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Studio head Frank Capra Jr. dies at 73

Frank Capra Jr., a producer who helped build a major television and movie studio and whose father directed the Christmas classic “It’s A Wonderful Life,” has died.
/ Source: The Associated Press

Frank Capra Jr., a producer who helped build a major television and movie studio and whose father directed the Christmas classic “It’s A Wonderful Life,” has died. He was 73.

Capra Jr. died Wednesday night at a hospital in Philadelphia, said Bill Vassar, the executive vice president of Wilmington-based EUE Screen Gems Studios, of which Capra was president. Capra died after a long fight with prostate cancer, Vassar said.

“With his Hollywood pedigree and extensive experience as a producer, Frank was the perfect ambassador to Hollywood,” Chris Cooney, chief operating officer of EUE Screen Gems, said in a statement. “He will be missed as a friend and a colleague.”

Under Capra’s leadership, EUE Screen Gems’ credits include several major motion pictures, including “28 Days,” “The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood,” “Domestic Disturbance,” “Black Knight” and “A Walk to Remember.”

He also was at the helm when “Dawson’s Creek” — starring a then-unknown Katie Holmes — filmed at the studios, and he kept all nine of the studio’s sound stages full in recent years between movies and the filming of another successful teenage soap, “One Tree Hill.”

Capra was one of three children of Frank Capra and Lucille Rayburn Warner Capra, who tried to protect her children from the Hollywood life. Still, he could tell stories about dinners with Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, and said he was best friends with Gary Cooper’s daughter Maria.

Capra Jr. said his father had no idea he was making a classic when filming “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which starred Jimmy Stewart, Donna Reed and Lionel Barrymore.

“I don’t think any filmmaker knows that,” he said. “He loved the idea of the story. He fell in love with that idea of the story about a man who could see the world the way it would have been had he never been born.”

Capra said his father described the movie as “the picture I was born to make,” and held no resentment that he didn’t earn any money from the movie’s repetitive showings on television during the Christmas season.

For the past several years, Capra screened his father’s 1946 Christmas favorite at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, using his family’s 35mm print until switching to a DVD last year. This year’s screening is Friday night.

Capra worked alongside his father on the 1961 Bette Davis film “Pocketful of Miracles.” He was a producer of three “Planet of the Apes” sequels and produced and directed several early television series, including “Gunsmoke” and “Dennis the Menace.”

He discovered North Carolina in 1983 when searching for a home to burn down for the filming of “Firestarter,” the Stephen King horror movie starring a young Drew Barrymore. The scene was shot at the Orton Plantation in Winnabow, and afterward Capra persuaded executive producer Dino De Laurentiis to build a studio facility in Wilmington.

De Laurentiis eventually sold the facility, which again changed hands in 1997, when the Cooney family bought the studios and installed Capra as president.

Along with his work at Screen Gems, Capra was a visiting professor at UNC Wilmington. He also served on the N.C. Film Council, and with Vassar helped bring the inaugural Scene First all-student film festival to Wilmington this year. Capra downplayed his involvement, saying he was scouting for talent.

Capra’s survivors include his wife, Debra, and daughter, Christina, both of Santa Barbara, Calif.; two sons, Frank Capra III, of Los Angeles, and Jonathan Capra, of Wilmington; a sister, Lucille Capra, of Traverse City, Mich.; and brother Tom Capra, of Palm Desert, Calif.