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Capra. Brought to the U. S. by his parents when he was 6, Frank Capra was reared in Los Angeles, where he and his brother Tony sold newspapers on street corners. When trade was slow, Tony punched Frank to attract attention, make Frank's papers sell quicker. Bright in school, Frank Capra graduated at 16, worked to save enough money to enroll at California Institute of Technology, where he majored in physics, learned to like the essays of Montaigne, won a $500 scholarship. In 1918, the year he graduated, Capra enlisted in the Coast Artillery. After the War, he became successively tutor to a grandson of Los Angeles' famed gambler. Lucky Baldwin; a pruner of orange trees at 20¢ a day; a writer of unsold short stories; a prop boy at an independent studio at Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street, site of Columbia's present studio; and, according to legend, a prosperous traveling salesman of worthless securities. According to Capra, the legend, brilliantly embroidered by Alva Johnston for the Saturday Evening Post, is apocryphal.
In 1921, in San Francisco, Capra encountered an ex-actor named Walter Montague, who was trying to produce movies there. Anyone who knew much about the movie business would have been highly skeptical of Montague. One of his notions was that San Francisco was going to become the U. S. cinema capital because it was so misty. Another was that he could make a fortune producing movies based on poems, either classic or written by himself. As Montague's assistant, Capra helped produce a one-reeler based on a Kipling ballad and made for $1,700 called Fultah Fisher's Boarding House, which was good enough to be distributed by Pathe and to play theatres all over the U. S. When Montague tried several other pictures based on his own writings, his company failed. But by this time Capra knew enough about picture-making to get a job as gagman for Hal Roach. When he had worked out gags for five Our Gang comedies, Capra asked Roach to let him try directing. Roach refused. Capra spent the next two years writing gags for Mack Sennett comedies, specializing in supplying gags for Comedian Harry Langdon. When Langdon went to First National as a feature comedian in 1926, he took his gagman with him, as director.