Overview (4)

Mini Bio (1)

David Wark Griffith was born in rural Kentucky to Jacob "Roaring Jake" Griffith, a former Confederate Army colonel and Civil War veteran. Young Griffith grew up with his father's romantic war stories and melodramatic nineteenth-century literature that were to eventually shape his movies. In 1897 Griffith set out to pursue a career both acting and writing for the theater, but for the most part was unsuccessful. Reluctantly, he agreed to act in the new motion picture medium for Edwin S. Porter at the Edison Company. Griffith was eventually offered a job at the financially struggling American Mutoscope & Biograph Co., where he directed over four hundred and fifty short films, experimenting with the story-telling techniques he would later perfect in his epic Die Geburt einer Nation (1915).



Griffith and his personal cinematographer G.W. Bitzer collaborated to create and perfect such cinematic devices as the flashback, the iris shot, the mask and cross-cutting. In the years following "Birth", Griffith never again saw the same monumental success as his signature film and, in 1931, his increasing failures forced his retirement. Though hailed for his vision in narrative film-making, he was similarly criticized for his blatant racism. Griffith died in Los Angeles in 1948, one of the most dichotomous figures in film history.

- IMDb Mini Biography By: Michael Kaminsky <kaminsky@ucsee.eecs.berkeley.edu> (qv's & corrections by A. Nonymous)

Spouse (2)

Trade Mark (1)

His films depict the cruelty of humankind.



Trivia (44)

He has been called "the father of film technique," "the man who invented Hollywood," and "the Shakespeare of the screen".



Interred at Mount Tabor Methodist Church Graveyard, Centerfield, KY (30 minutes north of Louisville).



In 1975 the U.S. Postal Service honored him with a postage stamp.





He produced and directed the first movie ever made in Hollywood, In Old California (1910) which was produced by the American Mutoscope & Biograph Co. which is still in existence today and the oldest movie company in America. The film was rediscovered by Biograph and shown on the 6th of May 2004 at the Beverly Hills Film Festival attended by the President of Biograph Company Thomas R. Bond II and Mikhail Vartanov . On the same day, a monument was erected near the site where the film was made (Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street. However, almost a year later in 2005, the 2.8 ton monument was stolen overnight, under mysterious circumstances and is no longer there, but was found almost one year after its disappearance near a garbage bin not far from where the monument stood on Vine Street in Hollywood.



His first sound film was Abraham Lincoln (1930).

He was said to have been an imperious, humorless man.



Was voted the 15th Greatest Director of all time by Entertainment Weekly.



Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume One, 1890-1945". Pages 415-427. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987.



He tried to sell a story to The Edison Company, which ended up hiring him as an actor instead.



He went from being a bit player to the industry's leading director in a period of only five years.





America (1924) is regarded as a major turning point in his career. Its failure ended his tenure as the industry's preeminent director.



After Die Geburt einer Nation (1915) was released and criticized as being racist, Griffith was very hurt. He decided to make Intoleranz (1916) as a follow-up, to show how damaging and dangerous people's intolerance can be.

On May 26, 1918, he was elected president of the Motion Picture War Service Association, an organization charged with boosting war bond sales.





Was the first person, after Charles Chaplin 's special award at the first Academy Awards (Chaplin had had his nominations rescinded and placed out of competition), to win an honorary Academy Award. Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences President Frank Capra thought it would be good publicity for the Academy, which was then structured as a company union, as the Academy was being boycotted by the trade union guilds and turnout at the 1936 Oscar ceremony was predicted to be low. The citation read: "For his distinguished creative achievements as director and producer and his invaluable initiative and lasting contributions to the progress of the motion picture arts."

In his declining years he lived off the income from an annuity he had invested in when he had been on top in Hollywood.



Began his career as a playwright, then moved to stage acting, then film acting, and finally (and famously) to film directing.





Dollys Abenteuer (1908), a Biograph release, was his directorial debut.



Ironically, the release of Die Geburt einer Nation (1915) inspired many African-Americans to start making their own films in an attempt to counter the film's depiction of them and to offer positive alternative images and stories of the African-American people.



The NAACP attempted to have Die Geburt einer Nation (1915) banned. After that effort failed, they then attempted to have some of the film's more extreme scenes censored.



Charles Chaplin called him "the teacher of us all".

Was an ardent Jeffersonian.



Pioneered the technique of parallel editing, which he used extensively after 1909.





Lillian Gish called him "the father of film". Although Griffith considered her a close friend, she had so much respect for him that she never referred to him as other than "Mr. Griffith", even long after he died.



Although Griffith was thought by many to be a bigot and racist, he detested the manner in which whites and the "white man's government" treated and oppressed Native Americans. This was a theme that he explored in several of his early short films, most notably in The Redman's View (1909) and Ramona (1910), which are very strong denouncements of the oppression of Native Americans by whites.



Several filming innovations belong solely to Griffith (some of which he invented during his collaboration with G.W. Bitzer at The Biograph Co. They include the flashback, the iris shot, the mask, the systematic use of the soft focus shot and the split screen.

He directed more than 450 films for Biograph. Amazingly, 440 of them still survive, accounting for a large portion of Biograph's shorts that survive.



By 1909 he was turning out two to three films per week.





After the 1915 release of Die Geburt einer Nation (1915), riots broke out in several black neighborhoods across the country.



His Die Geburt einer Nation (1915) is generally considered as the birth of modern American cinema.

Started to write an autobiography, but never finished it. [1926]





Ironically, he produced and directed the Biograph film The Rose of Kentucky (1911), which showed the Ku Klux Klan as villainous, a sharp contrast to Die Geburt einer Nation (1915) made four years later, in which the KKK was portrayed in a very favorable light.

On August 17, 1908, Biograph signed him to a contract at $50 per week plus a small royalty on each film.





He is one of the the most prolific directors of all time, with over 450 shorts and over 80 feature-length films to his credit. Of non-television directors, he ranks as the fourth most prolific after Louis Feuillade and Georges Méliès , both of whom also directed silent shorts, and Dave Fleischer , an animated short director.



Lillian Gish claimed that he invented false eyelashes in 1916 for Intoleranz (1916). Griffith wanted Seena Owen (who plays Attarea, the Princess Beloved, in the film's Babylonian segment) with lashes luxurious enough to brush her cheeks when she blinked. In collaboration with a wig maker, who did the actual fabricating, the solution Griffith was credited with involved weaving human hair through a fine strip of gauze, creating false eyelashes. However, like many Hollywood legends, this claim proves to not be true. In 1911 a Canadian woman named Anna Taylor received a U.S. patent for the artificial eyelash; hers was a crescent of fabric implanted with tiny hairs. Even before that, hairdressers and makeup artists tried a similar trick. A German named Charles Nestle (nee Karl Nessler) manufactured false lashes in the early 20th century and used the profit from sales to finance his next invention--the permanent wave. By 1915 Nestle had opened a New York hair-perming salon on East 49th St., with lashes as his sideline. In addition, one of the earliest known attempts to enhance eyelashes was during the times of the ancient Egyptians, when royalty used black powder called "kohl" to protect their eyes against sand, dust and bugs. However, this was to provide practical benefits, rather than cosmetic.



Was the first to utter the catchphrase "Lights, camera, action!" in 1910, on the set of In Old California (1910). It, like many of his techniques, are still widely used in filmmaking.

Ironically while he was known to have no real sense of humour it's he who can be credited as designing the blueprint for screen slapstick.In 1908 he made a short film about a man who accidentally breaks a curtain pole. He gets a new one and after drinking several pints wrecks havoc throughout the town by delivering the pole in his car to his sweetheart. He's pursued by an angry mob for the film's finale. The film called The Curtain Pole starred an actor by the name of Mikhail Sinot who changed his name to Mack Sennett.



In his last years Griffith lived in a first-floor suite at the Knickerbocker Hotel on Ivar Avenue in Hollywood, just off of Hollywood Boulevard. He suffered a fatal stroke in its lobby in 1948. The Knickerbocker still exists as a retirement home, and a memorial plaque for Griffith can be seen in the lobby.



Personal Quotes (18)



by G.W. Bitzer in "Billy Bitzer: His Story."] A film without a message is just a waste of time.



[Instructions Griffith allegedly gave to his assistants during the making of one of his epics, quoted by Josef von Sternberg in his memoir "Fun in a Chinese Laundry"] Move these 10,000 horses a trifle to the right, and that mob out there three feet forward.

There will never be talking pictures.



Talkies, squeakies, moanies, songies, squawkies . . . Just give them ten years to develop and you're going to see the greatest artistic medium the world has known.



Actors should never be important. Only directors should have power and place.





Everything went downhill after Lillian [ Lillian Gish ] left me.

[on what people associated with silent films] The good old American faculty of wanting to be shown things.



I made them see, didn't I? I changed everything.



Remember how small the world was before I came along? I brought it all to life: I moved the whole world onto a 20-foot screen.



Movies are written in sand: applauded today, forgotten tomorrow.



Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences? What art? What science?





[on Douglas Fairbanks ] He has such verve. He can use his body.

We do not want now and we never shall want the human voice with our films. Music -- fine music -- will always be the voice of the silent drama.





[on James Mason ] That Mason is the greatest actor.

[on sound movies] It is my arrogant belief that we have lost beauty.





[on Mary Pickford ] She never stopped listening and learning.



[to Mary Pickford ] You're too little and too fat, but I might give you a job.

[on being honored at the 1935 Academy Awards ceremony] We had many worries in those days, small worries. Now you people have your worries and they are big ones. They have grown with the business - and no matter what its problems, it's the greatest business in the world.



Salary (9)