49 Fun Facts About D. W. Griffith

In which state was D. W. Griffith born in 1875?

Kentucky. He was born on a farm near Louisville; when his father died the family sank into debt, and he left school early for jobs in a dry-goods store and a bookshop.

What do the initials in D. W. Griffith's name stand for?

David Wark. He kept the name off playbills in his years as a touring actor, and was still billed as Lawrence Griffith when he first appeared in Edison and Biograph films.

Which war does The Birth of a Nation depict?

The American Civil War. The Stonemans of the North and the Camerons of the South land on opposite sides, and the first half ends with a staged re-creation of Lincoln's assassination.

Which Great Train Robbery director gave Griffith an acting part when he came to Edison to sell a script?

Edwin Porter. He cast the would-be playwright as the hero of Rescued from an Eagle's Nest, and within months Griffith was directing films himself at the rival Biograph studio.

Roughly how many films did D. W. Griffith direct in his career?

About 500. Most were one-reel shorts of around twelve minutes: in five years at Biograph he turned them out at up to two a week, more than 400 in all.

What was Griffith's 1908 directorial debut?

The Adventures of Dollie. Kidnappers seal a little girl inside a barrel, which tumbles off their wagon into a river and is swept towards a waterfall before she is fished out safe.

Which cameraman did Griffith meet at Biograph and work with for years?

Billy Bitzer. He shot The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, and his skill let the director try the fade-outs, iris shots and close-ups he wanted.

Which novelist's technique inspired Griffith's cross-cutting between parallel stories?

Dickens. Told that jumping between two scenes would leave audiences lost, Griffith answered, by his wife's account, "Well, doesn't Dickens write that way?"

Which 1910 Griffith short was the first film shot in Hollywood?

In Old California. Biograph had sent Griffith's company west for the winter, and he took his cameras out to Hollywood, which was then just a small rural village.

In which 1911 Griffith short does a telegraph girl hold off robbers until help arrives by train?

The Lonedale Operator. She wires for help, then keeps the robbers back with a "gun" that turns out to be a wrench, a trick Griffith reveals in a close-up.

Which 1912 Griffith short is regarded as an early gangster film?

The Musketeers of Pig Alley. Griffith took his camera into New York's tenement streets, reportedly using real gang members as extras, for a tale of two rival gangsters.

What was Griffith's first feature film, shot for Biograph in 1913?

Judith of Bethulia. Biograph's bosses had no faith in long films: they cut it down, held it back until 1914 and offered Griffith only more one-reelers, so he quit and took his actors with him.

Who played the lead in Griffith's first feature film, shot for Biograph in 1913?

Blanche Sweet. Still in her teens, she was the toughest of Griffith's young heroines, an energetic contrast to the fragile type the director usually favoured.

Which Mexican revolutionary signed a 1914 film deal with Mutual, the company Griffith had just joined?

Pancho Villa. He gave Mutual's cameramen special access to his campaign against Huerta, restaged scenes for them, and appeared as himself in The Life of General Villa.

Triangle Film Corporation teamed Griffith with Keystone's comedy chief and which maker of William S. Hart westerns?

Thomas Ince. At his Inceville studio he split the staff into units, each filming from a detailed shooting script he had approved, the factory method the big studios went on to adopt.

Whose 1905 novel and play was the basis of The Birth of a Nation?

Thomas Dixon Jr. Griffith knew the former Baptist minister already: as a jobbing actor he had toured as leading man in another Dixon play, years before he filmed this one.

Under what title did Griffith first produce his 1915 epic through Reliance-Majestic?

The Clansman. It first played under that name, the title of the novel and stage play it adapts, and was renamed The Birth of a Nation by the time it opened in New York.

Which president watched The Birth of a Nation at the White House?

Woodrow Wilson. Griffith had already borrowed the scholar-president's authority: the film's title cards quote from Wilson's own History of the American People.

In which city did The Birth of a Nation have its premiere in February 1915?

Los Angeles. It opened downtown at Clune's Auditorium, and the protests that met it there followed the film to New York the next month and then on to Boston.

Which organisation campaigned to have The Birth of a Nation banned?

The NAACP. It organised boycotts, court challenges and appeals to mayors and censors; a few cities did ban the film, but it went on showing almost everywhere else and broke box-office records.

Which Wagner piece did Joseph Carl Breil use as the Klan's leitmotif in the score?

Ride of the Valkyries. Wagner's music swells as the hooded riders gather and gallop to the rescue in the film's climax, part of a score played live by a full orchestra.

The Birth of a Nation's love theme became the signature tune of which radio sitcom?

Amos 'n' Andy. Sold as sheet music under the title The Perfect Song, the tune outlived the film: it opened a radio comedy in which two white actors voiced Black characters.

Whose death is one of Intolerance's four stories?

Jesus. The Crucifixion is one of four tales of persecution Griffith wove together, his answer to the campaigners who had tried to have The Birth of a Nation banned.

What recurring image links the stories of Intolerance?

A mother rocking a cradle. She appears each time the film jumps between eras, under a line borrowed from Walt Whitman: "Out of the cradle endlessly rocking."

In Intolerance, Babylon falls to the army of which empire?

The Persians. Cyrus the Great takes the city in 539 BC, and in Griffith's telling Babylon is undone from within, by a feud between the followers of two rival gods.

Who played the Mountain Girl in Intolerance's Babylonian story?

Constance Talmadge. The tomboy charioteer was her first major role, and Griffith re-released the Babylon story as a film of its own in 1919.

Which government asked Griffith to make the 1918 propaganda film Hearts of the World?

British. The War Office's film section brought him to England in 1917 and let him film at the front in France, yet the battle scenes were restaged afterwards on a studio lot in California.

With which three stars did Griffith found United Artists in 1919?

Chaplin, Pickford and Fairbanks. Cowboy star William S. Hart sat in on the early talks but dropped out, leaving four founders set on releasing their own films free of the big studios.

Which 1919 film was Griffith's first release through United Artists?

Broken Blossoms. A small, bleak tragedy about a gentle Chinese shopkeeper and a girl beaten by her boxer father, it was a hit with critics and audiences all the same.

Griffith's 1919 melodrama of London's docklands is based on a story from which Thomas Burke collection?

Limehouse Nights. Limehouse was the dockside district that then held London's Chinatown, and Griffith recreated its foggy streets entirely on studio sets.

What is Way Down East remembered for?

A rescue from an icy river. The heroine lies on a drifting ice floe, her hand trailing in the freezing water, while the hero leaps from block to block to reach her before the falls.

Orphans of the Storm is set during which upheaval?

The French Revolution. The heroine is condemned to the guillotine, and Griffith ends on one more ride to the rescue, with Danton himself galloping to save her.

Orphans of the Storm was the last Griffith film to star which pair?

Lillian and Dorothy Gish. They play two sisters, one of them blind, who are torn apart; Lillian left Griffith's company afterwards, ending a partnership that had begun in 1912.

Which 1924 box-office failure led Griffith to leave United Artists?

Isn't Life Wonderful. Shot on location in Germany, it follows refugees scraping by on potatoes through the post-war inflation; with no spectacle and no last-minute rescue, audiences stayed away.

Who played Lincoln in Griffith's 1930 sound film Abraham Lincoln?

Walter Huston. Critics praised his performance and the film, Griffith's first talkie, with a script co-written by the poet Stephen Vincent Benét, yet audiences did not warm to it.

What was Griffith's final feature film, released in 1931?

The Struggle. This drama of a man's slide into alcoholism, shot in a cramped New York studio, failed with critics and audiences alike, and Griffith never directed another film.

Which future studio mogul made his first fortune by buying regional rights to show The Birth of a Nation?

Louis B. Mayer. Then a New England theatre owner, he paid Griffith for the right to show the film across the region, and the windfall helped launch the career that led to MGM.

Which Laurel and Hardy producer hired the ageing Griffith to help on his caveman film One Million B.C.?

Hal Roach. He wanted Griffith's help with choosing the cast and writers, and the prehistoric adventure turned out to be the last production the old director ever worked on.

Which comedian repeated his Broadway role as a carnival con man in Griffith's 1925 comedy Sally of the Sawdust?

W. C. Fields. He had played the good-natured swindler on stage in the musical Poppy, and he played him a third time when the story was remade as a talkie in 1936.

At which Hollywood hotel was Griffith living when he suffered his fatal stroke in 1948?

The Knickerbocker. Legend has him dying forgotten and penniless, but he was not broke: he lived comfortably at the hotel, though no studio would give him a film to direct.

Which honour did the United States give Griffith in 1975, a century after his birth?

A postage stamp. Honours later ran the other way: in 1999 the Directors Guild retired the career award that bore his name, saying the brilliant pioneer had also "helped foster intolerable racial stereotypes".

Which fellow director said of Griffith in a 1956 speech, "He was the teacher of us all"?

Cecil B. DeMille. "Griffith had no rivals," he told a Hollywood banquet held in his own honour, waving away the old talk that the two makers of epics had been competitors.

By what title was Griffith's star Lillian Gish known at the height of her silent career?

The First Lady of the Screen. The trade press used the title by 1925, when MGM signed her; Griffith had trusted her enough to let her direct a film herself and oversee the building of his studio.

Which English playwright-to-be appears as an extra in Griffith's 1918 war film Hearts of the World?

Noël Coward. It was his first film: the future author of Private Lives was still an unknown young actor when Griffith hired him as an extra during the shoot in England.

Which fellow Biograph alumnus founded Keystone Studios and the Keystone Cops in 1912?

Mack Sennett. He learned film-making as an actor and writer under Griffith at Biograph, then turned his teacher's chase-and-rescue finales into slapstick farce.

Which Griffith assistant on Intolerance won fame playing sadistic, monocled Prussian officers before directing films himself?

Erich von Stroheim. The Viennese hatmaker's son passed himself off as an aristocrat and former officer, and brought to his own films a perfectionism that kept getting him fired.

Which Thin Man director, once Griffith's assistant on Intolerance, brought him in to work uncredited on San Francisco in 1936?

Woody Van Dyke. Known as One-Take Woody for his speed, he gave his out-of-work mentor a hand in MGM's earthquake epic, though which scene Griffith shot is still argued over.

Which 1946 Selznick western, with veterans of his Biograph company in the cast, did Griffith visit during filming?

Duel in the Sun. Lionel Barrymore and others in its cast had started out in Griffith's Biograph shorts some thirty years earlier; by then no studio would give their old director a film.

Which Soviet director called Griffith a master but The Birth of a Nation 'disgraceful propaganda'?

Sergei Eisenstein. The maker of Battleship Potemkin credited Griffith's editing as a spur to Soviet montage, yet refused to let the artistry excuse the film's message.