120. Bernardi, “The Voice of Whiteness,” 103–28. Although Bernardi is not discussing The Birth of a Nation, the implication of his essay is that Griffith, at Biograph, was already working through technologies and ideologies he would use in Birth.
121. While Griffith made a number of films in which Indians were depicted as violent savages (Fighting Blood, 1911; The Last Drop of Water, 1911; and The Battle at Elderbush Gulch, 1913), Kim Newman points out that he “also made the significantly-titled The Redman’s View (1909) and A Mohawk’s Way (1910), [and] was reasonably sympathetic to the Indians in The Squaw’s Love (1911), The Chief’s Daughter (1911), The Indian Brothers (1911) and The Chief’s Blanket (1912).” Among other Griffith films that were “sympathetic to Native Americans,” Michael Hilger lists The Redman and the Child (1908), The Broken Doll (1910), and Ramona (1910). As Hilger notes, in fact, Griffith veered between depicting Indians as “savages” and as “noble red men.” Sometimes, as in Iola’s Promise (1912), he included both. Kim Newman, Wild West Movies, or, How the West Was Found, Won, Lost, Lied About, Filmed and Forgotten (London: Bloomsbury, 1990), 67; Michael Hilger, From Savage to Nobleman: Images of Native Americans in Film (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1995), 2, 17–19, 23, 40, 44.
CHAPTER 4
1. According to Cook, the loft was owned by the Epoch Producing Company. However, Epoch was not itself organized until the beginning of March 1915. Cook, Fire from the Flint, 164.
2. Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 16. Seymour Stern later claimed that Dixon and Woods had collaborated on a scenario for the film. Ibid., n. 17.
3. D. W. Griffith, “What I Demand of Movie Stars,” Moving Picture Classic, 3 (February 1917), 40–41, 68, reprinted in Geduld, Focus on D. W. Griffith, 54. Cuniberti observes that Griffith on other occasions either contradicted this or insisted that there had never been a scenario. Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 16, n. 20.
4. On this aspect of Griffith’s work, see Michael Allen, Family Secrets: The Feature Films of D. W. Griffith (London: BFI Publishing, 1999).
5. Flora Camp, of course, had been the name of the young girl raped by Dick in The Leopard’s Spots.
6. Henderson, Griffith, 146; Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me, 131–32. The reason for such secrecy, Gish explained, was to try to prevent another film company from rushing out a competing version.
7. Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 90; Schickel, Griffith, 216; Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 135.
8. Lillian Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 6–7, 9–12, 14, 16, 20–21, 29–39.
9. Anthony Slide, The Griffith Actresses (South Brunswick: A. S. Barnes, 1973), 112–16.
10. Bitzer, Billy Bitzer, 68.
11. Slide, The Griffith Actresses, 127–31
12. Quoted in Schickel, Griffith, 218.
13. Ibid., 219.
14. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me, 133; Slide, The Griffith Actresses, 99–100.
15. Richard Dyer, “A White Star,” Sight and Sound 3, no. 8 (August 1993): 22–24.
16. Schickel, Griffith, 217.
17. Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 90; Slide, The Griffith Actresses, 112, 116–17. The very earliest scenes of the film had Flora as a child played by Violet Wilkie.
18. Slide, The Griffith Actresses, 131–32.
19. Beringer, who also functioned as an assistant director for the film, later changed his name to André Beranger and became a character actor of some note in the 1920s. Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 12, n. 7.
20. Griffith, as quoted by Henry Stephen Gordon, “D. W. Griffith Recalls the Making of The Birth of a Nation,” in The Photoplay Magazine 10 (October 1916), 86–94, reprinted in Silva, Focus, 58.
21. Leon F. Litwack, “The Birth of a Nation,” in Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, Mark C. Carnes, Ted Mico, John Miller-Monzon, and David Rubel, eds. (London: Cassell, 1996), 140.
22. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me, 134.
23. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me, 134–35. Sul-Te-Wan appeared as a woman on the sidewalk jeering a dead white victim in the wartime raid on Piedmont, as one of the spectators in the South Carolina House of Representatives, and as the woman taunting Dr. Cameron when he is brought in front of his former slaves in chains. Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 59. It would be interesting—but completely unprofitable, since no evidence exists—to speculate on the precise nature of the relationship between Griffith and Sul-Te-Wan while he was making The Clansman, a film about miscegenation.
24. Schickel, Griffith, 233; Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me, 134.
25. Brown, Adventures, 62.
26. Eric Lott has demonstrated the manner in which blackface minstrelsy both expressed and challenged white working-class culture. Sarah Meer has recently analyzed 1850s minstrelsy and the “Uncle Tom” phenomenon in an international perspective. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Sareh Meer, Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005). For another study of blackface minstrelsy in historical perspective, see Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), especially chaps. 1 and 2.
27. Brown, Adventures, 71.
28. Slide, Before, In and After Hollywood, 75–77.
29. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me, 136.
30. Walsh had made his own threatrical debut in a touring company of The Clansman. He was an expert rider and bit player who, at Biograph, had risen to become an assistant director. After shooting “Lincoln” in his box at the theater, like Booth he was required to leap onto the stage and—like Booth—injured himself in the process, limping off stage in a very convincing imitation of reality. Schickel, Griffith, 221.
31. Brown, Adventures, 28, 57; cf. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me, 91, 93; Slide, Before, In and After Hollywood, 76, 105.
32. Schickel, Griffith, p. 222. According to von Stroheim’s biographer, it took two takes to get the shot of the fall off the roof right. Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 61. Joseph Henabery contested Stroheim’s role in the production, implying that he had only met Stroheim once Birth of a Nation had been completed. After reviewing the evidence available, Richard Koszarski is inclined to accept the case for Stroheim’s participation in Birth. Slide, Before, In and After Hollywood, 88; Richard Koszarski, “‘So Long, Master … ’: Stroheim, Griffith, and the Griffith Studio,” Griffithiana 71 (2001): 47–53.
33. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 139.
34. Slide, Before, In and After Hollywood, 81, 74–75.
35. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 145; cf. Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 68.
36. Slide, Before, In and After Hollywood, 122; Schickel, Griffith, 226.
37. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me, 142.
38. Schickel, Griffith, 216; Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 91.
39. Brown, Adventures, 28.
40. Slide, Before, In and After Hollywood, 78–80.
41. Brown, Adventures, 28; Bitzer, “D. W. Griffith,” DWGP.
42. Brown, Adventures, 28–29; Slide, Before, In and After Hollywood, 79–80.
43. Bitzer, “D. W. Griffith,” DWGP.
44. Schickel, Griffith, 212. The one outline of scenes in Griffith’s handwriting that has survived seems to have been something of an aide-mémoire from the editing process. Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 170–75.
45. Slide, Before, In and After Hollywood, 139.
46. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me, 133.
47. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 138; Bitzer, untitled recollections, DWGP.
48. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 138.
49. There is a list of interiors and exteriors in the Epoch accounts for March 13, 1915. It is impossible to say when it was written; since it includes scenes that
are missing from the final film, this might have been done at an early stage, possibly even before filming started. See “Birth of a Nation Budget,” DWGP.
50. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 137–38; Schickel, Griffith, 224. Brown remembered that Wortman and his gang of long-seasoned stage carpenters had no need to think very long about “what the town should look like or how it should be dressed.” All the gang had worked at some point for “Tommer” shows—traveling companies playing the stage version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The “Southern” town they created in California was based on this earlier experience. Moreover, Brown claimed, force of habit made them build scenery in sections that could be folded up and shipped (in reality, of course, most would simply be destroyed when filming was over). Brown, Adventures, 63–64. Linda Williams uses the background of the carpenters on Birth of a Nation in “Tom” shows to introduce her own discussion of “the strange confluence of the most popular and influential play of the nineteenth century with the most popular and influential film of the early twentieth century.” Williams, Playing the Race Card, 96–98.
51. Brown, Adventures, 63–64.
52. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 136–37; Brown, Adventures, 74. Bitzer also claimed that Griffith relied on documents to a very great extent. Bitzer interview, 1940, DWGP.
53. Brown, Adventures, 58–59, 64–65.
54. Ibid., 65.
55. Ibid., 57–58.
56. Schickel, Griffith, 224.
57. Brown, Adventures, 65.
58. Bitzer, Billy Bitzer, 107; Raoul Walsh, Each Man in His Time: The Life Story of a Director (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), 106.
59. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me, 137; Brown, Adventures, 55–56.
60. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 139–40: cf. Bitzer, Billy Bitzer, 107.
61. Walsh, Each Man, 107; Brown, interviewed in D. W. Griffith: Father of Film.
62. Brown, Adventures, 75–76; Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 140. This technique of using assistant directors to control groups of extras would later become known as the nucleus system. Henderson, Griffith, 150.
63. Walsh, Each Man, 106.
64. Brown, Adventures, 56; Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 140.
65. Schickel, Griffith, 225; Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 11.
66. Henderson, Griffith, 149; Miriam Cooper with Bonnie Herndon, Dark Lady of the Silents: My Life in Early Hollywood (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973), 77–78.
67. Brown, Adventures, 66–74. As Brown was trying to push the dummy off the rock, he almost fell. He just managed to keep his footing, denying Griffith the shot—as he sardonically noted—“of not one but two dummies making the drop.” Ibid., 73–74.
68. Slide, Before, In and After Hollywood, 186.
69. Billy Bitzer, “Our Neighbor Mrs. Thoren Almost Became a Stockholder,” DWGP.
70. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 138–39.
71. Cooper, Dark Lady of the Silents, 67.
72. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 139, 141.
73. Brown, Adventures, 17; Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 139.
74. Bitzer, Billy Bitzer, 107; Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 69; Billy Bitzer, “On Camera,” DWGP. The only times Bitzer recalled his own camera not being used was when it was an elevated platform “as in the distant battlefield shots where it would require a little time in hoisting it up and placing it.” On these occasions, a second camera—which Griffith would call Bitzer off the platform to operate—was used instead. Ibid.
75. Bitzer, Billy Bitzer, 86, 112. Bitzer’s assistant, Karl Brown, later suggested that Bitzer also had a Swiss-made lens that was the best of the lot. Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 69.
76. Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 69; Bitzer, Billy Bitzer, 108.
77. Brown, Adventures, 59. Griffith’s language may have been derived from the live theater. Connecticut actor-author-director William Gillette pioneered the development of the “fade-out,” involving a gradual dimming of the lights before the curtain was lowered. Griffith had once appeared in a play of Gillette’s. Kenneth S. Lynn, Charlie Chaplin and His Times (1997; reprint, London: Aurum Press, 2002), 76.
78. Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 26.
79. “Billy Bitzer on Photography,” Conversation with Beaumont Newhall, January 30, 1940, DWGP; Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 26, 45.
80. Bitzer, Billy Bitzer, 107; Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 141. In handwritten notes on making The Birth of a Nation, not dated but probably around 1940, Bitzer commented, “There were flares used in some battle scenes.” Bitzer, “No Electric Light All Sun Photography,” DWGP.
81. Bitzer, “No Electric Light All Sun Photography,” DWGP. Karl Brown, Bitzer’s assistant, remembered that “the day ended when the light became yellow.” Brown, Adventures, 17.
82. Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 52; Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 141.
83. Bitzer, “One Camera,” DWGP; Bitzer, Billy Bitzer, 108. Some sources identify the explosives expert for the film as Walter “Slim” Hoffman. According to Karl Brown, however, he was a one-armed man pockmarked by powder burns called “Fireworks” Wilson. Since Griffith and Bitzer already had experience in shooting Civil War pictures, it was Bitzer—Brown claimed—who finally told Wilson how to create the effect required of something that looked like a big explosion by making the “bombs” themselves out of mainly sawdust and very little powder. Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 68; Schickel, Griffith, 227–28; Brown, Adventures, 52–53, 55.
84. Aitken, The Birth of a Nation Story, 40.
85. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 146–47; Bitzer, Billy Bitzer, 108–109; Bitzer, “One Camera,” DWGP; Bitzer, “In the Rides of the Clansmen,” DWGP. This shot does not appear in versions of the film available today.
86. Brown, Adventures, 75.
87. Bitzer, “The Old Film in Half Tones,” DWGP. Karl Brown remembered that while directing the shot of Lee’s surrender, Griffith was holding a historical picture of the scene in his hand—“a unique example,” he commented, “of a picture being directed by a picture.” Brown, Adventures, 75.
88. Bitzer, “The Old Film in Half Tones,” DWGP; Bitzer, “No Electric Light All Sun Photography,” DWGP; “Billy Bitzer on Photography,” conversation with Beaumont Newhall, January 30, 1940, DWGP. Bitzer also implied that both he and Griffith had been familiar with Brady’s photographs and had been trying consciously to imitate them. Ibid.
89. Aitken, The Birth of a Nation Story, 34, 39.
90. Bitzer, Billy Bitzer, 109; Billy Bitzer, “Money,” DWGP.
91. Aitken, The Birth of a Nation Story, 37–41, 43.
92. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 142–43.
93. Schickel, Griffith, 239; Bitzer, Billy Bitzer, 110–11.
94. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 144; Schickel, Griffith, 240–41; Bitzer, Billy Bitzer, 110–11.
95. See “Investors and Amounts Invested,” DWGP.
96. Ibid. Curiously, Bitzer’s name does not appear on the list of investors in the movie.
97. Bitzer, “The Birth of a Nation,” n.d., DWGP. The only offer to help finance the film Griffith actually turned down was that of Lillian Gish’s mother, who attempted to invest her $300 savings. Ironically, of course, his principled refusal—he thought it too risky an investment—cost the Gishes a fortune. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 143.
98. Aitken, The Birth of a Nation Story, 45, 47–48.
99. In 1914, the Mutual Film Corporation filed suit to restrain the enforcement of an act of the Ohio legislature creating a state movie censorship board. Both Gerald Mast and Richard Koszarski wrongly state that this was in connection with the distribution in the state of The Birth of a Nation. Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment, 199; Mast, The Movies in Our Midst, 136. In reality, since the Majestic Corporation had declined to finance The Birth of a Nation, the Aitkens decided not to distribute it th
rough the Mutual company, and the Aitkens and Griffith created a separate organization, the Epoch Producing Company, to distribute the film. In 1915, the United States Supreme Court came down on the side of the Ohio Censorship Board, effectively deciding that film censorship would be permitted, a decision that stood until the Court reversed itself in the Miracle case of 1951. Later, in 1916, Mutual signed an exclusive contract with Charlie Chaplin to produce a series of twelve pictures. Lynn, Charlie Chaplin and His Times, 173–74.
100. Henderson, Griffith, 156; Aitken, The Birth of a Nation Story, 48–49; “ByLaws,” Epoch Producing Company, March 13, 1915, 2–3, DWGP.
101. Bitzer, Billy Bitzer, 105–106. Neither Bitzer nor his assistant, Karl Brown, shared Griffith’s enthusiasm for the project. Bitzer remembered thinking it “was just another sausage after all.” Ibid., 106; Brown, Adventures, 31–33.
102. Bitzer, Billy Bitzer, 106; Slide, Before, In and After Hollywood, 66; Brown, Adventures, 65.
103. Bitzer, Billy Bitzer, 107, 109.
104. Schickel, Griffith, 61; Slide, Before, In and After Hollywood, 67.
105. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 123–24.
106. Slide, Before, In and After Hollywood, 67.
107. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 126; Brown, Adventures, 29.
108. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 126; Brown, Adventures, 29; Bitzer, Billy Bitzer, 70.
109. Slide, Before, In and After Hollywood, 67; Brown, Adventures, 29; Bitzer, “D. W. Griffith,” DWGP; Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 127–28.
110. Bitzer, “D. W. Griffith,” DWGP; Brown, Adventures, 15, 30–31, 79–80; Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 92, 126, 127–29; Schickel, Griffith, 229.
111. Bitzer, Billy Bitzer, 106, 110; Brown, Adventures, 14–16; Aitken, The Birth of a Nation Story, 39.
112. Slide, Before, In and After Hollywood, 140.
113. Karl Brown was terrified, as Henry Walthall slowly loitered, that the camera would run out of film before he reached the front door. Brown, Adventures, 81–82.
114. Brown, Adventures, 81 (also see 93).
115. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 141; Bitzer, “D. W. Griffith,” DWGP; Bitzer, Billy Bitzer, 108.
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