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13. "Columbia's Gem"
- University Press of Mississippi
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13. "Columbia's Gem" efore July 1937, when the producers agreed to hold contract talks with the Screen Directors Guild, the guild had been limping along with a membership of only ninety directors, but that month another seventy-one agreed to come aboard, including Frank Capra. Capra signed his membership application on August 8, eighteen months after the formation of the SDG. Despite his later claim that "I wouldn't put the Academy above the Directors Guild, because that wouldn't be kosher," his six prior years of promanagement activity with the Academy had helped the studios stall recognition of the actors', writers', and directors' guilds. But once the actors became powerful enough to force the producers' hand and the Academy removed itself from labor-management issues, Capra lost most of his power base. Seeing events turning inexorably in labor's direction, he began listening to the arguments of his fellow directors. Before that time, King Vidor recalled, "All our activities wereconcentrated on getting these directors who were holdouts as members, slowly and with great difficulty." As Rouben Mamoulian put it, "We started taking different directors to lunch or dinner and shaming them intojoining us." After the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Wagner Act on April 12, 1937, the Hollywood guilds acquired momentum. SAG signed its first contract in May, and by June 1 the SWG mustered about 400 writers in support of its certification petition to the National Labor Relations Board. That May the directors formulated their contract demands and decided to admit assistant directors and unit production managers as Junior Guild members, swelling the SDG's total strength to about 550 by the end of the summer. In a 1985 interview, Capra said the pressure on him to become a B 3 7 6 F R A N K C A P R A member had intensified in December 1936, when he asked the SDG to send Oscar ballots to its members. It was to win the guilds' pledge not to boycott the 1937 ceremony that the Academy promised to stay out of labormanagement issues. When he met with the guild board members at their modest office in the Crossroads of the World building at 6671 Sunset Boulevard, "they hopped on me," Capra recalled, with Vidor demanding, "Frank, what the hell are you breaking your ass about the Academy for? Why don't you want to do anything for the directors?" According to Vidor, the conspicuous absence of Capra and other big names from the SDG's membership was one of the factors that had prevented the start of negotiations with Joseph Schenck, president of the Association of Motion Picture Producers: "We were workingto get 100 percent membership of at least all the important directors before going after a contract . I went to England to do a film for MGM, then Frank Capra came in and was the president when we had enough important directors as members, when we went after the original recognition and contract. It was just by the unified strength of all the directors getting together that we succeeded in getting recognition." Capra said he came in because he felt, "What the hell, my heart's more here than it is any other place." "The guild needed him more than the Academy did," Chet Sticht said. "The Academy job was a figurehead, a pat-on-the-back kind of thing. There wasn't a hell of a lot to it except for presiding over the Academy Awards ceremony and a few meetings. The guild had a fight on its hands." His troubles with Harry Cohn over Lost Horizon and his placement on the Hollywood "blacklist" contributed to Capra's new militancy on behalf of his fellow directors, he admitted in his book. The month Capra agreed to join the SDG was the month he returned to Hollywood from his trip to Europe and the U.S.S.R., and he signed his SDG membership form twenty days before filing his lawsuit to win his freedom from Columbia. It was during his holdout from the studio that he was elected to the guild's board on October 4. Though Mamoulian said the studios had attempted to blacklist directors who belonged to the guild, Capra, joining as late as he did, felt no such intimidation: "Fuck, / didn't get worried about being blacklisted. Howcould they blacklist me? I'd blacklist them. Everybody wanted to give me jobs. My career was made by them...