Biography
David Wark Griffith was the most important and influential film director of the silent period, one of the greatest American filmmakers, and the man who developed the basic visual language of storytelling in cinema. Born in Kentucky to Confederate colonel "Roaring Jake" Griffith, D.W. Griffith grew up in poverty, particularly after his father died. He became a stage actor in the 1890s, touring with regional stock companies and writing unsuccessful plays. Griffith's luck changed when he took up a friend's suggestion to try out at the Biograph motion picture studio on Fourteenth Street in New York. Although he appeared in one film for Edison,
Rescued from an Eagle's Nest (1908), all of his other early film work was at Biograph. In mid-1908, Biograph's main director, Wallace "Old Man" McCutcheon, took ill and his son, Wallace McCutcheon Jr., took over as director. The younger McCutcheon proved worthless at the job, and Biograph head office man Henry Marvin offered it to Griffith. His very first film,
The Adventures of Dollie (1908), proved so popular that Griffith stayed on as director, helming practically all of the 450 odd films Biograph produced in the next five years. With Griffith at the helm, they quickly became the most popular motion-picture company in America.
Despite the fact that Biograph did not permit onscreen credits for actors, Griffith practically invented the star system through his discovery of actress
Florence Lawrence, who was billed as "The Biograph Girl." When she jumped ship to competitor Vitagraph, he moved a new "Biograph Girl" into place, who later became "Biograph Mary" and eventually known by her name,
Mary Pickford. In his Biograph years, Griffith gathered around him a repertory company of actors and technical people, many of whom became important on their own:
Mack Sennett,
Mae Marsh,
Blanche Sweet,
Robert Harron,
Donald Crisp, Henry B. Walthall, Christy Cabanne, Frank Powell,
Henry Lehrman, and Dorothy and
Lillian Gish, to name a few.
Examination of films made by Griffith's principal photographer,
Billy Bitzer, in the early 1900s reveals that many of the techniques once credited to Griffith alone were developed by Bitzer before Griffith came to Biograph -- close-ups, moving shots taken from trains or cars, expressive long and medium distance shots. Yet even Bitzer noted that Griffith was the first to assemble such shots into a coherent pattern that served a story. Griffith's contributions in editing have never been challenged -- he introduced crosscutting, parallel montage, rapid editing, still frames, and other techniques. He also introduced the practice of shooting out of sequence; at least one of his Biographs still exists in its unedited state, and it reveals that Griffith's actors were so well drilled that they could play several scenes in the same setup without stopping the camera, maintaining a shot-to-footage ratio of nearly 1:1! Griffith made so many important films at Biograph that to name them here is impossible, but noteworthy titles include the social drama
A Corner in Wheat (1909),
The Lonedale Operator (1911),
The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1911; which introduced the gangster genre),
The New York Hat (1912), and the three-reel
The Battle at Elderbush Gulch (1913). Griffith broke with Biograph over the subject of multi-reel features, an area of the business already well established by 1913, but Biograph didn't see the need to follow the trend. Griffith took his entire repertory company with him when he left, and the talent drain was too much for his former employer to withstand; within two years Biograph folded.
After making a few low-budget quickies, including the first psychological horror feature,
The Avenging Conscience (1914), Griffith made his most famous film,
The Birth of a Nation (1915), likely the most controversial American film of all time. It revolutionized the whole movie industry from top to bottom. The sprawling American Civil War epic lasted nearly three hours and employed the most advanced cinematic techniques seen to that time, including breathtaking battle scenes, poignant, well-paced acting, and rapid-fire editing. It also demonized Southern African-Americans -- portrayed in all cases by blacked-up white men -- as uncivilized savages, rapists, and murderers, with the Ku Klux Klan presented as saviors of the South. No distributor would handle it, so Griffith put it out on a roadshow basis, charging high ticket prices with a live orchestra playing an original score written for the film.
The Birth of a Nation made millions in 1915 money, and though its total box office is not known, it was once unofficially recognized as the all-time box-office champ before
Star Wars (1977). Its effect was so powerful that it moved President Woodrow Wilson to comment that it was "like history written by lightning," though when he realized the greater social implication of these words, he retracted them.
Griffith sank every cent gained from
The Birth of a Nation into the longest, most expensive experimental film ever made,
Intolerance (1916), "the Sun Play of the Ages," which simultaneously weaves four tales of social injustice from Ancient Babylon, the story of Jesus, the massacre of the Huguenots, and a "modern" story called "The Mother and the Law," which he had made earlier and shelved. For the Babylonian story, he built one of the largest movie sets ever, so massive that Bitzer had to photograph it from a cable car. Dizzyingly complex and running four hours, no one went to see
Intolerance, even as it remains one of the most impressive personal achievements of any film director. After World War I, Griffith compiled the Babylonian footage and
The Mother and the Law into separate films and distributed them overseas, where they were hugely successful, and
The Fall of Babylon (1919) was widely acknowledged by European filmmakers as inspiring the practice of "Russian montage" associated with
Sergei Eisenstein and French filmmakers such as
Abel Gance.
During the First World War, Griffith directed
Hearts of the World (1918) and several other war-themed films mostly lost to us, and for the Triangle firm produced a number of other pictures that proved important, mainly the first
Douglas Fairbanks comedies. With Fairbanks, Pickford, and
Charlie Chaplin, Griffith co-founded United Artists in 1919, and while it had no studio of its own, its very existence shook up the industry. In 1919-1920, Griffith was at his height creatively, making three of his greatest films,
Broken Blossoms (1919),
True Heart Susie (1919) and
Way Down East (1920), all starring his personal muse,
Lillian Gish. The last of these may be the most perfect "D.W. Griffith film," couched in Victorian drama, stated in matchless camerawork and cutting, and dazzling in its scale and scope. Although the venture was not commercially successful, Griffith teamed up with inventor O.T. Kellum in 1921 to produce the first American feature with a fully synchronized music and effects soundtrack,
Dream Street; Griffith himself appeared in a spoken introduction to the film in direct sound.
At this time, Griffith's status as the foremost American film director began to unravel and he was beset by a number of personal tragedies. Actress
Clarine Seymour, whom he was grooming for stardom in films such as
The Idol Dancer (1920) died suddenly during an operation at the age of 22, and in September of that year
Robert Harron, the beloved "boy" actor of
The Mother and the Law, with whom he'd worked since 1908, died of an accidental gunshot wound at age 27. Griffith's productions for United Artists, made at his own studio at Mamaroneck, NY, were a string of flops; Griffith's attempts to win sympathy for inflation-ridden post-war Germany in
Isn't Life Wonderful (1924) was a critical and commercial disaster of the highest order; and while his Revolutionary War epic
America (1924) was a hit, it didn't recoup enormous cost overruns on the film. During these years, Griffith made
Orphans of the Storm (1922), his last film with the Gish Sisters, and it has become the most frequently shown of his films; while it has moments of charm, it doesn't really represent Griffith at his best. By 1924, Griffith had already sold his share in United Artists against the advice of his partners, and that year he sold the Mamaroneck studio as well and became a contract director for Paramount -- this would prove, in the end, his undoing.
It started off well enough; for Paramount, Griffith made his last great film, the comedy
Sally of the Sawdust (1925), which made an unlikely movie star out of veteran vaudevillian W.C. Fields. But soon Paramount was anxious to be rid of Griffith, and kept assigning him projects they believed incompatible with his talents so that when a film died at the box office, they could finally wash their hands of him. To Paramount's dismay, film after film he made for them were all commercial successes, even if critical notices were unkind. Back at United Artists in 1930, Griffith made
Abraham Lincoln starring
Walter Huston; easily one of the worst of his films, it nevertheless was a smash hit and made it look as though Griffith was finally back on track. However, his low-budget depression drama about alcoholism,
The Struggle (1931), gave the studio heads what they wanted. In retrospect,
The Struggle is Griffith's best talkie, but it was a resounding flop that finally ended Griffith's 25-year, 530-plus film run as a director. Although likely a third of the people working in Hollywood in 1931 felt that they owed their careers to D.W. Griffith, no one would hire him -- the age of the autocratic director who controlled every creative aspect of a film was truly finished. Griffith was still fairly well off, and spent the rest of his life on the family estate near Louisville, sharing his home with the families of the servants who had once worked for his father.
The whole idea of film preservation grew up around the work of D.W. Griffith; the donation of his personal collection of films to the Museum of Modern Art film library in 1940 was the basic seed that jump-started the collection as a whole, and by 1980 they had located all but about 30 of his 530 films. Otherwise, D.W. Griffith hasn't been well treated by posterity -- although the controversy surrounding
The Birth of a Nation seemed to have dissipated by the wide observances of his centennial in 1975, the rise of academic political correctness late in the century led to a backlash against the aging, nearly hundred-year-old film, with many insisting that it be banned. In 1999, the Director's Guild took Griffith's name off its DGA Award, and about that time a colorful Red Grooms sculpture representing Griffith directing a scene from
Way Down East was quietly removed from the campus of Northern Kentucky University. While there are many who would like to see the name of D.W. Griffith expunged from the rolls of history forever, there is no question that without him the basic language of the movies would not have developed when it did, and that his work established for the first time the potential of motion pictures as an art form -- period. ~ Dave Lewis, All Movie Guide