Frank Capra

Although Frank Capra (1897–1991) is best 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. He worked with or knew socially everyone in the movie business from Mack Sennett, Chaplin, and Keaton in the silent era through the illustrious names of the golden age. He directed Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Jean Harlow, Claudette Colbert, Bette Davis, and others. Reading his autobiography is like having Capra sitting in your living room, regaling you with his anecdotes. In The Name Above the Title he reveals the deeply personal story of how, despite winning six Academy Awards, he struggled throughout his life against the glamors, vagaries, and frustrations of Hollywood for the creative freedom to make some of the most memorable films of all time.

The Name Above The Title

Autobiographie

Hollywood Story

World War II Why We Fight: The Battle of Russia

Philip Van Doren Stern

Frances Goodrich

Albert Hackett

Offers the original screenplay for Frank Capra's 1946 film, including camera shots and instructions

Screenplay

It's a Wonderful Life

Jo Swerling

The Original Screenplay of Frank Capra's Cinematic Masterpiece

James W. Rodgers

A Play in Two Acts

The Name Above the Title

An Autobiography

Frank Capra: the Name Above the Title

Charles Wolfe

Frank Capra, Director

Meet John Doe

The never-before-published 1966 novel by legendary film director Frank Capra finally in print for the first time "If you, too, feel like wandering, come along and help me unravel this odd tale--a tale full of half-truths, whole-truths, and no-truths at all." So begins Frank Capra's never published, and often speculated about novel of his favorite place--Silver Lake, nestled in the jagged cliffs of the eastern Sierra Nevadas. Capra casts the fictional Frank Capra in the lead roll of this novel of environmental and humanitarian preservation. As tourism comes back to the decimated boom towns of the eastern Sierras, Frank Capra finds himself, along with a do-good cop named Lefty, at the center of a scandal. That scandal being that they provided food and protection to two men living off the grid in the wilderness, while the powers that be have been desperately trying to clear the men out of the area, being not the kind of folk they want in their towns. In a story that only Frank Capra can tell, the David and Goliath of small-town tourism politics comes to a head in the wilderness of the Sierra Nevadas.Cry Wilderness is a deeply humane novel about the ways in which people caring for one another ultimately triumphs over oppression.

Cry Wilderness

Frank Capra: The Name Above the Title

FILM ¨ BIOGRAPHY--> Few Hollywood directors had a higher profile in the 1930s than Frank Capra (1897Ð1991). He served as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and of the Screen Directors Guild. He won three Academy Awards as best director and was widely acclaimed as the man most responsible for making Columbia Pictures a success. This popularity was established and sustained by films that spoke to and for the times--It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Meet John Doe, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. These replicated the nation's hopes and dreams for a national community. He worked with some of the brightest stars in Hollywood--James Stewart, Clark Gable, Jean Arthur, Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, Claudette Colbert, Bette Davis, Donna Reed, and Ann-Margret. Capra's interviews express his connection to the national audience and explore his own story. He was a Sicilian immigrant boy who survived rough-and-tumble beginnings to become Hollywood's most bankable director. In reflecting on his life, almost every one of his films was a parable of acclaim verging on disaster. He spent much of the 1940s in uniform while making films for the War Department. Although Capra was an optimist, World War II and his series of Why We Fight films called his legendary optimism into question. His postwar film It's a Wonderful Life (1946) gave an answer to those questions with an astonishing directness Capra never equaled again. In 1971 he published his autobiography, The Name Above the Title. Many of the interviews collected here come from this period when, as an elder statesman of motion picture art and history, he reflected on his long career. The interviews portray the Capra legend vividly and demonstrate why the warm relations between Capra and his audiences continue to inspire acclaim and admiration. Leland Poague, a professor of English at Iowa State University, is the editor of Conversations with Susan Sontag (University Press of Mississippi). He is the author of Another Frank Capra and The Cinema of Frank Capra: An Approach to Film Comedy.

Interviews

Although Frank Capra (1897-1991) is best 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. He worked with or knew socially everyone in the movie business from Mack Sennett, Chaplin, and Keaton in the silent era through the illustrious names of the golden age. He directed Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Jean Harlow, Claudette Colbert, Bette Davis, and others. Reading his autobiography is like having Capra sitting in your living room, regaling you with his anecdotes. In The Name Above the Title he reveals the deeply personal story of how, despite winning six Academy Awards, he struggled throughout his life against the glamors, vagaries, and frustrations of Hollywood for the creative freedom to make some of the most memorable films of all time.

Frank Capra (1897-1991) è uno dei grandi maestro del cinema del Novecento e ha celebrato come nessun altro sul grande schermo l’american way of life degli anni Trenta e Quaranta, con capolavori quali È arrivata la felicità (1936), Arsenico e vecchi merletti (1944), La vita è meravigliosa (1946) e Angeli con la pistola (1961). Figlio di contadini siciliani, passa dalla laurea in ingegneria alla macchina da presa, ottenendo nel 1934 la consacrazione vera e propria con Accadde una notte, primo film in assoluto a conquistare i cinque Oscar più importanti (miglior film, miglior regia, miglior sceneggiatura, migliore attore protagonista e miglior attrice protagonista).In questo libro – un’autobiografia avvincente come un romanzo – Capra ripercorre la propria vita, dai duri sacrifici per farsi un’istruzione al trionfo che gli garantì un privilegio fino ad allora riservato solo alle grandi star di Hollywood: fu il primo regista a poter vantare in apertura dei suoi film «il nome sopra il titolo». Con un’introduzione di Fabio Stassi e una nota di John Ford.

La vita meravigliosa di un maestro del cinema

Il nome sopra il titolo

Frank Capra

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