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6. The GagMan there is any shortcut to fame and fortune in motion pictures, it is as a gag man," Capra wrote in 1927. "Here you may jump to the top overnight, after the short probationary period, which is long enough to show you whether you have the stuff that makes gag men." Capra did not "jump to the top overnight," but his period as a Hollywood gag man between 1924 and 1927 was, indeed, a formative and decisive step in his career. He started with the Hal Roach Studios in Culver City. When Capra was working on the lot for $75 a week, the star performer was Will Rogers, who earned $2,000 a week. The witty young director Leo McCarey, whom Capra emulated, was making comedies with Charles Parrott (later known as Charlie Chase), and future director George Stevens was a cameraman. Roach had not yet teamed Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, but his Our Gang ensemble of "clever street kids" whom he hired in 1922 "to just play themselves in films and show life from a kid's angle" already was a box-office bonanza. According to the Roach payroll and production records, Capra's job on Our Gang began in late January or early February of 1924, several months earlier than his book has it, and he lasted not the six months he claimed but only seven or eight weeks. He implied that he left voluntarily to pursue a break as a director, but when he was discharged after a "short probationary period," he must have wondered if he did have "the stuff that makes gag men." He claimed that he got the job through a recommendation by Bob Eddy to Our Gang director Robert F. McGowan, but in a 1984 interview, Roach said, "McGowan did not hire writers. That was up to me." Roach, however , did not remember Capra working for him: "There was nothing in his working for the Hal Roach Studios that was in any way outstanding. He was just another writer to me in those days." Most likely the person who steered "5f 1 4 0 F R A N K C A P R A Capra to Roach and put in a good word for the young gag man was not Eddy but Capra's high school teacher Rob Wagner. Nothing would have been more natural than for Capra to have looked up Wagner when he heard that Wagner was directing Will Rogers comedies for Roach, such as Two Wagons, Both Covered, a burlesque of the hit Western The Covered Wagon, and High Brow Stuff, a satire of little theater groups. After Capra was assigned to provide gags for the Our Gang two-reelers Cradle Robbers and It's a Bear, the first complete script he wrote for Roach was for Jubilo, Jr., a sentimental short comedy in which Rogers played a takeoff on the philosophical tramp character from his most famous silent feature, the 1919 Jubilo. Because it was primarily an Our Gang film, with Rogers appearing only in the framing segments, it was directed by McGowan, but for Capra to have landed such a plum assignment so quickly suggests that Wagner was instrumental in getting him on the lot in the first place. "I never quite lost sight of Rob Wagner," Capra acknowledged. "He got around and he knew most everybody. He was a very sociable guy, very easy to talk to, and he loved all his students. He knew I was pretty good at gags, and he called me in to talk about it. He was a very dear friend of Chaplin's, and we talked a lot about how Chaplin worked, how he got his material, and everything else." **Bob McGowan was one of the nicest guys I ever knew, the oddest guy I ever knew, and one of the funniest," Roach said of his Our Gang director. "He looked and acted serious, but he was quite the reverse, actually. You never knew what was going to happen next with Bob McGowan.McGowan was very good at ad-libbing. And nobody could handle kids any better than he could." Capra, however, found McGowandour and unsympathetic. McGowan, he claimed, would not let him come on the set and accepted his work grudgingly and with an obvious lack of enthusiasm. Roach, who took the sole writing credit for himself on the early Our Gang pictures, said that while it was highly unusual for a writer to be barred from...

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