48 Fun Facts About Frank Capra

On which Mediterranean island was Frank Capra born in 1897?

Sicily. The family left when he was a small boy and settled in Los Angeles, where Frank sold newspapers after school to help keep them afloat.

What does the surname Capra mean in Italian?

Goat. He was born Francesco Rosario Capra, and chose the name Frank Russell Capra for himself when he became an American citizen in 1920.

How did the Capra family travel to America in 1903?

In steerage on the steamship Germania, the cheapest way across. Capra remembered 13 days with no privacy or ventilation and called it the most degrading place you could ever be.

Capra worked his way through which university, graduating in chemical engineering in 1918?

Caltech, then still called Throop College of Technology. He played banjo in bars to help pay his way, and late in life he left the school part of his ranch as a retreat.

Which future Second World War air hero attended Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles alongside Capra?

Jimmy Doolittle. In April 1942 he led 16 Army bombers off the deck of an aircraft carrier to strike Tokyo, the first American raid on Japan's home islands.

What did Capra teach to artillerymen in the Army during the First World War?

Mathematics. He taught in San Francisco until he caught the 1918 flu and was discharged, then drifted through odd jobs for years before stumbling into films.

Capra's first film, Fultah Fisher's Boarding House, was based on a ballad by which writer?

Rudyard Kipling. Capra overstated his Hollywood experience and talked a San Francisco actor-producer into letting him direct the one-reeler.

After writing Our Gang gags for Hal Roach, Capra joined which slapstick producer known as the 'King of Comedy'?

Mack Sennett. He gave Capra a first chance to direct for a big studio in 1925, then fired him as incompetent three days into the shoot.

Capra directed The Strong Man and Long Pants for which baby-faced silent comedian?

Harry Langdon. The pair split after Long Pants and Langdon took over directing his own films, a move many believe sank his career within a few years.

Which Columbia Pictures mogul hired Capra and employed him through his 1930s heyday?

Harry Cohn. His studio was a Poverty Row outfit short of money, stars and prestige, and its breakthrough came with the hits Capra directed there.

Capra's Ladies of Leisure (1930) made a star of which actress, who went on to make several more films with him?

Barbara Stanwyck. Her first two talkies had flopped when Capra cast her; the film was her breakthrough, and she became one of his favourite leading ladies.

Which screenwriter, Fay Wray's husband, formed a famed writer-director team with Capra?

Robert Riskin. A New York playwright who went west when the talkies needed dialogue, he won an Oscar for It Happened One Night and later became Capra's partner in an independent company.

Which Oscar first belongs to Capra's It Happened One Night (1934)?

A sweep of the 'Big Five' categories: Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay. The winner was a cheaply made comedy from Columbia, then one of Hollywood's minor studios.

Who starred opposite Claudette Colbert as the roguish reporter in It Happened One Night?

Clark Gable. MGM lent its star to little Columbia for the part, by Hollywood legend as a punishment, and he came back with the Best Actor Oscar.

Capra's 1934 screwball classic was based on which 1933 short story, also its shooting title?

Night Bus. Samuel Hopkins Adams published it in Cosmopolitan in 1933, and Capra went through Myrna Loy, Margaret Sullavan and Miriam Hopkins before he landed a leading lady.

Which cartoon character may have been partly inspired by It Happened One Night?

Bugs Bunny. Animator Bob Clampett said the rabbit's carrot-munching was modelled on a scene in which the film's hero chomps a carrot while talking fast with his mouth full.

As of 2026, which director has more Best Director Oscars than Capra?

John Ford. He won four to Capra's three, yet none was for a western, the genre that made his name.

Which 1936 Capra film features a tuba-playing greeting-card poet who inherits a fortune?

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. When Deeds decides to give the whole fortune away to people ruined by the Depression, his relatives haul him into court to have him declared insane.

Capra's 1938 Best Picture winner You Can't Take It with You adapted a play by which duo?

George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. Capra's version of their Pulitzer-winning Broadway hit put him on the cover of Time in August 1938, hailed as the top director in the industry.

Which actor played the naive senator Jefferson Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington?

The story was loosely based on Montana senator Burton K. Wheeler and the Teapot Dome investigation.

In Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, what does the young senator resort to when the Senate moves to expel him?

A filibuster. Smith talks into a 24th hour while his secretary signals from the gallery which rules will let him keep the floor, then faints amid baskets of telegrams demanding he quit.

Which US ambassador in London urged Columbia to keep Mr. Smith Goes to Washington out of Europe?

Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. With war breaking out, he feared a film about a bought-and-paid-for Senate would hurt America's standing abroad and pressed the studio to withdraw it; Columbia released it anyway.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington won only one of its eleven Oscar nominations, in which category?

Best Original Story. Lewis R. Foster won for the tale behind the film, a slim return for a hit that had the Senate's Democratic leader, Alben Barkley, fuming that it made the chamber look like 'a bunch of crooks'.

Capra developed a Columbia biopic of which composer, George Sand's lover, later filmed without him as A Song to Remember?

Chopin. Capra was announced as its director in 1938 but left Columbia the next year; the studio went ahead without him, and Charles Vidor's Technicolor version finally reached cinemas in 1945.

Who starred as the drifter turned 'common man' in Capra's Meet John Doe (1941)?

Gary Cooper. His down-and-out ex-ballplayer is paid to pose as the author of a faked letter threatening a Christmas Eve suicide, and the ending gave Capra so much trouble that his original was scrapped.

Capra's 1937 film Lost Horizon, adapted from James Hilton's novel, is set in which hidden paradise?

Shangri-La. Capra's most lavish production ran far over budget, and the studio needed years of reissues before it finally turned a profit.

Which actor starred in Capra's 1944 black comedy Arsenic and Old Lace?

Cary Grant. Shooting wrapped in 1941, but the deal with the play's producers barred a release until the Broadway run ended, so the film sat on the shelf until 1944.

Days after Pearl Harbor the 44-year-old Capra agreed to join the US Army Signal Corps at what rank?

Major. He hurried Arsenic and Old Lace to completion first, then reported to Washington in February 1942 to start making films for the troops.

Which Army Chief of Staff wanted the Why We Fight films made and picked Capra for the job?

George C. Marshall. He wanted millions of new draftees shown why they were fighting, and reckoned a Hollywood storyteller would hold their attention better than the Army's own training-film makers.

Which Why We Fight film shared the Oscar for best documentary of 1942?

Prelude to War. It was made only to be shown to new recruits, but President Roosevelt was so impressed that he wanted civilians to see it too, and it went on general release in cinemas.

Who created the map sequences for the Why We Fight films?

Walt Disney and his animators. Their moving maps showed Axis conquests spreading across the globe in funereal black, turning strategy into something any new recruit could follow at a glance.

Capra dreamed up Private Snafu, a bungling cartoon soldier for Army training films, with many scripts by which children's author?

Dr. Seuss. Theodor Geisel joined the Army's film unit in 1943 and wrote many of the shorts, in which Snafu, voiced by Mel Blanc, does everything wrong so that real recruits would learn not to.

Which two directors, later of Roman Holiday and Shane, were Capra's partners in Liberty Films?

William Wyler and George Stevens. Their first release, It's a Wonderful Life, cost so much that it lost money, and the company was soon sold to Paramount.

Capra's film It's a Wonderful Life is based on which self-published short story?

The Greatest Gift. Philip Van Doren Stern printed it himself and posted it to friends as a Christmas card in 1943; a copy reached RKO, and Capra later bought the film rights from the studio.

What is the name of George Bailey's guardian angel in It's a Wonderful Life?

Clarence Odbody. He is an angel second class who has waited a long time for his wings, and the bell that rings on the Baileys' Christmas tree in the last scene tells George he has finally earned them.

What happened in 1974 that made It's a Wonderful Life a fixture of American Christmas television?

Its copyright lapsed. Nobody renewed it, so stations could fill December schedules with the film over and over, and a box-office disappointment of 1946 slowly became a Christmas classic.

Which actress was borrowed from MGM to play Mary in It's a Wonderful Life?

Donna Reed. Long cast as the wholesome girl next door, she won her only Oscar when she finally played against type, as a prostitute in From Here to Eternity.

For It's a Wonderful Life, RKO mixed a quiet new fake snow from soap, sugar, water and which fire-extinguisher chemical?

Foamite. Film snow had been cornflakes painted white, which crunched so loudly that dialogue was dubbed in afterwards; Capra wanted live sound, so the new mix was sprayed quietly over the set.

Capra's State of the Union starred which screen pair as a presidential hopeful and his wife?

Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Hepburn stepped in days before shooting after Claudette Colbert fell out with Capra; she already knew the script from helping Tracy rehearse it.

In the 1950s Capra produced four colour science specials, starting with Our Mr. Sun, for which sponsor?

The Bell System. The telephone giant hired Capra during an eight-year gap between his cinema features, and he wrote and produced hour-long television lessons on subjects from the sun to cosmic rays.

Capra's final film, Pocketful of Miracles (1961), remade which of his own 1933 movies?

Lady for a Day. Both films tell Damon Runyon's tale of Apple Annie, a street pedlar whom a gangster passes off as a society lady to fool her visiting daughter; the remake was a box-office disappointment.

Which space novel, filmed in 1969 with Gregory Peck, had Capra abandoned years earlier over its budget?

Marooned. Capra could not fit it into the budget Columbia would allow and walked away; John Sturges's film of three astronauts stranded in orbit opened months before Apollo 13 made the plot real.

What was Capra's 1971 autobiography called?

The Name Above the Title. The boast was earned: in the 1930s he became one of the first directors whose name was billed over a film's own title on posters and marquees.

In 1982 Capra became the tenth recipient of which career honour, handed over at a televised tribute?

AFI Life Achievement Award. Retired from directing since the 1960s, Capra had built a second career as a travelling teacher, touring schools and colleges to lecture on film.

Which Oscar host's cry of 'Come up and get it, Frank!' in 1934 had Capra leaving his seat for another Frank's prize?

Will Rogers. Capra, sure that his first directing nomination had won, got up to collect the award, but Rogers meant Frank Lloyd, the director of Cavalcade.

Capra's films championed the little man against bankers and bosses, but what were his own politics?

Conservative Republican. He opposed Franklin Roosevelt all through the Depression, and the liberal streak in his films owed more to his screenwriters than to him.

Which Frank Sinatra song from Capra's 1959 comedy A Hole in the Head became John F. Kennedy's 1960 campaign tune?

High Hopes. It won the Oscar for best song, and Sinatra then recorded it again with new lyrics urging Americans to vote for Kennedy.

Capra's 1931 comedy Gallagher was renamed Platinum Blonde before release to cash in on which co-star's fame?

Jean Harlow. The film was shot under the name of top-billed Loretta Young's character, but Columbia retitled it to trade on the rising star's much-publicised platinum hair.