. Sun from the Internet Archive NOTE: It will run smoothly after it loads all the way.

Embed of The Strange Case of Cosmic Rays: Part 1 (full three parts total available) from You Tube:



Embed of global warming excerpt from The Unchained Goddess from You Tube:

Capra for Christmas Eve: It Happened One Night (1934)

Frank Capra's films often enter the TV and personal DVD rotation at years-end. It's perhaps the fact that they expose society's materialistic tendencies at the most commercial time of year, combined with those happy, upbeat "everything will be all right" endings that make them perfect holiday fare. The dark corners of Capra's films serve as reminders in the blinding happiness of the holiday season that greed, selfishness, and bureaucratic red tape will be back come January 2nd. Maybe its because of the relative social tranquility of the Eisenhower era that Capra's films of the '50s are his least known, footnotes in film history for producing two Oscar-winning best songs (HERE COMES THE GROOM's "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening" and A HOLE IN THE HEADS's "High Hopes"). And his early films lacked the total creative freedom he needed and demanded in his later work. His better-known movies were made in the midst of the Great Depression, through the war, and during the noirish post-war era (from 1933s LADY FOR A DAY to 1946s IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE). Its these ten films (the number excludes his PRELUDE TO WAR documentaries) that are considered his best work, and each is a film classic. Featuring idealistic hereos who work outside the system to make progress within society thereby exposing conformism (even George Bailey is a nonconformist despite giving up his "dreams"), they end in those signature "only in the movies" climaxes, that have kept them popular through the intervening years.

Frank Capra won three Academy Awards for best director during this period, and received three additional nominations. His first win was for IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT, which also swept the awards that year.

IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT is about an heiress who flees her wealthy father (when he disapproves of her new husband) and falls for a street-smart newspaperman who sees her story as the scoop of the year. Claudette Colbert plays Ellen Andrews opposite Clark Gable's Peter Warren, who doesn't let his newspaper or the Andrews fortune blind him from his ideals. And those ideals lean ultimately toward the romantic side, which is why, aside from the occasional social commentary, the movie exists as a blueprint for the romantic comedy (and the start of the "screwball" genre).

Among the film's funniest scenes is when Peter and Ellen work together to fool detectives by pretending to fight like a married couple. The levity of the film is kept up in clever ways as when, for example, it takes time out for a scene in which the bus passengers sing “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze.” The inevitable romance is not forced, and Peter’s stubborn disinterest in Ellen keeps it real (and gives Colbert opportunity to show off some acting chops: especially in a scene when she’s stung by Peter’s insults after a moment when they nearly kiss). Some post-“production code” moments have pre-code flavor, particularly in the dialogue (Peter: “Why didn’t you take off all your clothes, you could have stopped forty cars.”)

It Happened One Night (1934): Eternally contemporary film with a dash of Depression era realism not only defined the era’s screwball comedy genre but provided the blueprint for the modern romantic comedy.