The nominees were ...
- Bernard W. Burton, One Hundred Men and a Girl
- Al Clark, The Awful Truth
- Gene Havlick, Gene Milford, Lost Horizon
- Elmo Veron, Captains Courageous
- Basil Wrangell, The Good Earth
And the Oscar went to ...
Considering that the movie was way over budget, that director Frank Capra shot more than a million feet of film, that its first cut was six hours long, which was trimmed to a still-gargantuan three and a half hours for the first preview, it's clear that Havlick and Milford deserved some recognition for what Capra put them through. Columbia head Harry Cohn then took over and supervised the editing down to 132 minutes. After another cut of fourteen minutes, Capra sued the studio; he finally reached a settlement, but held a grudge for the rest of his contract with Columbia. But further cuts were to come: It was pared down to 92 minutes during World War II, eliminating some anti-war elements, and during the anticommunist 1950s it lost some scenes that seemed favorable to the Chinese. Havlick was nominated two more times, both of them for films directed by Capra: You Can't Take It With You and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Milford, who had been nominated before for One Night of Love, later won another Oscar, for On the Waterfront.
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