D.W Griffith was born on January 22, 1985 in La Grange, Kentucky. Griffith first started his career by writing dramatic literature. He was unsuccessful at this profession, so he became an actor. This was a route into the motion picture business, where he began directing an amazing body of work. Between 1908 and 1913 while he directed for the Biographic Company, Griffith produced 450 short films. This was tremendous amount of films even for this period. All of these short films allowed him to experiment with cross-cutting, camera movement, close- ups, and other camera methods.
During Griffith’s first trip to California, he discovered a very good place to make his movies. This place became known as Hollywood. With this, Griffith and his company, Biograph, were the first to shoot a film in Hollywood. Influenced by a European feature film “Cabiria”, Griffith was convinced that feature films could be financially reasonable. He produced and directed the Biograph feature film “Judith of Bethulia”, one of the earliest feature films to be produced in the United States. However, Biograph believed that longer features were not practical. According to the actress Lillian Gish, Biograph thought that a long film would hurt the audience’s eyes. Because of the unpopularity of features and the film’s budget ($30,000 to produce), Griffith left Biograph and he took all of his actors with him. His new production company became an independent production unit partner in Triangle Pictures Corporation with Keystone Studios and Thomas Ince. Through David W. Griffith Corp. he produced “The Clansman” (1915), which would later be known as “The Birth of a Nation”.
Griffith broke box office records with “The Birth of a Nation” in 1915 . It was extremely popular and this film was considered the first feature length by film historians. “The Birth of a Nation” was a story of the Civil War. It captured the violence, the spectacle, and the excitement of the war. Using extreme and dramatic camera angles and complex edits, the film brought an event to life unlike any film had done before. The film was also a tragic testament to the deep prejudice times that American blacks were experiencing. Black audiences were outraged by the films racist deformation of history. Viewed as a contributor to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the film caused riots in a number of black communities. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People campaigned against the film, but was unsuccessful in destroying it. This film became one of the most successful box office attractions of its time. With the money Griffith made from this film he was able to become a producer.
Griffith left his partnership in 1917 and went to First National (1919-1920). At the same time he founded United Artists with Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks. Though United Artists survived as a company, Griffith’s association with it was short, and while some of his later films did well at the box office, commercial success often avoided him. Features from this period included “Broken Blossoms” (1919), “Way Down East” (1920), “Orphans of the Storm” (1921), and “ America”, (1924). Griffith made only two sound films, “Abraham Lincoln” (1930) and “The Struggle” (1931). None were successful. He never directed another film.
The highlights of his later years were a special Oscar presented to him by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1936 for his contributions to film art, and a 1940 display of his work by the Museum of Modern Art. For the last seventeen years of his life he lived alone in Los Angeles. He died in 1948 in a Los Angeles Hotel.
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