GRIFFITH

David Llewelyn Wark "D. W." Griffith (January 22, 1875 – July 23, 1948)
was a premier pioneering Academy Award-winning American film director. He is best known as the director of the controversial 1915 film The Birth of a Nation and the subsequent film Intolerance (1916).

Early life

Griffith was born in La Grange, Kentucky to Jacob Griffith and Mary Perkins Oglesby. His father was a Confederate Army colonel, a Civil War hero, and a Kentucky legislator. Griffith was educated by his older sister, Mattie, in a one-room country school. His father died when he was 10, upon which the family experienced serious financial hardships. At age 14, Griffith's mother abandoned the farm and moved the family to Louisville where she opened a boarding house, which failed shortly. Griffith left high school to help with the finances, taking a job first in a dry goods store, and, later, in a bookstore.
Griffith began his career as a hopeful playwright but met with little success; only one of his plays was even accepted for a performance. Griffith decided to instead become an actor, and appeared in many plays as an extra.

Film Career

In 1907, Griffith, still having goals for becoming a successful playwright, moved to California and attempted to sell a script to Edison producer Edwin Porter. Porter rejected Griffith's script, but allowed him to be an extra in his movie. In 1908, Griffith accepted an acting job for the Biograph Company in New York City.
At Biograph, Griffith's career in the film industry changed forever. In 1908, Biograph's main director Wallace McCutcheon grew ill, and his son, Wallace McCutcheon Jr., took his place. McCutcheon Jr., however, was not able to bring the studio good success. As a result, Biograph head Henry Marvin decided to give Griffith the position; Griffith then made his first movie for the company, The Adventures of Dollie.
Between 1908 and 1913 (the years he directed for the Biograph Company), Griffith produced 450 short films, an enormous number even for this period. This work enabled him to experiment with cross-cutting, camera movement, close-ups, and other methods of spatial and temporal manipulation. At Biograph, Griffith became a huge success as a director.
On Griffith's first trip to California as a director, he and his company discovered a little village to film their movies in. This place was known as Hollywood. With this, Biograph was the first company to shoot a movie in Hollywood titled In Old California (1910).
Influenced by a European feature film Cabiria from Italy, Griffith was convinced that feature films could be financially viable. 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 viable. Biograph thought that a movie that long would hurt the audience's eyes.
Because of this, Griffith left Biograph and took his whole stock company of actors with him, and joined the Mutual Film Corporation and formed a studio Reliance-Majestic Studios, with Majestic Studio manager Harry Aitken .(The studio was later renamed Fine Arts Studio).

His new production company became a self-governing production unit partner in Triangle Film Corporation with Keystone Studios. Through Reliance-Majestic Studios, Griffith produced The Clansman (1915), which later came to be known as The Birth of a Nation.
The Birth of a Nation is considered important by film historians as the first feature length American film, and arguably changed the standards of the film industry. It was enormously popular, breaking box office records, but aroused controversy in the way it expressed the racist views held by many in the era .(It depicts Southern pre-Civil War black slavery as benign, and the Ku Klux Klan as a band of heroes restoring order to a post-Reconstruction black-ruled South).
Although these views matched the opinions of many American historians of the day (and indeed, long afterwards), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People campaigned against the film, but was unsuccessful in suppressing it.
The Birth of a Nation went on to become the most successful box office attraction of its time. Among the people who profited by the film was Louis B. Mayer, who bought the rights to distribute The Birth of a Nation in New England. With the money he made, he was able to begin his career as a producer that culminated in the creation of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios.
However, after seeing The Birth of a Nation, audiences in some major northern cities also responded by rioting over the film's racial content. After The Birth of a Nation had run its course in theaters, Griffith responded to the negative reception through his next film Intolerance, which attacked the institution of slavery. However, Intolerance was not a success. Like The Birth Of A Nation, Griffith put a huge budget into the film's production, which was also a key factor in it's failure at the box office. Soon after, the production partnership was dissolved, so Griffith went to Artcraft (part of Paramount), then to First National. At the same time he founded United Artists, together with Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks. At United Artists, Griffith continued to make films, but never could achieve box office grosses as high as either The Birth of The Nation or Intolerance.
Though United Artists survived as a company, Griffith's association with it was short-lived, and while some of his later films did well at the box office, commercial success often eluded him. Features of Griffith from this period include Broken Blossoms (1919), Way Down East (1920), Orphans of the Storm (1921) and America (1924); the earlier three were successes at the box office.
In 1924, Griffith was forced to leave United Artists after Isn't Life Wonderful failed at the box office, and accepted return to Paramount as a director. Griffith made only two sound films, Abraham Lincoln (1930) and The Struggle (1931). Neither was successful, and he never made another film. For the last seventeen years of his life he lived as a virtual hermit in Los Angeles.

Death
He died of cerebral hemorrhage in 1948 on his way to a Hollywood hospital from the Knickerbocker Hotel where he had been living alone. He is buried at Mount Tabor Methodist Church Graveyard in Crestwood, Kentucky.

Achievements
D. W. Griffith has been called the father of film grammar. Few scholars still hold that his "innovations" really began with him, but Griffith was a key figure in establishing the set of codes that have become the universal backbone of film language. He was particularly influential in popularizing "cross-cutting"—using film editing to alternate between different events occurring at the same time—in order to build suspense. Some also claim, that he "invented" the close-up shot. He used many elements from the "primitive" style of movie-making that predated classical Hollywood's continuity system, such as frontal staging, exaggerated gestures, minimal camera movement, and an absence of point of view shots.

Legacy
Motion picture legend Charles Chaplin called Griffith "The Teacher of us All". This sentiment was widely shared. Filmmakers as diverse as John Ford and Orson Welles have spoken of their respect for the director of Intolerance. Whether or not he actually invented new techniques in film grammar, he seems to have been among the first to understand how these techniques could be used to create an expressive language.
In early shorts such as Biograph's The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) which was the first "Gangster film", we can see how Griffith's attention to camera placement and lighting, heighten mood and tension. In making Intolerance the director opened up new possibilities for the medium, creating a form that seems to owe more to music than to traditional narrative. Griffith was honored on a 10-cent postage stamp by the United States issued May 5, 1975.
In 1953, the Directors Guild of America instituted the D.W. Griffith Award. Its recipients included Woody Allen, Akira Kurosawa, John Ford, Ingmar Bergman, and Alfred Hitchcock. In Dec 1999, however, DGA President Jack Shea and the DGA National Board—announced that the award would be renamed the DGA Lifetime Achievement Award because Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation had "helped foster intolerable racial stereotypes".

Film Preservation
D.W. Griffith has five films preserved in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". These films are Lady Helen's Escapade (1909), A Corner in Wheat (1909), The Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916), and Broken Blossoms (1919).