- Born
- Died
- Birth nameDavid Llewelyn Wark Griffith
- Height1.80 m
- David Wark Griffith was born in rural Kentucky to Jacob "Roaring Jake" Griffith, a former Confederate Army colonel and Civil War veteran. Young Griffith grew up with his father's romantic war stories and melodramatic nineteenth-century literature that were to eventually shape his movies. In 1897 Griffith set out to pursue a career both acting and writing for the theater, but for the most part was unsuccessful. Reluctantly, he agreed to act in the new motion picture medium for Edwin S. Porter at the Edison Company. Griffith was eventually offered a job at the financially struggling American Mutoscope & Biograph Co., where he directed over four hundred and fifty short films, experimenting with the story-telling techniques he would later perfect in his epic Naissance d'une nation (1915).
Griffith and his personal cinematographer G.W. Bitzer collaborated to create and perfect such cinematic devices as the flashback, the iris shot, the mask and cross-cutting. In the years following "Birth", Griffith never again saw the same monumental success as his signature film and, in 1931, his increasing failures forced his retirement. Though hailed for his vision in narrative film-making, he was similarly criticized for his blatant racism. Griffith died in Los Angeles in 1948, one of the most dichotomous figures in film history.- IMDb mini biography by: Michael Kaminsky <kaminsky@ucsee.eecs.berkeley.edu> (qv's & corrections by A. Nonymous)
- SpousesEvelyn Baldwin(March 2, 1936 - November 1, 1947) (divorced)Linda Arvidson(May 14, 1906 - March 2, 1936) (divorced)
- His films depict the cruelty of humankind.
- Often cast Lillian Gish in almost all his movies.
- Characters in Griffith's films often get trapped (and sometimes die) in small, confined spaces. Examples of this running theme can be found in Les aventures de Dollie (1908), Le spéculateur en grains (1909), The Usurer (1910), Naissance d'une nation (1915), and Le lys brisé (1919).
- Because the movie Birth of Nation many people of the Ku Klux Klan considered him as as honorary member
- Was the first to utter the catchphrase "Lights, camera, action!" in 1910, on the set of In Old California (1910). It, like many of his techniques, are still widely used in filmmaking.
- Griffith produced and directed the first movie ever made in Hollywood, In Old California (1910), which was produced by the American Mutoscope & Biograph Co. which is still in existence today and is the oldest movie company in America. The film was rediscovered by Biograph and shown (without musical accompaniment) on the 6th of May 2004 at the Beverly Hills International Film Festival, attended by the President of Biograph Company Thomas R. Bond II and the festival's founder Nino Simon. On the same day, a monument was erected near the site where the film was made (Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street). However, almost a year later in 2005, the 2.8 ton monument was stolen overnight, under mysterious circumstances and is no longer there, but was found almost one year after its disappearance near a garbage bin not far from where the monument stood on Vine Street in Hollywood.
- Ironically, he produced and directed the Biograph film The Rose of Kentucky (1911), which showed the Ku Klux Klan as villainous, a sharp contrast to Naissance d'une nation (1915) made four years later, in which the KKK was portrayed in a very favorable light.
- Although Griffith was thought by many to be a bigot and racist, he detested the manner in which whites and the "white man's government" treated and oppressed Native Americans. This was a theme that he explored in several of his early short films, most notably in The Redman's View (1909) and Ramona (1910), which are very strong denouncements of the oppression of Native Americans by whites.
- [quoted by G.W. Bitzer in "Billy Bitzer: His Story."] A film without a message is just a waste of time.
- [Instructions Griffith allegedly gave to his assistants during the making of one of his epics, quoted by Josef von Sternberg in his memoir "Fun in a Chinese Laundry"] Move these 10,000 horses a trifle to the right, and that mob out there three feet forward.
- There will never be talking pictures.
- Talkies, squeakies, moanies, songies, squawkies . . . Just give them ten years to develop and you're going to see the greatest artistic medium the world has known.
- Actors should never be important. Only directors should have power and place.
- Naissance d'une nation (1920) - $300 per week plus 37.5% of net profits
- Her First Biscuits (1909) - $52 .50
- When Knighthood Was in Flower (undefined) - $35
- The Stage Rustler (1908) - $35
- At the Crossroads of Life (1908) - $15
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