The face of Griffith stretches long and thin, with a high curved nose breaking over an underlip which has protruded into a natural shelf on which he rests an innumerable series of cigarettes. With a wide pull that deepens the vertical ruts on either side of his mouth, be smiles, his gray eyes at the same moment picking up details like a vacuum cleaner. They are grave eyes, possessing a quality that somehow has its nearest suggestion in "quizzical". Beneath a gray hat, a large hat, his hair, long and thin, spikes itself, breaking gently over his collar. His clothes are Griffith, revealing a man as unlike other movie men as his direction has been unlike that of other directors. He is an original.
The hat, collar and tie and shoes of this man have a permanence about them. The collar, a broad affair with deep points is several sizes larger than the Griffith neck, just as the innovations which be brought to the films ten or more years ago were too large for the neck of the business. His string tie, carelessly knotted, fits the collar in the same proportion as the collar fits the neck, resulting in a defenseless display of collar ends, and a knot lingering on his chest. High and laced, his shoes have bright, brass hooks, with loops in the back, designed to aid in pulling them on but which serve merely to catch on his trousers. His chief sartorial distinction, however, is his massive hat, worn always when directing, and only leaving his head for a sudden spontaneous recognition when he sweeps it off with the gesture of a southern gallant.
Back in 1880 on a Kentucky farm a man stood on the front door steps, shouting to his neighbor three miles away:
"Baby's here. Maw is fine."
It was Colonel Griffith, otherwise known as "Roaring Jake", bellowing to the county that his son, David Wark Griffith, was born. Only the signing of the peace papers a day sooner than be expected had prevented Roaring Jake from becoming a Confederate Brigadier General, the only man in the army who could shout to a soldier five miles away. The Colonel's family stayed on the farm seventeen years after that informal birth announcement, while the baby outgrew his prettiness and his nickname of Sugar, developing instead a great roaring voice like his father's, and a reputation for unbeatable laziness. At length the family moved in to Louisville, where David worked in a dry goods store until be persuaded the owner of a book shop to hire him. As soon as he had read everything in the place, he was taken on as a reporter for the Louisville Courier-Journal, but finally went back to the book shop. Here be was advised to go on the stage. His career was short. He acted, and wrote and starved, all gracefully and continuously, until be finally anchored at the Biograph studios where be informed everybody that the directing was all wrong and this was bow to do it.
There followed food and fame, and a heavy growth of eccentricities keeping pace with his development of new technique and of newer stars. To point a scene, the gangling, slow young man introduced close-ups. Then be brought in cut-backs and fade-outs, and hazy photography which be first effected by throwing layers of chiffon over the camera lens to make more angelic the innocent hair of Lillian Gish. Those were his days of glory. He spilled forth the corked talents of Mary Pickford, the Gishes, the Talmadges. He made his great films of hokum, and honey, and horror, and called them The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, Broken Blossoms, Way Down East.
When Mr. Griffith, the good gray director, works, he remains calm and quiet, much of his power over his actors lying in his voice, an amazing voice cutting through all the noise about him. It is deep and slow and grave with the resonance of an old-time Shakespearean actor. It is a voice to mold phrases, for recitations. That formal studied tone is utilized for such informalities as "Bring on the ducko, where is the vampo?"
He sits in a chair, any chair, always in the same position, leaning back, his right leg thrown over the left. His arms form into a pattern, the left one reaching across his chest hooked onto the right, which is lifted vertically upward as though lie were a candlestick bearer. The upheld band perpetually holds a cigarette, borrowed from a passing camera man. The cigarette, also, goes through a ritual; first come two or three puffs, and then it goes into position until a long ash gathers. It is a pose and a prop, sending a gossamer gray film over the gray bat and the gray-brown skin. All is deliberate as though he were watching himself in a slow motion film. He hums, muted, "I got shoeses, You got shoeses".
If the scene is an intimate one, it is directed with Mr. Griffith drawn close, his face a dimmed mirror to guide the cast. Promptings form on his lips and die. "Come quicker, not quite so much support, good enough, and once again, please."
Once again. That is the Griffith law. Thirty times one morning four players practiced a two-minute sequence for the restaurant scene of The Sorrows of Satan. Before then they had rehearsed it thirty-five times. The business demanded that the four eat sandwiches. Twelve times the property man supplied real chicken sandwiches, dressed with a lettuce leaf and a sliced pickle. The twelfth practice time, one of the girls appealed to him.
"My God, Mr. Griffith, can't I just eat the lettuce this time?"
"The lettuce is eaten last. Eat the sandwich and then you may go to lunch."
His life is divided into two parts. Either he is buried in the production of a picture, or he is buried in a vast pile of contemplated pictures. He will only go to theater if lie is in search of a type. He follows odd persons for blocks. He moves his table in restaurants in order to be nearer to a type. He collects a dozen plots, decides on one, announces it, gathers a cast, and then sits around wondering whether one of the other eleven plots would not have been better. The business office usually prods him at that point, causing decision, and a Griffith movie is then actually set in motion, sometimes after a mere wait of nine or ten months.
Then work begins without relation to time clocks or the normal studio procedure. He holds secret rehearsals, keeps longer hours than any other director. For six weeks he drilled the cast of The Sorrows of Satan, at Keen's Chop House in the large hall over the restaurant, instead of in the corners of the great Long Island studio of Paramount. Finally the cast, perfected in their business, were ordered to the studio where the camera shot some scenes twenty-five times, and Carol Dempster was set through the motions of taking an ironing board from the closet to the table one hundred and twenty-five times.
By the time the picture had reached the last stages, the director had thought out five different endings, plot notions working through him like fungi in yeast cakes. Several of them be filmed, much to the dismay of the executives. Not only does he direct the movie, but be wants to cut and edit, write the sub-titles, and arrange the musical score. Brutality alone can keep him out of the projection rooms of the theaters. And even there be has entered. After one of his products had been on Broadway for six weeks, Judged a box office success, he insisted on inserting new and better close-ups. He never writes finis to a movie.
Although others have made millions in the movies and put the millions in real estate, D. W. Griffith has made his millions and put them right back into movies. When be had the Mamaroneck studio, he played with his own money, inside one picture a year, ordered extras by the hundreds, and if he could not decide on a scene, went out in his little sailboat while the overhead went merrily on. His only object is the making of pictures, no matter what the cost. When he did Intolerance he built the walls of Babylon three hundred feet high, and hired so many extras that his daily payrolls totaled $12,000, to the horror of his backers. So fertile was his directorial imagination that the camera took several hundred thousand feet of film, and the picture in its rough state required seventy-five hours to be seen.
D.W. Griffith, the first of the great directors, has been so inextricably tied up with the development of movie style that Terry Ramsaye in his "A Million and One Nights -The History of the Motion Picture" referred to him sixty-seven times. The life of this man has been so concentrated in the movies that the minor facts of his outside life are few. He lives simply, quietly, alone since the separation from Mrs. Griffith, to whom be was secretly married back in the days when he engaged her under the name of Linda Arvidson for The Adventures of Dolly, the first piece be ever directed. He goes to the opera occasionally, but his life is devoted to the attempt to recapture the glory that was his in the triumphant days of The Birth of a Nation.
To an interviewer who once asked Albert Gray, brother of D. W., what kind of a boy Griffith had been, the answer was:
"D. W. was a nut, and he's still a nut, but a mighty good nut."
Allene Talmey, "Doug and Mary and Others," New York: Macy-Masius, 1927, pages 93-101.
© 1997, David Pierce, on editing and revisions (if any)
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