Mitchell and McCarthy seem to have organized a series of private viewings for journalists.27 Their efforts in advance of the official opening culminated in a special preview with an invited audience on the afternoon of Monday, March 1. The guest list was drawn from New York’s social and literary elite. It included financiers and society ladies; actors such as Douglas Fairbanks and his wife; writers such as Rex Beach, Richard Harding Davis, and Booth Tarkington; and illustrators such as Charles Dana Gibson.28 Two nights later, the film opened to a capacity audience, greeted by female ushers wearing 1870s-style dresses and male ushers dressed in Union blue and Confederate gray uniforms of the kind worn by the armies during the Civil War. Spectators began to applaud even during the early shots of the streets of Piedmont, and during the Civil War sequences, their applause was “nearly incessant for a full half-hour.” They showed so much enthusiasm for the film that by the intermission they were already calling for Dixon and Griffith to speak. Dixon responded first. Asserting that the film was superior to his own book and play, he declared that only someone who was both the son of a soldier and a Southerner could have made such a picture. He then introduced Griffith as “the greatest director in the world.” Griffith spoke briefly, claiming that his objective was to place moving pictures “on a par with the spoken word as a medium for artistic expression” and thanking the audience for the reception being accorded his film.29
“The drama critics of all of the New York newspapers attended the premiere,” reported The Moving Picture World a few days later, “and in almost every instance the picture was reported at length and in glowing terms.” The anonymous reviewer for the New York Times was one of relatively few to display any ambivalence toward the subject matter of the film, and even he described Birth as “an impressive new illustration of the scope of the motion picture camera.” Others were not so circumspect. “The mind falters and the typewriter baulks before an attempt to either measure or describe D. W. Griffith’s crowning achievement in screen drama,” wrote Burns Mantle of the Evening Mail. “Judged by all the photo dramas New York has given,” declared the Standard Union, “this new film spectacle is the greatest and largest ever produced.”30 “Never before has such a whirlwind combination of story, spectacle, and tense drama been unrolled before New Yorkers,” commented The Sun’s critic. To Louis Sherwin of the Evening Globe it was “beyond question the most extraordinary picture that has been made—or seen—in America so far.” C. F. Zittel’s highly enthusiastic review in the Evening American must have overjoyed anyone connected with the film: it was less a critical appraisal than a spirited panegyric. “‘The Birth of a Nation,’” Zittel assured his readers, “will thrill you, startle you, make you hold on to your seats. It will make you laugh. It will make you cry. It will make you angry. It will make you glad. It will make you hate. It will make you love. It is not only worth riding miles to see, but it is worth walking miles to see.”31
The combination of ecstatic reviews, publicity, and word-of-mouth reports assured the film’s success. “There has not been a vacant seat in the house since the opening performance,” commented the New York Commercial a few days later, “and crowds have been turned away at every presentation.” Anxious about his investment in the picture, Billy Bitzer kept returning to watch the lines forming in front of the box office. He need not have worried: as the days went by, the queue of those wanting to see The Birth of a Nation only grew longer.32 Even in the first few days, newspapers were noting that the film was “doing the biggest business” ever known at the Liberty Theater and predicting a long run.33 Over the next few months, doubtless prompted by Mitchell and McCarthy, they would hail the various landmarks of what would become a record-breaking run. “Even Holy Week seemed to have no effect upon attendance at the Liberty Theater,” commented the Journal of Commerce on April 3, “and the house was crowded at every performance.” With two showings a day, at 2:10 in the afternoon and 8:05 in the evening, the total number of performances grew rapidly. In mid-May, the film had its 150th performance. At the 200th performance in early June, souvenir programs bound in vellum were distributed to moviegoers. On August 9, the New York Press estimated that more than 400,000 people had seen Birth at the Liberty Theater, where it was now in the sixth month of its run.34 Thanks to the installation of new cooling equipment in the Liberty, the film ran steadily throughout the summer months.35 It continued throughout the fall and into early winter: the final performance of its unprecedented run of nearly forty-four weeks at the Liberty came on January 2, 1916.36
Originally, Griffith and the Aitkens had intended to charge $2 just for box seats, with the remaining prices varying between 25 cents and $1 for evening performances and 25 cents and 50 cents for matinées. The huge demand for seats and the movie’s “wonderful send-off … in the papers,” Variety noted on March 12, had persuaded them to charge $2 for most of the lower floor. In the same issue, Variety made an early estimate of the film’s profitability. With the Liberty’s 1,200 seats filled at each performance, The Birth of a Nation would be making $14,000 a week. With an exceptional $14,000 having been spent on advertising in the first week, the total expenses had now settled down to $4,500 a week, including $1,250 rent for the theater.37 While Variety’s estimate of income actually earned was pretty accurate (total receipts at the Liberty Theater for the week ending March 13—the first full week of the film’s run—were $13,320.25), the actual cost of showing Birth (including publicity, rent, and salaries for staff and orchestra) was much higher than suggested: $13,317.79 for the same week. Even by the end of April, the profits from the New York engagement were small: $12,455.90 on receipts totaling $99,455.10.38 Yet reports in newspapers and the trade press of the film’s great popularity and commercial success prompted a flood of offers either from theater owners wishing to book it or of businessmen wanting to purchase the right to distribute the film in particular areas (future M-G-M mogul Louis B. Mayer apparently telephoned the Aitkens as early as March 1, the night of the private preview, to offer $50,000 for the New England rights). According to reports in the New York newspapers, during the first three weeks of its run at the Liberty Theater some 2,138 offers for bookings or the cash purchase of territorial rights had already been received.39
Distributing The Birth of a Nation
When the board of the Epoch Producing Company met in mid-March to decide how to distribute the film, the atmosphere, as Roy Aitken recalled, was “tense.” On the one hand, the members of the board (including both Aitken brothers, Griffith, and Griffith’s lawyer, Albert J. Banzhof) were aware that what seemed startlingly large offers for the film were being made. After the months of financial uncertainty surrounding the film’s production, and the risks that had been taken, there must have been a strong incentive to accept such offers. The Aitkens had borrowed most of the $59,000 they had invested in the picture and were now being pressed by their creditors for payment—another argument for acceptance. So, too, were the uncertainties surrounding the film in relation to censorship problems and possible boycotts. On the other hand, members of the board knew that the greatest profits were likely to come from organizing “road show” companies themselves to exhibit the film both in the United States and abroad. Organizing such road shows, however, would require further infusions of capital at a time when, Roy Aitken later remembered, “most of Epoch’s stockholders were tired of the tension of shoestring financing” and yearning “to pay debts and reward ourselves with a few luxuries.” The end result was a compromise: the board decided to organize road companies to show The Birth of a Nation in selected major cities, hoping thereby to cream off the most profitable section of the potential market. To help create the money to do this, they sold off distribution rights in some areas. The California rights went to William H. Clune and Griffith himself. Harry Sherman of Minneapolis acquired for $100,000 the rights to show the film in sixteen Western states. Louis B. Mayer’s syndicate received for $50,000 the rights to New England (excluding Boston, which—at least initially�
��was reserved for an Epoch road show).40
Each road show company was established with its own manager, publicity chief, projectionists, electricians and other technicians, sound effects staff, porters and stage hands, and an orchestra of twenty to forty performers.41 It resembled in many ways the theatrical and musical comedy companies that had toured the country in previous decades.42 Made up of fifty to a hundred people, each road show took time to organize. They were also expensive, and the money from the sale of state and city rights was slow to arrive: by June 30, only $36,500.00 had been received.43 While most accounts of The Birth of a Nation emphasize how quickly it became a financial success, in reality that success came relatively slowly. As late as July 1915, there were still only four road show companies in existence; by September, the figure had reached eight; by January 1916, there were twelve. By the end of February 1916, the total gross income for all the road shows had reached $2,226,885.42. During the same period, their outlays came to $1,131,633.68, making a total profit of $1,095,251.74.44 This figure did not represent the total profit on the film to that point. It did not include the income from the rights distributors, derived both from the sale of rights and the subsequent percentage paid of the box office take.45 Nor did it cover any returns from the road show companies that by this stage were operating in England, Australia, and South America.46 But it was Epoch’s largest and certainly best-regulated source of income during Birth’s first run (there is considerable evidence that states’ rights distributors, including Mayer, minimized the percentages they were supposed to pay through underreporting box-office grosses).47
The Birth of a Nation, under its original title of The Clansman, continued to run profitably at Clune’s Auditorium in Los Angeles. (Epoch/The Kobal Collection)
The success that attended the showings in Los Angeles, Washington, and New York had convinced Griffith and the Aitkens that they had a hit on their hands. Yet in the circumstances, their commitment to a road show strategy was quite brave. It depended on a series of assumptions: that The Birth of a Nation would appeal to audiences from different regions and classes, that enough people would be prepared to pay “live” theater prices of up to $2 to see what was after all still just a motion picture, and that long runs in one place would not quickly exhaust the novelty value of the film (nickelodeons sold themselves in part on their frequent changes of program).48 If the road show was not an entirely new phenomenon (George Kleine, for example, had exhibited Quo Vadis and other imported spectacular films on a similar basis), it had certainly never been tried before on such a scale.49 There was also the problem of how to communicate the character and appeal of the film—and the enthusiastic reception by its earliest audiences—to people across the country. The only national media existing in the United States in 1915 were the monthly magazines, and these rarely commented on motion pictures except in the context of censorship debates. Epoch, no doubt advised by Mitchell and McCarthy, set out to publicize their film by feeding “news” and selective information to local newspapers across the country through press agencies and wire services.
The Press Campaign
Since The Birth of a Nation was advertised as the first “$2 picture,” much of this publicity campaign was aimed at showing the ways in which it differed from previous, shorter movies. Griffith was quoted as saying that the public “is alert to values. They have shown themselves willing to pay five cents to see a film that cost $500 to produce, 50 cents to see one that cost $50,000 and $2 for one that cost half a million.”50 By implication, therefore, charging up to $2 a seat for Birth of a Nation could be justified by the cost of producing the film and its vast scale: the original claims made before the Liberty Theater showings that Birth had cost $500,000 to make and that 18,000 people and 3,000 horses had been involved were constantly repeated in local newspapers.51 Such claims, of course, were highly exaggerated. But many newspapers also reported items of information about the film that were completely fictional. These so-called “facts,” entirely created by Birth’s publicity department, included the assertions that all the “history” in the movie had been verified by three college professors, that the “town” of Piedmont (in reality, just a set) had been found only through a patient search in several Southern states, that five other towns had been specially built and three of them destroyed, and that the film had been shot on location in five states and “partly in Mexico.”52 Various myths also accumulated in relation to the battle scenes: that 18,000 actors “encamped for months in the picturesque hills of Virginia,” that the action sequences involved a fifty-mile march over rough country, that an organized corps of surgeons and nurses accompanied the “troops,” that roads were specially built for the production, and that the battle-front trenches extended for five miles. It was claimed that Griffith directed the battlefield sequences from a sixty-foot tower, using an elaborate telephone system (with its cables hidden underground) and that real shells costing $80 apiece were fired from the cannons.53 All these claims, of course, were false—as was the declaration that 500 costumers and seamstresses had worked for three months to produce all the uniforms, Klan robes, and women’s frocks.54
Overwhelmingly, the local American press greeted The Birth of a Nation with enthusiastic endorsements.55 “Only once in a lifetime is such a magnificent production produced,” noted the Baltimore American. Griffith’s movie, editorialized the Huntsville, Alabama, Daily Times, “is so far out of the ordinary that we do not hesitate to commend it and urge all who can to see it.” “The spectacular effects, the breadth of conception and the skill of execution with which the picture has been made differentiate it from all previous attempts at photo-spectacle,” commented the Washington Herald. “Not even Nero ever gazed upon so magnificent a spectacle,” observed the Akron, Ohio, Paragraph. “Never has such a photographic spectacle been shown in this city,” declared the Quincy, Illinois, Daily Journal, “and it far surpasses those spectacular foreign photo plays, Cabir[i]a and Quo Vadis, shown here last winter.”56 Several other reviewers drew attention to the parallels between Cabiria and The Birth of a Nation. On the whole, they found Griffith’s production at the very least equal to that of Giovanni Pastrone.57 One newspaper, the Philadelphia Evening Ledger, printed a thoughtful comparison of the two films by its “dramatic editor.” Cabiria, he argued, was better than Birth of a Nation on a number of technical points, especially the lighting. Griffith, however, excelled in action and fire scenes, and with the use of “cut-backs” (parallel editing) brought the second part of his film to a dramatic and engrossing climax.58 Other than on racial and historical grounds, there was remarkably little direct criticism of Birth: the film critic of the New York Mail thought the editing at times a little clumsy, was unimpressed by the footage taken from a camera moving rapidly in front of the Ku Klux Klan (“It absolutely kills the illusion”), and disliked the allegorical ending.59 Most critics, however, dealt only in superlatives: the aesthetics of the film, many believed, were such an advance on what had gone before that Birth of a Nation signified little less than the emergence of the motion picture as a new form of art.60
If Birth was art, whose art was it? In Germany before the First World War, the term “autorenfilm” (author’s film) had been coined to denote the claim of the scenarist (rather than the director) to be the principal creative source in making movies.61 The film reviewer of the New York Mail, however, had an alternative suggestion. “The producer of a film (by producer, I mean the man who actually directs the making of the production) either makes or breaks the effort,” he wrote in March 1915. “Yet the producer has never, to date, had the credit he deserves. This is especially true so far as the public is concerned.”62 Griffith, as pointed out in Chapter 3, was a classic example of this unnamed producer during his Biograph years.63 But in terms of The Birth of a Nation (which the Mail reviewer saw as a pioneering demonstration of the new possibilities of film), critics had no hesitation in identifying him as the movie’s principal creator. Some hailed him as an artistic genius: on
e reviewer classed him with Homer, Herodotus, Phidias, Michelangelo, Titian, and Wagner; another saw him as “the modern Shakespeare.”64
Mitchell and McCarthy’s publicity team must have been delighted with such unsolicited compliments. They were busy trying to build up the reputations of Griffith and his players by passing on tidbits of information (usually fictional) about them to the newspapers. The hoary old claims about Griffith as the originator of various new cinematic techniques were revived;65 even more far-fetched stories (including that Griffith had inspired the introduction of the foxtrot as a dance) found their way into some newspaper reports.66 Sometimes, “planted” stories made the actors in the film seem even more fascinating and exotic. According to one paper in Pennsylvania, the part of the lovesick sentry gazing at Elsie Stoneman in the hospital scene was played by Paul LeBlanc, a New Orleans Creole who had played comedy roles with Sarah Bernhardt before going to Los Angeles, where Griffith discovered him. In spite of the convincing level of detail provided, the story was false: the actual part of the lovesick sentry was played by William Freeman.67
One of the most influential things the publicity team did was to furnish the press with statistics on the length of the runs Birth was enjoying in major cities. It was not the first motion picture to enjoy a long run in a “live” theater; Herbert Brenon’s seven-reel Neptune’s Daughter held the pre-Birth of a Nation record with a half-year engagement at the Globe Theater in New York.68 But it was the first to run for so long, to so much acclaim, in so many places at once. “The production starts in to-morrow upon its third month,” observed one New York paper, anticipating somewhat, “and is going as strong as ever. Its success has been duplicated in Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco and plans are now shaping for a Chicago production. Nearly 125,000 people have seen the picture … in this city.”69 “There have been over 500 performances at the Liberty theater, New York; 300 at the Tremont theater, Boston, and over 850 performances at the Illinois theater, Chicago,” noted the Akron Paragraph in mid-September, “and it is still showing in these cities.”70 A few weeks later, the Kansas City Star reported (prematurely as it turned out) that Birth would close at the Liberty Theater in New York on November 27 after a run of 725 performances, and on the same day, its record-breaking runs of thirteen weeks in Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh (where the previous longest run—Ben Hur—had lasted five weeks) would also end. In Boston, it was noted, the film had opened on April 10 and closed on October 30, a twenty-nine week run that exceeded by 100 performances the record of any previous engagement.71 By emphasizing the length and success of the film’s runs in major metropolitan centers, local newspapers whetted the appetite of envious potential viewers in the rest of America. Reports of the controversy swirling around the film also made people outside the big cities eager to see what all the fuss was about.72 There must also have been increasing numbers of word-of-mouth recommendations from neighbors and relatives who had seen the film on visits to one of the cities where it was showing.
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