This chapter details Capra’s early film career. Capra went to work for Columbia Pictures on October 1927, who he claimed called him in for interview because his name appeared at the top of an alphabetical list of unemployed directors. But production chief Harry Cohn would have heard about Capra from his much-heralded feature-directing debut on The Strong Man. Capra’s embellished accounts of the job that resulted in his “marrying the harlot,” to quote his revealing metaphor for his grudging commitment to a film career, were designed to show not that he was not desperate for work but that he was “trading money for power.”