D.W. Griffith

David Wark Griffith (January 22, 1875 – July 23, 1948) was an American film director.

Considered one of the most influential figures in the history of the motion picture, he pioneered many aspects of film editing and expanded the art of the narrative film.

Griffith was born on January 22, 1875, on a farm in Oldham County, Kentucky, the son of Jacob Wark "Roaring Jake" Griffith, a Confederate Army colonel in the American Civil War who was elected as a Kentucky state legislator, and Mary Perkins (née Oglesby).

Griffith was raised as a Methodist, and he attended a one-room schoolhouse, where he was taught by his older sister Mattie.

His father died when he was 10, and the family struggled with poverty.

When Griffith was 14, his mother abandoned the farm and moved the family to Louisville, Kentucky; there she opened a boarding house, which was unsuccessful.

Griffith then left high school to help support the family, taking a job in a dry goods store and later in a bookstore.

He began his creative career as an actor in touring companies.

Meanwhile, he was learning how to become a playwright, but he had little success.

Only one of his plays was accepted for a performance.

It was based on Thomas Dixon Jr..'s 1905 novel The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan; it depicts Southern slavery as benign, the enfranchisement of freedmen as a corrupt plot by the Republican Party, and the Ku Klux Klan as a band of heroes restoring the rightful order.

He traveled to New York City in 1907 in an attempt to sell a script to Edison Studios producer Edwin Porter; although Porter rejected the script, he gave Griffith an acting part in Rescued from an Eagle's Nest instead.

As a result of this experience, Griffith decided to try his luck as an actor, and he appeared in many films as an extra.

In 1908, Griffith accepted a role as a stage extra in Professional Jealousy for the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, where he met cameraman Billy Bitzer.

In 1908, Biograph's main director Wallace McCutcheon Sr. fell ill, and his son Wallace McCutcheon Jr. took his place.

McCutcheon Jr. did not bring the studio success; Biograph co-founder Harry Marvin then gave Griffith the position, and he made the short The Adventures of Dollie.

He directed a total of 48 shorts for the company that year.

Among the films he directed in 1909 was The Cricket on the Hearth, an adaptation of Charles Dickens' novel.

Showing the influence of Dickens on his own film narrative, Griffith employed the technique of cross-cutting—where two stories run alongside each other, as seen in Dickens' novels such as Oliver Twist.

When criticized by a cameraman for doing this technique in a later film, Griffith was said to have replied "Well, doesn't Dickens write that way?".

His short In Old California (1910) was the first film shot in Hollywood, California.

Four years later, he produced and directed his first feature film Judith of Bethulia (1914), one of the early films to be produced in the U.S. Biograph believed that longer features were not viable at this point.

According to Lillian Gish, the company thought that "a movie that long would hurt [the audience's] eyes".

Griffith left Biograph because of company resistance to his goals and his cost overruns on the film.

He took his company of actors with him and joined the Mutual Film Corporation.

There he co-produced The Life of General Villa, a silent biographical-action movie starring Pancho Villa as himself, shot on location in Mexico during a civil war.

He formed a studio with Majestic Studios manager Harry Aitken, which became known as Reliance-Majestic Studios and later was renamed Fine Arts Studios.

His new production company became an autonomous production unit partner in the Triangle Film Corporation along with Thomas H. Ince and Keystone Studios' Mack Sennett.

The Triangle Film Corporation was headed by Aitken, who was released from the Mutual Film Corporation, and his brother Roy.

To modern audiences, Griffith is known primarily for directing the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation.

One of the most financially successful films of all time and considered a landmark by film historians, it made investors enormous profits, but it also attracted much controversy for its degrading portrayals of African Americans, its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan and support for the Confederacy, and its overtly racist viewpoint.

The film led to riots in several major cities all over the United States, and the NAACP attempted to have the film banned.

Griffith directed and produced The Clansman through Reliance-Majestic Studios in 1915.

The film later became known as The Birth of a Nation.

It is one of the early feature length American films.

The film was a success, but it aroused much controversy due to its depiction of slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, race relations in the American Civil War, and the Reconstruction era of the United States.

Griffith made his next film Intolerance (1916) as an answer to critics, who he felt unfairly maligned his work.

Together with Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks, Griffith founded the studio United Artists in 1919 with the goal of enabling actors and directors to make films on their own terms as opposed to the terms of commercial studios.

Several of Griffith's later films were successful, including Broken Blossoms (1919), Way Down East (1920), and Orphans of the Storm (1921), but the high costs he incurred for production and promotion often led to commercial failure.

He had made roughly 500 films by the time of The Struggle (1931), his final feature, and all but three were completely silent.