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9. American Madness hile Capra was on his honeymoon, Robert Riskin was putting the finishing touches on an original screenplay called Faith. The subject was a bold and timely one:a run on a bank. More than 3,600 American banks had failed since the end of 1929,one fifth of all the banks in the country, with deposits totaling more than $2.5 billion. In March of 1932, as Columbia put Faith into production, faith in the American economic system was a scarce commodity indeed. The Bank Holiday proclaimed by President Roosevelt and his dramatic overhaul of the banking system were a year away; Herbert Hoover was still in office. In the meantime, Americans were hoarding more than $100 million they were afraid to deposit in banks, contributing to a critical deficit in treasury reserves. As Faith started filming, the 1932 presidential campaign was just getting under way, with candidate Roosevelt arguing that the onlyway to end the bank crisis was for people to stop hoarding and to "puttheir money to work." Before 1932, the Depression was reflected in movies mostly as a backdrop for the depradations of gangsters, but by that year, when Warners made / Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and Columbia dealt with the Bonus Army and congressional corruption in Washington Merry-Go-Round, Hollywood had been forced to admit that American institutions were in serious trouble. For by then, even the film industry itself was no longer "Depression-proof." With a fourth of the country's workers unemployed, ticket sales had fallen drastically. Paramount and RKO would be in receivership within a year, and Fox and Warners would be close to bankruptcy . Only the mighty MGMand the frugal Columbia were still healthy. "Every time Capra made another film, Columbia built another soundstage ," Al Keller recalled. Capra's films were so much in demand that Columbia was able to use them as spearheads in block-booking deals, w. 2 4 8 F R A N K C A P R A forcing theater chains to accept other Columbia films in order to play Capra's—an arrangement that literally meant the difference between life and death for a studio without its own theaters. Columbia was thus in the unique position of being competitive without needing the chains that were dragging down the major studios. Because of the expenditures involved in the conversion to sound, all of the studios had become heavily indebted to banks, mostly in the East, giving bankers an unprecedented degree of control over the movie industry . Columbiawent public with its stock in 1932, when Joe Brandt sold his holdings and Harry Cohn added the presidency to his role as production chief by acquiring a 50 percent ownership, with Jack Cohn becoming vice president and treasurer. Columbia as a result had more capital on hand than other studios, and its lack of theaters kept it relatively independent of Wall Street control, but it still depended greatly on its close ties with the California-based Bank of America and the brothers Giannini. Starting on a shoestring with his Bank of Italy, which he founded in San Francisco in 1904, Amadeo Peter Giannini had made his reputation as the champion of "the little guy" by loaning money on character rather than on collateral. The Bank of Italy (whose successor, the Bank of America, was created in 1928) pioneered branch banking services, advertised forborrowers , and billed itself as "The Bank for Just Plain Folks." Adventurous and freewheeling, the Italian-Catholic-Democrat—dominated Bank of Italy was viewed by the staid eastern banks with the same suspicion they held for the Jews who dominated the movie business, and A. P. Giannini's bank was one of the first to recognize the potential of motion pictures. At the urging of his younger brother Dr. Attilio H. (Doc) Giannini, a physician who switched to banking and took charge of motion picture lending at the Hollywood office, the Bank of Italy made its first loan to a film company in 1909, and it introduced the practice of accepting motion picture negatives as collateral, a practice that later would enable Capra and Riskin to make Meet John Doe, and Capra to make It's a Wonderful Life, productions financed primarily by the Bank of America. Doc Giannini followed the principle of loaning on character when he took a chance in 1919 on Harry Cohn, Joe Brandt, and Jack Cohn, lending them the $100,000 they needed to capitalize their new movie...

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