> Director Frank Capra often said that the making of It Happened One Night would have made a pretty good screwball comedy in itself. Consider the elements: two irascible studio bosses, an impossibly fast schedule, a couple of spoiled stars who didn't want to make the picture and are hostile to the harried director - yet somehow they manage to produce an enduring classic.

> To fulfill MGM's obligation to loan-out a star to Columbia, Capra first asked for Myrna Loy as the female lead. She took one look at the script and turned it down. Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, then tried to borrow Miriam Hopkins, Constance Bennett, Margaret Sullavan, Carole Lombard and Bette Davis from various studios, only to be turned down by each of them. Cohn also suggested Loretta Young, who had starred in Capra's Platinum Blonde (1931), but the director wasn't interested.

> One reason many name actresses turned down the chance to star in It Happened One Night was because of Columbia Pictures, which at the time was considered only one notch above "Poverty Row" studios.

> Luckily, Columbia had a major asset in Capra, who had been nominated for an Academy Award for Lady for a Day (1933). Capra and writer Robert Riskin had adapted and renamed a magazine story called "Night Bus," and Cohn had arranged to borrow Robert Montgomery from MGM for the lead in the newly named It Happened One Night. But Montgomery balked, saying there were already "too many bus pictures."

> Instead, MGM studio boss Louis B. Mayer made Cohn an offer he couldn't refuse. "I got an actor here who's being a bad boy," Mayer reportedly told Cohn. "I'd like to spank him." The bad boy was Clark Gable, who was becoming an important star, and flexing his muscles. He told Mayer he wouldn't play any more gigolo roles, and he wanted a raise. Mayer would punish him by exiling him to Siberia on Poverty Row. Gable arrived for his first meeting with Capra drunk, rude, and angry. In spite of this inauspicious beginning, Capra and Gable eventually became friends. Once Gable read the script, he realized the character was a man very like himself, and he enjoyed making It Happened One Night.

> Claudette Colbert, under contract to Paramount, had four weeks free, but she was also a hard sell. She'd made her first film, For the Love of Mike (1927), with Capra directing, and it had been a disaster, so she was not excited about repeating the experience. What did excite her, however, was the prospect of making $50,000 for four weeks of work, since her Paramount salary was $25,000 per film. So she willingly agreed to do it, but, at the same time, she gave Capra a hard time.

> Although Colbert had gladly disrobed for DeMille in The Sign of the Cross (1932), she refused to be shown taking off her clothes in the motel room sequence in It Happened One Night. No matter. Draping her unmentionables over the "walls of Jericho" made for a sexier scene anyway. More problematic was the hitchhiking scene. Colbert didn't want to pull up her skirt and flash her legs. So Capra hired a chorus girl, intending to have her legs stand in for Colbert's in closeup. Colbert saw the girl posing, and said "get her out of here, I'll do it - that's not my leg!"

> After shooting wrapped, Colbert told friends, "I've just finished the worst picture in the world!"

> According to Frank Capra in an interview with Richard Schickel for The Men Who Made the Movies: "We made the picture really quickly - four weeks. We stumbled through it, we laughed our way through it. And this goes to show you how much luck and timing and being in the right place at the right time means in show business: how sometimes no preparation at all is better than all the preparation in the world; and sometimes you need great preparation, but you can never outguess this thing called creativity. It happens in the strangest places and under the strangest of circumstances. I didn't much care for the picture, yet it turned out to be It Happened One Night."