GRIFFITH, D. W. 1875-1948

Movie director

Motion Picture Pioneer

One of the first movie directors to explore the creative possibilities of the medium of film, D. W. Griffith made a major impact on the development of the art and techniques of moviemaking.

Background

David Wark Griffith was born on a Kentucky farm on 22 January 1875, the youngest child of a former Confederate officer whose regiment had failed to keep William Tecumseh Sherman from burning Atlanta. In 1889, four years after his father's death, the family moved to Louisville, where David Griffith went to work in a dry-goods store, quitting in 1893 to take a job in a book-store. While volunteering as an usher and stagehand in various Louisville theaters, he saw stars such as John Drew, Lillian Russell, and Julia Marlowe. In 1896 he got his first acting job, embarking on a career that took him all over the country during the next ten years, a period in which he was also writing plays, poetry, and short stories. On 14 May 1906 he married actress Linda Arvidson, and the two settled in New York, where they were cast in The One Woman, a play by Thomas Dixon Jr., author of The Clansman (1905), a novel that would play a pivotal role in Griffith's later work.

A Career in the Movies

Determined to be a writer, Griffith sought employment as a scriptwriter for the Edison and Biograph movie companies, only to get work as an actor. By 1908, however, Biograph had begun buying his scenarios and letting him direct movies. Over the next five years Griffith made more than four hundred short films for that company, including melodramas, Westerns, and adaptations of the classics and contemporary literary works. Realizing that the camera could free the motion picture from the natural limitations of stage plays, he experimented with closeups, long shots, camera angles, editing, and other new techniques. These movies featured Mary Pickford, Mack Sennett, Lionel B anymore, and the Gish sisters, Dorothy and Lillian. By 1913 Griffith was experimenting with longer films, including the four-reel Judith of Bethulia (released in 1914). At the end of that year he left Biograph for Mutual, which offered him more money and freedom to make more-sophisticated movies. During 1914 he directed four movies for Mutual (including a film version of the Edgar Allan Poe story "The Telltale Heart") ranging in length from five to seven reels.

Two Masterpieces

Griffith's next two projects, the ambitious movies The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916)—were filmed not in New York but in Hollywood, California, where many independent producers were moving for the weather and scenery. The Birth of a Nation, a twelve-reel movie based on Dixon's The Clansman, was produced in 1914 at an unprecedented cost of $100,000 and released in early 1915. Today this epic, set in the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction (and strongly influenced by Griffith's father's war experiences), is remembered for its pioneering use of film technique and for the racism of the second part, in which members of the Ku Klux Klan are portrayed as heroes. During its first run (1915-1917) ticket sales totaled $60 million, despite protests from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Regardless of its racism, The Birth of a Nation is remarkable for its vast scope and complex plot, which was in fact outdone by Griffith's next major motion picture, Intolerance (1916). This second epic, which cost $400,000, starred the same actresses Griffith had made famous in The Birth of a Nation—Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh, and Miriam Cooper—and told the story of religious and political oppression throughout history. Though audiences of the day found the picture somewhat overwhelming, Intolerance is now widely regarded as Griffith's finest work.

War Work and Later Films

Between March and October 1917 Griffith and Lillian Gish visited England and France (at the invitation of the British government) to film scenes against the backdrop of the war for Hearts of the World, released in 1918. Over the following thirteen years Griffith directed and produced another two dozen films, distributed by Adolph Zukor's movie companies. Some of these movies starred Carol Dempster, an actress with whom he had become personally involved after separating from his wife in 1912. Several of his later films were notable, including Broken Blossoms (1919), one of Lillian Gish's finest silent movies; the acclaimed Way Down East (1920); and two twelve-reel war epics, Orphans of the Storm (1921) and America (1924). Griffith's first sound film—Abraham Lincoln (1930), starring Walter Huston—had mixed success and was followed by a flop, The Struggle (1931), the last movie Griffith made.

Final Years

During the 1930s and 1940s Griffith went back to writing poetry and plays (which were not produced). Divorced in 1936, he immediately took a second wife, Evelyn Baldwin, an actress thirty-five years his junior. Also in 1936 he was given an honorary Oscar, and two years later he was named the first honorary life member of the Directors Guild of America. Griffith was un-happy in what he considered forced retirement, and his bitterness led to alcoholism and another divorce. He was living alone in a Hollywood hotel when he died of a cerebral hemorrhage on 24 July 1948.

Sources:

Robert M. Henderson, D. W. Griffith: His Life and Work (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972);

Henderson, D. W. Griffith: The Years at Biograph (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970);

Paul O'Deil, Griffith and the Rise of Hollywood (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1970);

Richard Schickel, D. W. Griffith: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984).

David Wark Griffith

David Wark Griffith (1875-1948), American filmmaker, was a pioneer director-producer who invented much of the basic technical grammar of modern cinema.

On Jan. 22, 1875, D. W. Griffith was born at Crestwood, Oldham County, Ky., the descendant of a distinguished (but impoverished) Southern family. Scantily educated but convinced of his "aristocracy," he became an actor at 18 in Louisville. For 10 years he was a supporting player in provincial companies, using the stage name Lawrence Griffith to protect his family's honor but his real name for the plays and poetry he was trying to publish. In 1906 he secretly married actress Linda Arvidson Johnson, who viewed his literary and directorial aspirations unsympathetically and, after 5 years, left him.

Early Films

In 1907 Griffith sold a poem to Frank Leslie's Weekly and a play, A Fool and a Girl, to actor James K. Hackett. The play promptly failed, and Griffith was driven to try the then unsavory movie business. E. S. Porter, whose Great Train Robbery was the first "story" film, gave him the lead in a primitive one-reeler called Rescued from an Eagle's Nest and unwittingly started Griffith toward greatness.

In 1908 Griffith sold several stories to the Biograph Company and also acted in them. Within a few months he had a chance to direct. The success of his first effort, The Adventures of Dollie, led to regular employment, a series of rapidly improving contracts, and pride enough in his work to use his real name.

During 5 years with Biograph, Griffith made hundreds of short pictures and gradually won consent to increase their length beyond one reel, thus enabling him to expand narrative content. With the help of his famed cameraman, G. W. "Billy" Bitzer, he made revolutionary technical innovations in film making. He also started the cinema careers of Mary Pickford, Mack Sennett, the Gish sisters, Lionel Barrymore, and many others.

Griffith Classics

In 1913 Griffith formed an independent company. Within 2 years he completed his epic masterpiece The Birth of a Nation (1915), often considered the most important film ever made. Dealing with the Civil War and its aftermath in the South, it was, for its day, incredibly long (12 reels) and expensive ($100,000). However, it grossed $18 million within a few years of release and established once and for all the astonishing power and potentiality of cinema as a serious art form. The film also aroused storms of controversy because of its treatment of African Americans and Ku Klux Klansmen.

Determined to clear himself of charges of prejudice, Griffith next made one of the most enormous, complex, and ambitious pictures in history. Intolerance (1916) attempted to interweave four parallel stories—modern, biblical, 16th-century French, and Babylonian—into a monumental sermon on the evils of inhumanity. His financial backers were appalled; audiences found it chaotic and exhausting; but for all its faults, Intolerance established techniques and conventions which permanently affected film making. Individual fragments of this huge, disjointed picture became the basis for entire schools of cinematic development. The overpowering Babylonian sequences with immense crowds and sumptuous spectacle provided Cecil B. DeMille and others with the substance of their whole careers.

Formation of United Artists

In 1917 Griffith made a propaganda film for the British government, Hearts of the World, which served mainly to display the director's ultimately fatal tendency toward melodrama and sentimentality.

Returning to the United States, Griffith joined Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin in forming United Artists, through which he released such famous pictures as Broken Blossoms (1919), Way Down East (1920), and Orphans of the Storm (1921); their varying success temporarily relieved his steadily mounting financial difficulties.

After his important film Isn't Life Wonderful (1924), Griffith was increasingly out of tune with popular taste and with the growing film industry. He was obliged to work as an employee in the new Hollywood studio system. After 1927 the transition to "talkies" posed further problems, and although he managed one more independent production in 1930 (Abraham Lincoln), his career was finished by 1931. He received one small directing assignment, for which he was not paid, in 1936.

Griffith had led the new medium of film into unexplored areas of spectacle, realism, intimacy, and social content. His contributions to the technique of film art include the invention of the close-up, the long shot, the fadeout, night shots, high and low photographic angles, cross-cutting, backlighting, the moving camera, and many other devices that are now taken for granted. Despite his genius, he was, except for 39 weeks on radio, unemployed and unemployable for the last 17 years of his life. A second marriage ended in divorce in 1947, and a year later, at age 73, he died, alone and almost forgotten, in a shabby side-street Hollywood hotel.

Further Reading

The literature on Griffith and his achievements is extensive. Useful introductory works are Iris Barry, D. W. Griffith, American Film Master (1940); a popular biography by Homer Croy, Star Maker: The Story of D. W. Griffith (1959); and Lillian Gish, Lillian Gish: The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me (1969).

Additional Sources

Schickel, Richard, D.W. Griffith: an American life, New York: Limelight Editions, 1996.

Williams, Martin T., Griffith, first artist of the movies, New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. □