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10. "The catastrophe of Success" t was just a few days before the start of shooting on Madame La Gimp. "Harry," Capra told Cohn when they met at the studio, "I want you to face the fact that you're spending three hundred thousand dollars on a picture in which the heroine is seventy years old." Cohn rose from his desk and stared out his window onto Gower Street. Then he turned back to Capra: "AllI know is the thing's got a wallop. Go ahead." Thus was made Lady for a Day, the first film for which Capra received an Academy Award nomination for best director. Also the first Columbia film to receive a best-picture nomination, it was a stunning artistic and financial success that sealed the thirty-six-year-old Capra's status as oneof Hollywood's master directors. And yet he almost had not made the film. His doubts contrasted starkly with the enthusiasm Cohn and Riskin always had for the project. Capra's autobiography contains a revealing "error" regarding the chronology of events leading to Lady for a Day. He seemed to think that his four-month stay at MGM working on Soviet came after the making of Lady for a Day, not before it. Such a significant misplacing of time is hard to accept as a simple memory lapse, and indeed other evidence suggests it may have been a deliberate attempt to obscure the extent of Riskin's contribution to Lady for a Day. Capra discussed the genesis of Lady for a Day in a September 1934 interview with Eileen Creelman of the New York Sun: "I'd read the Runyon story for years before we made it. I'd never thought of it as a picture. I used to tell it all the time, to anyone who would listen, just as an amusing story. Then someone at the studio started to tell it to me. I stopped him and said I knew it. I can't remember who the fellow was,but it was he who suggested filming it. Then I began thinking about it as a picture. The more I thought, the better I liked it." 9 2 9 0 F R A N K C A P R A Harry Cohn's memory, in an interview the previous March with the New York Telegraph, was more precise: "We believe here that writers are more important than either star or director," the studio chief said, "because the story is the whole foundation of the film. A weak story with the greatest cast ever assembled cannot produce a great picture. Look at Lady for a Day. . . . More credit is due to Riskin for that picture than to Damon Runyon, who wrote it as a magazine story. Another studio [Fox], which has first call on the stories in that magazine [Cosmopolitan], passed it up. But Riskin saw something in it—the basic story idea—and liked it. He showed it to Frank Capra, who also liked it, and they went to work." Riskin, despite his own Oscar nomination for Lady for a Day, made no public claim to being the prime mover. At first he may have accepted Capra's egotism as part of the Hollywood system that enabled directors to hog the glory they should have shared with screenwriters. But his resentment grew, and in time it would break up their highly successful collaboration . Runyon, like Cohn, recognized where the central credit lay for the film. He wired profuse appreciation to Riskin for his manifold improvements in the story, and after reading press commentaries describing himself as the "author" of Lady for a Day, Runyon went on public record in a February 1935 interview: "I wish you would quote me that Lady for a Day was no more my picture than Little Miss Marker, which, like the former picture, was almost entirely the result of the genius of the scenario writers [sic] and the director whoworked on it. ... Howthe hell, then, could I be called the author of the picture? . . . I hope I have too keen a sense of literary ethics to assume the role of 6 fly catcher' or the applause from something that was not mine." Capra's sense of ethics was more flexible. His reluctance to share credit for Lady for a Day with Riskin by name in the Creelman interview ("I can't remember who the fellow was") was the first public sign of a carefully cultivated amnesia which...

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