116. Slide, Before, In and After Hollywood, 137–39. Henabery, later an experienced director, considered Walthall “the best silent picture actor who ever lived.” Once told by Griffith what was needed, Walthall usually asked if it was a long shot or a close-up: “He varied his style and degree of exaggeration according to his distance from the camera. He even varied his action according to the focal length of the lens. He knew how differently action appeared with a very wide angle lens as compared to one with a narrow angle. He was a master of overplaying, sometimes valuable in long shots, and a master of underplaying, so important in close-ups. At times, without … apparent facial movement, Walthall expressed a character’s innermost feeling to the audience.” Ibid., 137–38.
117. Slide, Before, In and After Hollywood, 138; Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 127.
118. Brown, Adventures, 18–19; Henderson, Griffith, 152; Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 102.
119. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 153.
120. Bitzer, Billy Bitzer, 105. According to Henderson, the printing was done in Chicago. The accounts of the Epoch Producing Company, however, show that Bitzer’s recollection of New York was correct. Henderson, Griffith, 152; Epoch Producing Company accounts, dated March 13, 1915, DWGP.
121. Brown interview, January 12, 1976, quoted in Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 17.
122. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 125; Brown, Adventures, 20, 85.
123. Brown, Adventures, 16, 22–23.
124. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 147; Brown, Adventures, 20, 85.
125. Epoch Producing Corporation, Accounts dated March 13, 1915, DWGP.
126. For a discussion of the various claims made over the length of the final version, see Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 20–22.
127. Schickel, Griffith, 242.
128. Brown, Adventures, 74; Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 147.
129. A. R. Fulton, “Editing in The Birth of a Nation,” reprinted in Silva, Focus, 145.
130. Brown, Adventures, 17, 20. “Final” here is in quotation marks to emphasize that Griffith, as noted in Chapter 1, continued to edit the film after its première at Clune’s Auditorium: a number of shots were added, changed, or removed. Others were cut at a later stage as a result of protests, political pressure, and censorship.
131. Brown, Adventures, 74.
132. According to the scripts prepared by Theodore Huff and John Cuniberti, there are fifty-five shots in this sequence. Robert Lang identifies sixty-three. See Huff, A Shot Analysis of D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” 25–27; Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 86–91; Lang, The Birth of a Nation, 88–92. The shot analysis that follows is based on Lang.
133. Fulton, “Editing in The Birth of a Nation,” 151.
134. Brown, Adventures, 59.
135. Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 20. See Huff, A Shot Analysis of D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation.” Cuniberti comments that on the basis of both internal and external evidence, Huff prepared this work c. 1939. Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 20, n. 38.
136. Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 22; Lang, The Birth of a Nation, 43–156.
137. “Birth of a Nation Budget,” DWGP; Griffith’s autograph list of scenes reprinted in Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 170–75.
138. Nashville Banner, January 25, 1916, and Brown in a 1975 letter, both cited in Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 37. It may be, of course, that the Nashville Banner’s description of the film beginning with a scene of slaves being sold is simply a longer version of the shot (“The bringing of the African to America planted the first seed of disunion”) which is the opening scene that survives in today’s versions of the film (shots 7–8). This also is a slave-selling scene.
139. W. Stephen Bush, “The Birth of a Nation,” Moving Picture World, March 13, 1915, reprinted in Silva, Focus, 25–26; Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 38. Francis Hackett also commented on the “smell” incident in his March 20, 1915 review of the film. See Lang, The Birth of a Nation, 162.
140. Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 37–38, 151, 166–67.
141. Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 125.
142. Brown, Adventures, 84–85; Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 92; Schickel, Griffith, 242–43.
143. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 146; Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation 19, n. 31. Brown also asserted that early prints were both tinted and toned, a claim “supported by others who have seen surviving remnants of the original.” Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 19, n. 31.
144. “The Clansman, Statement of Receipts and Disbursements,” DWGP; Brown, Adventures, 120–21.
145. Russell Lack, Twenty Four Frames Under: A Buried History of Film Music (London: Quartet Books, 1997), 56.
146. Brown, Adventures, 30, 79; Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 92. Griffith’s secretary, Agnes Wiener, told Gish that he kept more than 1,000 classical records in his suite at the Alexandria Hotel. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 124.
147. Moving Picture World, March 13, 1909, quoted in Charles Hofmann, Sounds for Silents (New York: Drama Books Specialists, 1970), n. p.
148. New York Daily Mirror, October 9, 1909, quoted in Lack, Twenty Four Frames Under, 30.
149. Marks, Music and the Silent Film, 68. Also see Laurence E. MacDonald, The Invisible Art of Film Music: A Comprehensive History (New York: Ardsley House, 1998), 2; Kathryn Kalinak, Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 51; Hofmann, Sounds for Silents, n. p.
150. Marks, Music and the Silent Film, 64–65, 100. The connection between film and theater was further emphasized by the new tendency of referring to films as “photoplays.”
151. Charles Merrell Berg, An Investigation of the Motives for and the Realization of Music to Accompany the American Silent Film, 1896–1927 (New York: Arno Press, 1976), 147–48; Marks, Music and the Silent Film, 99–101, 103–105.
152. Breil, quoted in Marks, Music and the Silent Film, 136.
153. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 152; Berg, An Investigation, 150.
154. Marks, Music and the Silent Film, 148, 143–44.
155. Marks, Music and the Silent Film, 208–209.
156. Hofmann, Sounds for Silents, n.p.; Marks, Music and the Silent Film, 148.
157. Marks, Music and the Silent Film, 140, 209.
158. Wagner’s Rienzi overture was used as well as the “Ride of the Valkyries.” Marks, Music and the Silent Film, 209.
159. Scott D. Paulin, “Richard Wagner and the Fantasy of Cinematic Unity: The Idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk in the History and Theory of Film Music,” in Music and Cinema, ed. James Buhler, Caryl Flinn, and David Neumeyer (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 58–84.
160. On the Wagnerian vogue and the composer’s influence on U.S. culture generally, see Joseph Horowitz, Wagner Nights: An American History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
161. Paulin, “Richard Wagner and the Fantasy of Cinematic Unity,” 66; Kalinak, Settling the Score, 63.
162. Paulin, “Richard Wagner and the Fantasy of Cinematic Unity,” 70.
163. Marks, Music and the Silent Film, 101–102, 137–38, 142. The love/Elsie Stone-man theme from The Birth of a Nation proved highly successful when released as sheet music under the title “The Perfect Song.” In the 1930s, it was also used as the theme of the extremely popular “Amos ‘n’ Andy” radio program. The Chappell Company in New York and London continued to publish new arrangements of the song until the 1950s. Ibid., 128. One of Breil’s motifs was the “Negro theme,” later referred to as the “Motif of Barbarism.” According to Jane Gaines and Neil Lerner, this theme—“an insistent tom-tom beating underneath a mildly syncopated melody”—was used in a way that was both “systematic and extreme” to suggest that the black characters in the film were “barbaric.” Gaines and Lerner, “The Orchestration of Affect,” 252, 254, 257.
164. Jean Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema, trans. Christopher King (1963; reprint, London: Athlone Press, 1998), 67.
165. Marks, Music and the Silent Film, 166.
166. Some commentators almost from the beginning divided the film into “Griffith’s” first half of the film (good) and “Dixon’s” second half (bad). Vachel Lindsay was among the first to argue that “wherever the scenario shows traces of The Clansman, the original book, by Thomas Dixon, it is bad. Wherever it is unadulterated Griffith, which is half the time, it is good.” To divide the film in this way, however, argues Linda Williams, “is to ignore both the power and excitement of the second part of the film with its last-minute rescues as well as the raid by ‘black renegades’ on the Cameron plantation in the first half of the film.” Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (1915: reprint, New York: Modern Library, 2000), 48; Williams, “Politics,” in Usai, The Griffith Project, Vol. 8, 102.
CHAPTER 5
1. “News of the Trade,” Reel Life, March 20, 1915; “President Witnesses Moving Pictures in the White House,” Post-Dispatch [St. Louis], February 19, 1915; “President Sees Photo-Play,” Morning Telegraph [New York], February 19, 1915; “President Acts in White House Movies,” Evening Globe [Boston], February 19, 1915; “Feature Film Shown at the White House,” Public Ledger [Philadelphia], February 19, 1915; “Wilson to See Moving Pictures,” Evening Star [Washington, D.C.], February 19, 1915; all in DWGP. Also see Thomas Dixon Jr. to Joseph P. Tumulty, January 27, 1915, in Arthur S. Link, ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 32 (January 1–April 16, 1915) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 142.
2. Cripps, Slow Fade to Black, 52.
3. On Wilson’s attitudes toward race, see Kathleen L. Wolgemuth, “Woodrow Wilson and Federal Segregation,” Journal of Negro History, 44, no. 2 (April 1959): 158–73; Henry Blumenthall, “Woodrow Wilson and the Race Question,” Journal of Negro History, 48, no. 1 (January 1963): 1–21; Nancy J. Weiss, “The Negro and the New Freedom: Fighting Wilsonian Segregation,” Political Science Quarterly, 84, no. 1 (March 1969): 61–79; Nicholas Patler, Jim Crow and the Wilson Administration: Protesting Federal Segregation in the Early Twentieth Century (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2004).
4. Link, ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 32, 267, n.1.
5. Program reproduced in Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 185 (page itself unnumbered); D. W. Griffith to Woodrow Wilson, March 2, 1915, in Link, ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 32, 310–11. Griffith appears to have discussed with Wilson the possibility of making more “historical and political” films. Ibid.
6. “‘The Birth of a Nation’ Shown,” Evening Star [Washington, D.C.], February 20, 1915, DWGP; “Chief Justice and Senators at ‘Movie,’” Herald [Washington, D.C.], February 20, 1915, DWGP; “The Birth of a Nation,” Sun [New York], February 22, 1915, DWGP; Eric F. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform (New York: Vintage, 1977), 176–77.
7. “Griffith Highly Honored,” Motography, March 6, 1915; “The Birth of a Nation,” Sun [New York], February 22, 1915; “Chief Justice and Senators at ‘Movie,’” Herald [Washington, D.C.], February 20, 1915; all in DWGP
8. Henderson, Griffith, p. 156; Chairman [Joel E. Spingarn]’s Report, Minutes of the Annual Meeting of Members of the NAACP, January 3, 1916, 14, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Papers, Library of Congress (henceforth NAACPP).
9. At the Raleigh Hotel showing, Griffith formally requested that no review of the film appear before its New York première on March 3. “Movies at Press Club,” Washington Post, February 20, 1915, DWGP.
10. Lack, Twenty Four Frames Under, 48–49.
11. Merritt, “Nickelodeon Theaters, 1905–1914: Building an Audience for the Movies,” 59–79. Also see Robert C. Allen, “Motion Picture Exhibition in Manhattan, 1906–1912: Beyond the Nickelodeon,” in Fell, ed., Film before Griffith, 162–75. For a summary of the later debates in the Cinema Journal on the social composition of early movie audiences, see Melvyn Stokes, “Introduction: Reconstructing American Cinema’s Audiences,” in Stokes and Richard Maltby, eds., American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era (London: BFI Publishing, 1999), 2–5.
12. Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film, 6–7, 41–42.
13. Bowser, Transformation of Cinema, 203–204; Schickel, Griffith, 155.
14. Tim Anderson, “Reforming ‘Jackass Music’: The Problematic Aesthetics of Early American Film Music Accompaniment,” Cinema Journal, 37, no. 1 (Fall 1997): 8.
15. Bowser, Transformation of Cinema, 127–31.
16. On the birth of the movie palace, see David M. Naylor, American Picture Palaces: The Architecture of Fantasy (New York: Van Rostrand Reinhold, 1981); idem, Great American Movie Theaters (Washington, D.C.: Preservation Press, 1987); Ben M. Hall, The Best Remaining Seats: The Story of the Golden Age of the Movie Palace (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1961); Ave Pildas, Movie Palaces (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1980).
17. Macdonald, The Invisible Art of Film Music, 2; Lack, Twenty Four Frames Under, 50; Victor Watson in the New York Times cited in Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment, 20. The pattern of change may have been especially rapid in the bigger cities. In poverty-stricken Lowell, Massachusetts, the brand-new 350-seat Colonial Theater closed in 1911 after only two months. In Worcester, Massachusetts, Roy Rosenzweig has traced the opening of a series of new, cheap movie theaters and the creation of a working-class audience that as late as 1914 still dominated moviegoing in the city. Bowser, Transformation of Cinema, 129; Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 192–213.
18. Bowser, Transformation of Cinema, 201, 204, 210–11, 255; Schickel, Griffith, 155; Star [Lincoln, Nebraska], March 14, 1915, DWGP.
19. Marks, Music and the Silent Film, 104.
20. Aitken, The Birth of a Nation Story, 47. Linda Arvidson also noted that the $2 admission was Harry Aitken’s idea, and that both Griffith and Dixon had opposed it. Mrs. D. W. Griffith, When the Movies Were Young, 255. The idea of charging higher prices of admission for longer films was not new. Thomas Ince, for example, had charged extra for his five-reel The Battle of Gettysburg (1913). Spears, The Civil War on the Screen, 26.
21. Cook, Fire from the Flint, 145.
22. World [New York], June 6, 1915, DWGP.
23. Schickel, Griffith, 267–68. If this story of the film’s renaming is true, the suggestion must have been made at one of the earliest of the New York screenings, since the film shown at the White House on February 18 was entitled The Birth of a Nation. See “Preview Program” in Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, n.p.
24. Aitken, The Birth of a Nation Story, 51–52.
25. As discussed in Chapter 4, the film cost around $100,000 to produce. The battle scenes needed only a few hundred extras and the Klan rides a group of professional riders.
26. On alterations to the Liberty Theater to make it ready for the first performances, see Globe [New York], February 26, 1915, DWGP.
27. See the later account of the showing to three journalists from the New York American in February 1915. Despite the small size of the audience, all three found themselves (with some embarrassment) applauding the ride of the Ku Klux Klan. “‘Birth of a Nation’ Proved Gold Mine for Producers,” American [New York], November 7, 1915, DWGP.
28. “The Birth of a Nation,” Brooklyn Times, March 2, 1915, DWGP.
29. Variety [New York City], March 19, 1915, DWGP; Schickel, Griffith, 275–76; “Griffith Film Scores,” The Moving Picture World, March 13, 1915, DWGP.
30. The Moving Picture World, March 13, 1915, DWGP; review in the New York Times as cited in Henderson, Griffith, 157; Schickel, Griffith, 277; “‘The Birth of a Nation’ at the Liberty Theater, Manhattan—Notes,” Standard Union [Brooklyn], March 4, 1915, DWGP.
31. S
chickel, Griffith, 277.
32. New York Commercial, March 13, 1915, DWGP; Bitzer, Billy Bitzer, 113.
33. Evening Sun [New York], March 8, 1915; “The Best Moving Pictures—‘Birth of a Nation,’” Globe [New York], March 6, 1915; New York Commercial, March 6, 1915; all in DWGP.
34. Journal of Commerce [New York], April 3, May 15, 1915; Evening Journal [New York], June 9, 1915; “‘Birth of a Nation’ Souvenir,” Motion Picture World [New York], July 3, 1915; New York Press, August 9, 1915; all in DWGP.
35. Brooklyn Eagle [New York], April 25, 1915; “At the Liberty Theatre,” New York Telegraph, July 6, 1915; both in DWGP.
36. Merritt, “Dixon, Griffith, and the Southern Legend,” p. 27, n. 2.
37. “Griffith’s $2 Feature Film Sensation of Picture Trade,” Variety [New York City], March 12, 1915, DWGP.
38. Figures based on “Income and Expenditure to March 13, 1915” and “Trial Balance, April 30, 1915,” Accounts of the Epoch Producing Company, DWGP.
39. Aitken, The Birth of a Nation Story, 55; New York Commercial, March 29, 1915, DWGP; New York Tribune, March 29, 1915, DWGP; Telegraph [New York], March 29, 1915, DWGP.
40. Aitken, The Birth of a Nation Story, 58–59. On the Mayer syndicate, see “Mayor Will Hear Colored Citizens,” Enterprise [Brockton, Massachusetts], August 12, 1915, DWGP.
41. Aitken, The Birth of a Nation Story, 59; “‘Birth of a Nation’ Advance Man Here,” St. Joseph Gazette [Missouri], November 19, 1915, DWGP; “Takes Large Staff to Run ‘Birth of a Nation,’” Lansing Press [Michigan], January 28, 1916, DWGP; “Heavy Sales for ‘Birth of a Nation,’” Evening Times [Trenton], September 20, 1915, DWGP.
42. “‘The Birth of a Nation’ Draws Great Crowds,” Paragraph [Akron, Ohio], September 14, 1915; “‘Birth of a Nation’ Advance Man Here,” St. Joseph Gazette [Missouri], November 19, 1915; both in DWGP.
43. Epoch Producing Corporation, Balance Sheet, June 30, 1915, DWGP.
44. Epoch Producing Corporation, Comparative Statement of Gross Receipts for the Period ended February 29, 1916, DWGP; Epoch Producing Corporation, Profit and Loss Statement for the Period ended February 29, 1916, DWGP.
D W Griffith's The Birth of a Nation Page 48