David Wark (D.W.) Griffith
(1875-1948)
Griffith was from rural Kentucky. He was the son of a Confederate Colonel
who died when D.W. was 10, leaving his family deeply in debt.
Beginning in 1895 Griffith struggled to find success as an actor and playwright. He failed, but learned much stagecraft.
In 1907 he was forced to take work as a movie actor and writer for Porter at Edison.
In 1908 he moved to Biograph and soon became their principal director. Working with Billy Bitzer, he made over 450 one reel films
by 1913.
Bitzer and Griffith experimented with many new
techniques (close-up, panoramic scene, simultaneous action, etc.), inventing
much of modern cinema.
In 1913, he left Biograph for Mutual/Reliance-Majestic and began to make feature films.
He took Bitzer and his entire company with him and announced publicly that he was
Biograph's director.
Griffith's announcement was an important moment in movie history. Virtually everyone worked anonymously in the first years of the movies. This was a condition of employment dictated by the owners of movie studios. The owners thought of the studios in terms of the industrial labor of the era. The people who appeared in the films, and the people who made them were labor. Owners feared (correctly) that allowing their names to be known would give them power. Of course, what the owners missed was that if the names of the stars and key directors were known, they too would become part of the story and everyone would make a whole lot more money. However, that's a tale for later in the course.