It Happened One Night > Trivia

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  • It Happened One Night became the first film to win the Big Five: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Screenplay. This feat would later be duplicated by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) in 1976 and The Silence of the Lambs (1991) in 1992.
  • Claudette Colbert was so convinced that she would lose the Oscar competition in 1935 to write-in nominee Bette Davis that she decided not to attend the awards ceremony. When she won that year, contrary to her belief, she was summoned from the train station to pick up her Oscar.
  • In 1996, Steven Spielberg anonymously purchased Clark Gable’s Oscar to protect it from further commercial exploitation and returned it to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, commenting that he could think of “no better sanctuary for Gable’s only Oscar than the Motion Picture Academy”.
  • Friz Freleng, the creator and animator of Bugs Bunny, noted that It Happened One Night was one of his favorite films. Several key mannerisms were taken from Clark Gable’s performance as Peter Warne. Peter casually chomps on carrots and is called “Doc” by another character named Oscar. Peter also created a fictional man named “Bugs Dooley” in order to intimidate Oscar.
  • It Happened One Night (1934) became the very first romantic comedy to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. This feat would later be duplicated by You Can’t Take It with You (1938) (another Frank Capra film), The Apartment (1960), Annie Hall (1977), Terms of Endearment (1983), Shakespeare in Love (1998), and The Artist (2011).
  • It Happened One Night (1934), along with Gigi (1958), The Last Emperor (1987), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), and CODA (2021), holds the record for winning all the awards in every single major category in which it was nominated at the Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
  • 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 mean 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 out-guess this thing called creativity. It happens in the strangest places and under the strangest of circumstances. I didn’t care much for the picture. It turned out to be ‘It Happened One Night’.
  • Although Claudette Colbert and Frank Capra had a slightly cantankerous relationship during the making of the film, she nevertheless appreciated his efforts and thanked him at the Academy Awards when she won the Oscar for Best Actress.
  • Claudette Colbert complained nearly every day during filming. On the last day of shooting, she told a friend, “I just finished making the worst picture I’ve ever made”.
  • When director Frank Capra asked Claudette Colbert to expose her leg for the hitchhiking scene, she initially refused. Later, after having seen the leg of her body double, she changed her mind, insisting, “That is not my leg!”