D W Griffith's The Birth of a Nation

by Melvyn Stokes

  89. Cook, Fire from the Flint, 149. Evelyn Ehrlich noted that in 1908 The Clansman “ran for a respectable 51 performances.” Ehrlich, “The Civil War in Early Film: Origin and Development of a Genre,” Southern Quarterly 19, nos. 3–4 (Spring–Summer 1981): 71.

  90. Schickel, Griffith, 80–81; Russell Merritt, “Rescued from a Perilous Nest: D. W. Griffith’s Escape from Theatre into Film,” Cinema Journal 21, no. 1 (Fall 1981): 27; Mrs. D. W. Griffith [Linda Arvidson], When the Movies Were Young (New York: Dover, 1969), 21–22.

  91. Cook, Fire from the Flint, 150–53.

  92. Reversing his usual practice, Dixon later published a novel based on the play: The Sins of the Father: A Romance of the South (New York: D. Appleton, 1912).

  93. Cook, Fire from the Flint, 153–56.

  94. The first filmed version was directed by Edwin S. Porter for the Edison Company in 1903. A fourteen-shot “feature,” it introduced each scene by a title on film. The film’s meaning ultimately came from the cultural competence of its audience. It was not, Janet Staiger has argued, as fragmentary and disconnected as it might later appear. The fourteen discrete tableaux, to spectators familiar with the novel and play, “must have called up a whole causal chain of events, fully motivated in psychologies of characters, and complexly ordered into a story that involved a simultaneity of events as well as sequentiality.” Staiger, Interpreting Films, 105–18, quotation from 118. Shortly afterward, another (slightly shorter) version was produced by Sigmund Lubin. In 1910, a Vitagraph version, released in three reels, played its own part in encouraging the move toward longer films. Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990), 349, 361; Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 198, 203; Williams, Playing the Race Card, 87–94.

  95. Cook, “The Man behind The Birth of a Nation,” 525, n. 24.

  96. On early attempts at innovating sound, see J. Douglas Gomery, “The Coming of the Talkies: Invention, Innovation, and Diffusion,” in Balio, The American Film Industry, 192–211.

  97. Jack Spears, The Civil War on the Screen and Other Essays (South Brunswick: A. S. Barnes, 1977), 32. For an alternative view of the difficulties facing Kinemacolor and the eventual collapse of the company, see Gorham Kindem, “The Demise of Kinemacolor: Technological, Legal, Economic, and Aesthetic Problems in Early Color Cinema History,” Cinema Journal 20, no. 2 (Spring 1981): 3–14.

  98. Spears, The Civil War on the Screen, 32–33.

  99. Cook, “The Man behind The Birth of a Nation,” 525.

  CHAPTER 3

  1. Schickel, Griffith, 16–17; James Hart, ed., The Man Who Invented Hollywood: The Autobiography of D. W. Griffith (Louisville, Ky.: Touchstone, 1972), 24.

  2. Schickel, Griffith, 17–18.

  3. Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 36; Schickel, Griffith, 18.

  4. Schickel, Griffith, 18–19; Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 24.

  5. Schickel, Griffith, 19.

  6. Ibid., 19–20.

  7. Ibid., 19–23.

  8. Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 26; Schickel, Griffith, 16, 23.

  9. Schickel, Griffith, 24; Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 25–27.

  10. Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 26; Schickel, Griffith, 30–31.

  11. Rogin, “The Sword Became a Flashing Vision,” in Lang, The Birth of a Nation, 275; Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 28–30, quotation from 30.

  12. Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 32, 34, 35; Schickel, Griffith, 31–32.

  13. Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 34–38.

  14. Ibid., 32–33.

  15. Ibid., 39.

  16. Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 41–42; Schickel, Griffith, 39–40, 44.

  17. Schickel, Griffith, 25, 31–32, 41; Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 42–43.

  18. Schickel, Griffith, 40–43, 46; Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 43–44, 48, 52–53. While Griffith does not seem to have committed himself finally to an acting career until the spring of 1896, he appeared in a testimonial benefit in Louisville at the end of July 1895. For this, as well as the most complete chronology of Griffith’s career on the stage, see Merritt, “Rescued from a Perilous Nest,” 19–27.

  19. Schickel, Griffith, 46; Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 48–49.

  20. Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 38–39; Gerrie Griffith Reichard, interviewed in D. W. Griffith: Father of Film, documentary film, produced by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill (1993).

  21. Schickel, Griffith, 43–44, 47, 82.

  22. Schickel, Griffith, 47–49; Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 49–51.

  23. Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 53; Schickel, Griffith, 49–51; Merritt, “Rescued from a Perilous Nest,” 22.

  24. Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 53; Schickel, Griffith, 51–52.

  25. Schickel, Griffith, 53, 55–56, 58–59; Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 53–55.

  26. Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 37, 53, 58, 68.

  27. Schickel, Griffith, 62.

  28. Mrs. D. W. Griffith, When the Movies Were Young, 12; Merritt, “Rescued from a Perilous Nest,” 26–27; Schickel, Griffith, 63–70; Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 59.

  29. Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 69; Walter Whiteside, 1915, quoted in Merritt, “Rescued from a Perilous Nest,” 5; Mrs. D.W. Griffith, When the Movies Were Young, 14.

  30. Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 68; Merritt, “Rescued from a Perilous Nest,” 23–24, 26; Schickel, Griffith, 60, 65, 67–68, 71–75.

  31. Mrs. D. W. Griffith, When the Movies Were Young, 21–22.

  32. Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 69–70; Schickel, Griffith, 82–90.

  33. Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 73; Schickel, Griffith, 51–52. In 1904, Griffith had appeared in a play, Winchester, which blended together a film with live stage action. Merritt, “Rescued from a Perilous Nest,” 25.

  34. On Davidson, see Robert Farr, “Hollywood Mensch: Max Davidson,” Griffithiana 55/56 (September 1996): 107–25 (on his relations with Griffith, see 109).

  35. Mrs. D. W. Griffith, When the Movies Were Young, 29–30; Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 73.

  36. Eileen Bowser, “Griffith’s Film Career before The Adventures of Dollie,” in Film before Griffith, ed. John L. Fell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 367.

  37. Iris Barry, D. W. Griffith—American Film Master (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1940), 11; Bowser, “Griffith’s Film Career before The Adventures of Dollie,” 368; Mrs. D. W. Griffith, When the Movies Were Young, 41. According to his wife, Griffith also approached Kalem, Lubin, and other studios, but did not find work there. Ibid.

  38. Mrs. D. W. Griffith, When the Movies Were Young, 31, 34, 40; Bowser, “Griffith’s Film Career before Dollie,” 368–69, 371–73.

  39. Bitzer, Billy Bitzer, 63.

  40. Mrs. D. W. Griffith, When the Movies Were Young, 42, 45–48

  41. Schickel, Griffith, 107–11; Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 75–75; Mrs Griffith, When the Movies Were Young, 51–52.

  42. In practice, his productivity was highest at the beginning of the period, declining toward the end. He directed 60 films in 1908, 141 in 1909, 87 in 1910, 70 in 1911, 67 in 1912, and 31 in 1913. Figures based on the filmography in Schickel, Griffith, 637–43. For the most detailed listing of Griffith’s Biograph films, see Cooper C. Graham, Steven Higgins, Elaine Mancini, and João Luiz Vieira, D. W. Griffith and the Biograph Company (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1985).

  43. Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 74.

  44. Michel Ciment, Le crime à l’écran: une histoire de l’Amérique (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 17.

  45. Spears, The Civil War on the Screen, 11.

  46. Ibid., 12, 21–23, 29–30.

  47. Robert Lang, “D. W. Griffith: A Biographical Sketch,” in Lang, The Birth of a Nation, 29.

  48. Although it was not a Civil
War film, The Girls and Daddy (1909) anticipated the threat posed to Elsie and Flora by Lynch and Gus by showing a blackface burglar threatening two young white girls. See Daniel Bernardi, “The Voice of Whiteness: D. W. Griffith’s Biograph Films (1908–1913),” in The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema, ed. Daniel Bernardi (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 122–23; Courtney, Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation, 20, 31–32.

  49. Bowser, Transformation of Cinema, 22.

  50. Tom Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 60–64.

  51. Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film, 64–65.

  52. Schickel, Griffith, 122; Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film, 143–45; Henderson, D. W. Griffith, 31–32.

  53. Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film, 144–45; Henderson, Griffith, 49–50.

  54. Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film, 145–48, 155–58, 160–62.

  55. Schickel, Griffith, 111. His wife remembered the salary as $45. Mrs. D. W. Griffith, When the Movies Were Young, 52.

  56. Schickel, Griffith, 115–16.

  57. Bitzer, Billy Bitzer, 8–9, 20, 53; Karl Brown, Adventures, 18–19; Schickel, Griffith, 118.

  58. Schickel, Griffith, 103; Mrs. D. W. Griffith, When the Movies Were Young, 62–65.

  59. Mrs. D. W. Griffith, When the Movies Were Young, 95–97.

  60. Schickel, Griffith, 137, 141, 153, 167.

  61. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 63.

  62. Bowser, Transformation of Cinema, 196–97. Other longer films included Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show (three reels, 1910), which was distributed outside the normal exchange system, and Drink (a two-reel adaptation of Zola’s L’Assommoir), which was probably exhibited by special arrangement between Pathé Frères, its producer, and the MPPC. Ibid., 192, 197.

  63. Henderson, Griffith, 97–98; Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 87; Graham, Higgins, Mancini, and Vieira, D. W. Griffith and the Biograph Company, 102.

  64. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me, 63; Schickel, Griffith, 160.

  65. Graham, Higgins, Mancini, and Vieira, D. W. Griffith and the Biograph Company, 145, 160, 162.

  66. Schickel, Griffith, 185, 196, 199–200; Williams, Griffith: First Artist of the Movies, 54–55; Henderson, Griffith, 119–20, 124, 132.

  67. Henderson, Griffith, 119.

  68. Schickel, Griffith, 188–89; Henderson, Griffith, 124. Blanche Sweet later recalled that she had seen Quo Vadis with Griffith in New York. Slide, American Racist, 83.

  69. Since Griffith himself was supposedly supervising two other Biograph directors, Dell Henderson and Anthony O’Sullivan, for part of the time, the attribution of some of the films is not absolutely clear. See Graham, Higgins, Mancini, and Vieire, D. W. Griffith and the Biograph Company, 171–211.

  70. Richard Schickel points out that it was a historical epic, based in fact on the biblical Apocrypha, and the author of the play used as the basis for the film, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, had at least as high a literary reputation as Henryk Sienkiewicz, who had written Quo Vadis. Schickel, Griffith, 191.

  71. Henderson, Griffith, 126–27, 131. Griffith himself later recalled that the film took two weeks to shoot, cost $13,000, and as a consequence led to his “getting in Dutch with the bosses again.” Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 83–84.

  72. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me, 108.

  73. Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 87; Henderson, Griffith, 115–16, 131–32.

  74. This ad is reproduced in Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film, 117.

  75. Biograph would finally release all four films between February and April 1914. Graham, Higgins, Mancini, and Vieira, D. W. Griffith and the Biograph Company, 160, 210–11.

  76. Griffith repeated his claims to have invented techniques such as the close-up, the flashback, the fade-out, and the iris shot both in later interviews and in his autobiography. See David W. Griffith, “The Miracle of Modern Photography,” The Mentor 9, no. 6 (July 1921), 67; Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 84–86.

  77. Williams, Griffith: First Artist of the Movies, 27.

  78. Edward Wagenknecht, “Griffith’s Biographs: A General View,” Films in Review 26, no. 8 (October 1975), 465.

  79. Bitzer, Billy Bitzer, 54.

  80. Bitzer recalled that Cuddebackville could easily be used as “a mountainous locale” since “the sloping hills looked like mountains when photographed against the sunset.” Bitzer, Billy Bitzer, 68

  81. Bowser, Transformation of Cinema, 171.

  82. Ibid., 162–65, 171–72. Biograph was the third major film company to arrive in California. The Selig studio and the New York Motion Picture Company had already established themselves there in 1909. Ibid., 151–52.

  83. Williams, Griffith: First Artist of the Movies, 34.

  84. Williams, Griffith: First Artist of the Movies, 39; cf. Iris Barry, D. W. Griffith: American Film Master, 16.

  85. Mrs. D. W. Griffith, When the Movies Were Young, 128–31.

  86. Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 82; Bitzer, Billy Bitzer, 84–85.

  87. Bitzer, Billy Bitzer, 54. Later, to boost Griffith’s reputation at Bitzer’s expense, Griffith partisans, including Lillian Gish and Linda Arvidson, asserted that Bitzer had at times dragged his feet over some of Griffith’s suggestions. See Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 61–62; Mrs. D. W. Griffith, When the Movies Were Young, 128–29.

  88. Bowser, Transformation of Cinema, 54

  89. “Before his arrival,” Bitzer later reflected on Griffith as a director, “I, as cameraman, was responsible for everything except the immediate hiring and handling of the actor. Soon it was his say whether the lights were bright enough, or if the make-up was right.” Bitzer, Billy Bitzer, 69.

  90. Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film, 42–43. Much the same point was made by Edward Wagenecht. See Wagenecht, “Griffith’s Biographs,” 465.

  91. Williams, Griffith: First Artist of the Movies, 34–35. Griffith himself later claimed that Bitzer had resisted the notion of shooting close-ups. Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 85–86. The management of the Biograph were even more skeptical: manager Henry Marvin argued that audiences had paid to see actors and might object if they could see only part of them, and that they would be unable to follow the changes between long or medium shot and close-up. Williams, Griffith: First Artist of the Movies, 35.

  92. Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film, 108–109.

  93. Quoted in Bowser, Transformation of Cinema, 88.

  94. Roberta E. Pearson, Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 4, 20, 23, 28, 36, 51, 120.

  95. Pearson, Eloquent Gestures, 79–80; Bitzer, Billy Bitzer, 63.

  96. Barry, D. W. Griffith—American Film Master, 15; cf. Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film, 97.

  97. Bowser, Transformation of Cinema, 62.

  98. Bowser, Transformation of Cinema, 58–59.

  99. According to Tom Gunning, parallel editing was the “linch-pin” of the new narrator system for film introduced by Griffith in his first eighteen months at Biograph. Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film, 80.

  100. Iris Barry, D. W. Griffith—American Film Master, 16–17.

  101. Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film, 41–42.

  102. Bowser, Transformation of Cinema, 269. Harrison’s article, “The Art Director and His Work,” appeared in Moving Picture World, November 22, 1913, 847–48.

  103. Bowser, “Griffith’s Film Career before The Adventures of Dollie,” 373.

  104. Bowser, Transformation of Cinema, 105; Everson, American Sile
nt Film, 51.

  105. Schickel, Griffith, 203.

  106. Bowser, Transformation of Cinema, 221–22: Aitken, The Birth of a Nation Story, 20–21; Robert Lang, “Biographical Sketch,” in Lang, ed., The Birth of a Nation, 29; Henderson, Griffith, 137–38.

  107. Barry, American Film Master, 20 (cf. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 123); Bowser, Transformation of Cinema, 258.

  108. Bowser, Transformation of Cinema, 164–65.

  109. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 109–11; Bitzer, Billy Bitzer, 89–90.

  110. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 112–113; Brown, Adventures, 31; Williams, Griffith: First Artist of the Movies, 57–60; Everson, American Silent Film, 76–77. Part of the intertitle language may be derived from Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee.”

  111. Comparatively recent as his memories of the abortive 1912 color film were, Woods’s recollection of the project may have been prompted still further by the fact that when Griffith arrived in Los Angeles to work for Majestic he took over the old Kinemacolor lot at 4500 Sunset Boulevard as his studio. Brown, Adventures, 9.

  112. Spears, The Civil War on the Screen, 33. According to Griffith’s wife, he was already familiar with the play “as he had heard from his friend Austin Webb, who had played the part of the mulatto Silas Lynch, about all the exciting times attending the performance of the play—the riots and all—and more he had heard from Claire McDowell, who was also in the show, and more still from Mr. Dixon himself.” Mrs. D. W. Griffith, When the Movies Were Young, 251.

  113. Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 88–89.

  114. Aitken, The Birth of a Nation Story, 26.

  115. Cook, Fire from the Flint, 163.

  116. Aitken, The Birth of a Nation Story, 26, 31; Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 89.

  117. Aitken, The Birth of a Nation Story, 31. According to Roy Aitken, his brother Harry gave Dixon a personal check for the $2,000. Dixon’s biographer believes he settled just for the 25 percent. Ibid., 35; Cook, Fire from the Flint, 164.

  118. Aitken, The Birth of a Nation Story, 36; Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 132.

  119. Aitken, The Birth of a Nation Story, 27, 29–38.