D. W. Griffith

David Llewelyn Wark "D. W." Griffith (January 22, 1875 – July 23, 1948) was a premier pioneering Academy Award-winning American film director. He is best known as the director of the controversial 1915 film The Birth of a Nation and the subsequent film Intolerance (1916).

Early life

Griffith was born in La Grange, Kentucky to Jacob "Roaring Jake" Griffith and Mary Perkins Oglesby. His father was a Confederate Army colonel, a Civil War hero, and a Kentucky legislator. D.W. was educated by his older sister, Mattie, in a one-room country school. His father died when he was 10, upon which the family experienced serious financial hardships. At age 14, D.W.'s mother abandoned the farm and moved the family to Louisville where she opened a boarding house, which failed shortly. D.W. left high school to help with the finances, taking a job first in a dry goods store, and, later, in a bookstore.

Griffith began his career as a hopeful playwright but met with little success; only one of his plays was even accepted for a performance. Griffith decided to instead become an actor, and appeared in many plays as an extra.

Film career

In 1907, Griffith, still having goals for becoming a successful playwright, moved to California and attempted to sell a script to Edison producer Edwin Porter.. Porter rejected Griffith's script, but allowed him to be an extra in his movie Rescued From An Eagle's Nest Finding his way into the motion picture business, he soon began to direct a huge body of work. In 1908, Griffith accepted an acting job for the Biograph Company in New York City. At Biograph, Griffith's career in the film industry would also change forever[1]. In 1908, Biograph's main director Wallace McCutcheon grew ill, and his son, Wallace McCutcheon, Jr., took his place. McCutcheon, Jr., however, was not able to bring the studio good success[2]. As a result, Biograph head Henry Marvin decided to give Griffith the position [3]; Griffith then made his first movie for the company, The Adventures of Dollie.

Between 1908 and 1913 (the years he directed for the Biograph Company), Griffith produced 450 short films, an enormous number even for this period. This work enabled him to experiment with cross-cutting, camera movement, close-ups, and other methods of spatial and temporal manipulation. At Biograph, Griffith became a huge success as a director, and would also help launch the career of Mary Pickford as well.

On Griffith's first trip to California as a director, he and his company discovered a little village to film their movies in. This place was known as Hollywood. With this, Biograph was the first company to shoot a movie in Hollywood: In Old California (1910).

Influenced by a European feature film Cabiria from Italy, Griffith was convinced that feature films could be financially viable. He produced and directed the Biograph feature film Judith of Bethulia, one of the earliest feature films to be produced in the United States. However, Biograph believed that longer features were not viable. According to actress Lillian Gish, "[Biograph] thought that a movie that long would hurt [the audience's] eyes". Because of this, and the film's budget overrun (it cost US$30,000 dollars to produce), Griffith left Biograph and took his whole stock company of actors with him, and joined the Mutual Film Corporation and formed a studio, with Majestic Studio manager Harry Aitken known as Reliance-Majestic Studios (which was later renamed Fine Arts Studio). His new production company became an autonomous production unit partner in Triangle Film Corporation with Keystone Studios and Thomas Ince; the Triangle Film Corporation was head by Griffith's partner Harry Aitken, who was released from the Mutual Film Corporation and his brother Roy. Through Reliance-Majestic Studios, he produced The Clansman (1915), which would later be known as The Birth of a Nation.

The Birth of a Nation is considered important by film historians as one of the first feature length American film (most previous films had been less than one hour long), and arguably changed to film industry to the standards of which it is recognized today. It was enormously popular, breaking box office records, but aroused controversy in the way it expressed the racist views held by many in the era (it depicts Southern pre-Civil War black slavery as benign, and the Ku Klux Klan as a band of heroes restoring order to a post-Reconstruction black-ruled South). Although these views matched the opinions of many American historians of the day (and indeed, long afterwards), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People campaigned against the film, but was unsuccessful in suppressing it. It would go on to become the most successful box office attraction of its time. "They lost track of the money it made," Lillian Gish once remarked in a Kevin Brownlow interview. Among the people who profited by the film was Louis B. Mayer, who bought the rights to distribute The Birth of a Nation in New England. With the money he made, he was able to begin his career as a producer that culminated in the creation of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios. Margaret Mitchell, who wrote Gone with the Wind, was also inspired by Griffith's Civil War epic.

However, after seeing The Birth of a Nation, audiences in some major northern cities also responded by rioting over the film's racial content. After The Birth of a Nation had run its course in theaters, Griffith would also respond to the negative reception a vast amount of critics gave the film through his next film Intolerance, which attacked the institution of slavery. During its release, however, Intolerance was not a success;^{reference required} like The Birth Of A Nation, Griffith put a huge budget into the film's production, which was also a key factor in its failure at the box office. The production partnership was dissolved in 1917, so Griffith went to Artcraft (part of Paramount), then to First National (1919-1920). At the same time he founded United Artists, together with Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks. At United Artists, Griffith continued to make films, but never could achieve box office grosses as high as either The Birth of a Nation or Intolerance.

Though United Artists survived as a company, Griffith's association with it was short-lived, and while some of his later films did well at the box office, commercial success often eluded him. Griffith features from this period include Broken Blossoms (1919), Way Down East (1920), Orphans of the Storm (1921) and America (1924); the earlier three were successes at the box office. In 1924, Griffith was forced to leave United Artists after Isn't Life Wonderful failed at the box office, and returned to Paramount as a director. Griffith made only two sound films, Abraham Lincoln (1930) and The Struggle (1931). Neither was successful, and he never made another film. For the last seventeen years of his life he lived as a virtual hermit in Los Angeles.

Death

He died of cerebral hemorrhage in 1948 on his way to a Hollywood hospital from the Knickerbocker Hotel where he had been living alone. He is buried at Mount Tabor Methodist Church Graveyard in Centerfield, Kentucky.

Achievements

D. W. Griffith has been called the father of film grammar. Few scholars still hold that his "innovations" really began with him, but Griffith was a key figure in establishing the set of codes that have become the universal backbone of film language. He was particularly influential in popularizing "cross-cutting"—using film editing to alternate between different events occurring at the same time—in order to build suspense. Some claim, too, that he "invented" the close-up shot. That being said, he still used many elements from the "primitive" style of movie-making that predated classical Hollywood's continuity system, such as frontal staging, exaggerated gestures, minimal camera movement, and an absence of point of view shots.

Credit for Griffith's cinematic innovations must be shared with his cameraman of many years, Billy Bitzer. In addition, he himself credited the legendary silent star Lillian Gish, who appeared in several of his films, with creating a new style of acting for the cinema.

Works

• The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America (1916) pamphlet

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