Left to right: Griffith, cameraman Billy Bitzer (behind Pathé camera), Dorothy Gish watching from behind Bitzer, Karl Brown keeping script, and Miriam Cooper in profile, in a production still for Intolerance (1916).
Griffith on the set of Birth of a Nation (1915) with actor Henry B. Walthall and others.
Birth of a Nation (1915), perhaps the most famous silent movie directed by Griffith and considered a landmark by film historians; adapted for the screen by Griffith and Frank E. Woods, based on the novel and play The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan by Thomas Dixon, Jr.
The first million dollar partners: Fairbanks, Pickford, Chaplin, and Griffith.
United Artists founders, Griffith, Pickford, Chaplin, and Fairbanks sign their contract for the cameras (1919).
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David Lewelyn Wark Griffith was born on January 22, 1875 in La Grange, Kentucky, United States. Griffith was the son of a Confederate officer who died from the effects of a war wound when the boy was ten. The family lived simply on a farm, reduced by the war, and then ran a boardinghouse in Louisville, Kentucky.
He attended a one-room schoolhouse where he was taught by his older sister, Mattie. After his father died when he was ten, the family struggled with poverty. Griffith then left high school to help support the family, taking a job in a dry goods store and later in a bookstore.
Before entering the movies, Griffith was an actor, working at a succession of odd jobs when left stranded by traveling stock companies, and writing stories, poems, and plays. In 1907, jobless, Griffith set out to sell film stories to the studios in New York. Offering a scenario to Edwin S. Porter of the Edison Company, he was asked instead to take the lead in a film Porter was about to make. Thus Griffith made his film debut in Rescued from an Eagle's Nest in 1907. He met with some success in selling scenarios to the Biograph Company and at the same time accepted an acting job there. In 1908 he directed his first picture, The Adventures of Dolly, photographed by G. W. Bitzer, Biograph's experienced cameraman, who freely advised Griffith and remained his right-hand man for many years. Griffith's pictures were immediate successes.
Between 1908 and 1913 he directed more than 300 films for Biograph, mostly one-reelers, and in that time developed the means of expression that were to make the movies an important new art form. Seeking more independence and the freedom to develop his ideas, he left Biograph in 1913 to join the new Reliance-Majestic Company, taking with him Bitzer and many of the actors he had developed at Biograph who were to become in their own right famous names of the movie industry. In 1915 the independently financed, produced, and distributed The Birth of a Nation was released, a story of the Civil War and Reconstruction period based on Thomas Dixon's novel The Clansman. It was longer by far than any American movie yet made (it ran for over three hours, and tickets were sold at the unheard-of price of two dollars). Hailed as a great work of art, it was an outstanding financial success and stirred up a controversy that has not ended to this day over its emotion-charged depiction of the Southern black.
Partly in reaction to this controversy, Griffith next produced Intolerance (1916), a complex interweaving of four stories from different periods in time. This venture was not as financially successful as The Birth of a Nation but was to have an even greater influence on film-making throughout the world. Griffith's production partnership was dissolved in 1917 and he went to Artcraft, part of Paramount Pictures, and then to First National Pictures (1919–1920). In 1924, he made a deal with Adolph Zukor at Paramount and went to Germany to make lsn Y Life Wonderful. When De Mille left Paramount, Sorrow's of Satan was handed to Griffith.
David died at the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood, a drunken, womanizing spectator of the industry to which he had acted as a frontier scout.
By 1916 Griffith had done more than any other one man to develop the unique language of the screen, to free it from stage conventions, to give flexibility to the camera, and to develop imaginative and purposeful editing of the film itself. With the assistance of Bitzer, he developed the meaningful use of long shots to open up the field of vision to great vistas, close shots to investigate the most transient emotions of the human face, cross-cutting to heighten tension through parallel scenes, and other film devices.
In 1936 David Llewelyn Griffith got an honorary Oscar for his contribution to the development of cinematography.
In 1953, the Directors Guild of America (DGA) instituted the D. W. Griffith Award, its highest honor. On December 15, 1999, DGA President Jack Shea and the DGA National Board announced that the award would be renamed as the "DGA Lifetime Achievement Award". They stated that, although Griffith was extremely talented, they felt his film The Birth of a Nation had "helped foster intolerable racial stereotypes", and that it was thus better not to have the top award in his name.
In 1975, Griffith was honored on a ten-cent postage stamp by the United States.
D.W. Griffith Middle School in Los Angeles is named after Griffith. Because of the association of Griffith and the racist nature of The Birth of a Nation, attempts have been made to rename the 100% minority-enrolled school.
In 2008 the Hollywood Heritage Museum hosted a screening of Griffith's earliest films, to commemorate the centennial of his start in film.
On January 22, 2009 the Oldham History Center in La Grange, Kentucky opened a 15-seat theatre in Griffith's honor. The theatre features a library of available Griffith films.
Griffith got the Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Griffith was raised a Methodist.
To distill the stvlistic advances of over three hundred films, Griffith abandoned the fixed point of view of the audience in the stalls and made his camera selective. He saw that there might be a balance between long shot, medium shot, and close-up, and that action might be heightened by the insertion of faces reflecting on or moved by the actions. The effect of introducing a cinematic language should not conceal Griffith’s preference for the standard sentimental melodrama of nineteenth- centurv theatre and cheap fiction, but he established the emotional impact of films by recognizing the value of sensitive acting. He stressed rehearsal, eliminated crude overacting, and saw that close-ups were more effective if restrained. The outstanding proponents of this novel cinema-acting style are Miriam Cooper in Intolerance and Lillian Gish, but Griffith organized a company of excellent players, just as he liked to use the same, loyal technicians - most notably the cameraman Billy Bitzer.
In the years after the war, Griffith's insistence on conservative sentimentality marooned him. But, as he admitted, he was not amenable to the monopoly of the large studios. He could cope with neither the new morality nor the factory product. His participation in United Artists had been vague. Throughout the 1920s he lived uneasily, and America - a solemn and slow account of the War of Independence - put him in debt. His twopence-colored view of story content could not absorb the enormous extra realism that came with sound, no matter that his eye for an image was very sophisticated.
Quotations:
"We do not want now and we never shall want the human voice with our films. Music, as I see it within that hundred years, will be applied to the visualization of the human being’s imagination. And, as in your imagination those unseen voices are always perfect and sweet, or else magnificent and thrilling, you will find them registering upon the mind of the picture patron, in terms of lovely music, precisely what the author has intended to be registered there."
"There will never be speaking pictures. Why should there be when no voice can speak so beautifully as music? There are no dissonant r’s and twisted consonants and guttural slurs and nasal twangs in beautiful music."
Quotes from others about the person
Performer and director Charlie Chaplin called Griffith "The Teacher of us All".
Welles said "I have never really hated Hollywood except for its treatment of D. W. Griffith. No town, no industry, no profession, no art form owes so much to a single man."
In 1906 he secretly married actress Linda Arvidson Johnson, who viewed his literary and directorial aspirations unsympathetically and, after 5 years, left him.
A second marriage with Evelyn Baldwin 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.
Confederate Army colonel in the American Civil War
