Over at Columbia Pictures, director Frank Capra and his writer, Robert Riskin, wanted Mutiny on the Bounty to be their next picture, but the studio couldn't afford the rights. In its place, Capra picked "Night Bus," which they got for $5,000. It was a short story written by Samuel Hopkins Adams that had appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine. They were all set to start on the script when studio head Harry Cohn announced that Capra was being loaned to MGM to make a picture for Irving G. Thalberg.

At MGM, Capra was given several scripts to choose from and picked a melodrama called Soviet. Thalberg promised him an all-star cast including Wallace Beery, Marie Dressler, Joan Crawford and Clark Gable. Then Thalberg took ill and had to go to Europe for his health. As soon as he left, Mayer started canceling his pet projects, including Soviet. Capra returned to Columbia, but had been at MGM long enough that they still owed Columbia the loan of one of their stars.

Back at Columbia, Capra decided to get back to work on "Night Bus." Working with Riskin, he re-shaped the story to make the leads more sympathetic. As part of the process, the chemist became first an artist, then a newspaper reporter following the heiress to get his old job back.

Several other film stories involving bus trips had failed to perform well at the box office (Fugitive Lovers and another bus picture, Universal's Cross Country Cruise, both 1934, were prime examples), so Capra and screenwriter Robert Riskin, under pressure from Harry Cohn, changed Night Bus to the new title, It Happened One Night. At one point, Capra tried to get Cohn to drop the film, but with the Gable loan already settled, it was too late to back out.

by Scott McGee & Frank Miller