Between spring 1896 and spring 1897, Griffith traveled through Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, and North Dakota playing a range of roles with several companies. Returning to Louisville in May 1897, he was offered a small part in David Belasco’s Men and Women at the Temple Theater. The production was by the Meffert Stock Company, which was a cut above the other companies Griffith had toured with (he would describe them later as “a real company” that “actually paid their actors salaries”). Unhappily for Griffith, he was dismissed by the manager after the first matinée performance. There followed a curious episode in which Griffith was engaged by a new company called the Twilight Revellers. Organized by Irishman Ned Risley, “a sort of steamboat comedian and small-town barnstormer,” and bankrolled by a stage-struck blacksmith, Jim White, the Revellers tried to bring plays such as Pygmalion and Galatea and The Arabian Nights to small towns in Indiana and Kentucky. Their money ran out in the fourth town and they were caught by the landlord of their boarding house attempting to escape without paying. Risley managed to persuade the man that what he really wanted to do was to join the company (Griffith, whose description of the Revellers is probably the most affectionate of all his theatrical reminiscences, asserted that in the end there were no less than five landlords involved in a doomed attempt to keep the show on the road). When the company disbanded, Griffith probably found a temporary job or jobs to see him through the summer.22
In the fall season of 1897, the Meffert Stock Company acquired new management in the form of Oscar Eagle and his wife, Esther Lyon. The two, who acted in as well as directed their own productions, had a high reputation and were determined to offer a considerable range of plays, including some premièred only recently in Europe. Although it is not clear who first suggested Griffith to the new managers, by October 1897 he had become a full member of the company. While he played mainly minor roles during his first year, he gained much from the experience of regular acting as part of a highly professional acting troupe. When Eagle left Louisville temporarily in 1898 to direct a summer season at the Alhambra Theater in Chicago, he took Griffith with him. Performing in a number of plays that were new to him, Griffith scored a major personal triumph with his depiction of Abraham Lincoln in William Haworth’s play, The Ensign. He seems subsequently to have reproduced the role at an Elk’s Club minstrel show in Indiana where, according to the trade press, he “made his famous Lincoln pose in the tableau finale and received deserved praise.”23
Between September 1898 and March 1899, he acted with another company that toured Iowa, Minnesota, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan. At the end of this period, he returned for one last time to the Meffert Company. His parts were now much more important, reflecting his growing reputation as an actor. He played Athos in the adaptation of The Three Musketeers that closed the season. During the summer of 1899, perhaps while working in a temporary job as a stringer for the Louisville Courier-Journal, Griffith must have been thinking deeply about his future. He probably sensed that his career was at a turning point. He was twenty-four years old. His stature as an actor had increased and he had been in virtually continuous employment for the previous two years. He may also have known that Eagle and Lyon, his main local patrons, were not coming back to Louisville for the next season. Griffith was ambitious: he obviously felt the time had arrived to test his theatrical skills on a wider stage. Drawing out his savings, he paid $19 for a round-trip ticket to Atlantic City. On his arrival in the New Jersey resort, he cashed in the return part of the ticket and bought another, this time to New York.24
Griffith’s arrival in New York was inauspicious. He lived for three days in a cheap flophouse under the Brooklyn Bridge, under the delusion that he was in New York proper, before moving on to even worse accommodation near the Bowery. He “haunted” (his word) the main theatrical agencies. Eventually, he was rewarded with the lead role, as “Happy Jack” Ferrers, in a popular melodrama called London Life. The show toured New York State, Ontario, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, with Griffith receiving “generally good” reviews. In Minneapolis, however, he left the show for reasons that are unclear. It was midwinter and he had no money for train fare. Imitating (and sometimes traveling with) hoboes, he “hopped freights” or “grabbed the blinds” of baggage cars on passengers trains to Louisville, where he was able to scrape up enough money to pay for his return to New York. On another occasion, when a melodrama he was performing in folded in upstate New York, Griffith was forced to become “an ore shoveler and puddler” for the Tonawanda Iron and Steel Company to earn the cost of his train fare back to New York.25 It seems, indeed, that Griffith frequently turned to manual labor to survive financially when acting roles were scarce. He claimed to have worked, at various times, shoveling concrete and scraping rust from the iron supports in the New York subway. This, together with his experience of the cheapest form of accommodation and his acquired knowledge of tramps and hoboes, would help give him the sense of identification with the poor that characterized many of his early films and probably helped account for a good deal of their success with nickelodeon audiences.26
Between 1899 and 1904, although he regarded New York as his home base, Griffith did not by any means spend all his time there. He worked with several touring companies. Early 1901 found him on the West Coast for the first time. A year later, he joined a company formed by his old friend, Oscar Eagle, which toured from Troy, New York, to Indianapolis. Over the next two years, he belonged to several companies that toured the Midwest, the East Coast, and New England. In 1904, however, perhaps seduced by the notion of higher earnings or the possibility of greater acting achievements, he decided to move to San Francisco, then second only to New York as a major theatrical hub.27
Soon after his arrival in the city, Griffith found work playing Rupert of Hentzau in The Prisoner of Zenda at the Central Theater. As soon as that run finished, he did six weeks of repertory with Melbourne MacDowell at the Opera House on Mission Street. It was during this period that he met Linda Arvidson Johnson, an aspiring young actress. Hired as an extra in Fedora, Linda was initially terrified by Griffith’s “deep stern voice” as the police inspector in the play, but the two rapidly became romantically involved. When the MacDowell company moved on to Portland, Griffith was dismissed (MacDowell, he would later remember, “grew prosperous and particular. I got fired”). Returning to San Francisco and finding no theatrical work immediately available, he took a temporary job as a hop-picker. In January 1905, he played the lead (as John the Baptist) in The Holy City in San Francisco. Next month, he went to Los Angeles to take a role in an adaptation of Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel Ramona, which focused on the story of a Spanish mission girl persecuted for bearing the child of an Indian (Griffith played the part of the Indian outcast, Alessandro). When Ramona finished its two-month tour, he played a comic detective for three months. In early 1906, he joined the repertory company run by Nance O’Neill, which was a highly professional troupe offering an excellent range of old classics and new plays. (The latter included Judith of Bethulia, which, a few years later, Griffith would use as the basis for his move to longer films.) Griffith, taking on more and more important roles, traveled with Miss O’Neill and her company in a tour that would eventually embrace ten states and four Canadian provinces. While the company was in Minneapolis in April 1906, he received a telegram from Linda with news of the San Francisco earthquake. Thinking over the matter for a few days, he wrote inviting her to join him in Boston toward the end of the tour. Leaving San Francisco on a refugee train, carrying a lunch box and clothes provided by the Red Cross, she took several days to cross the country. The couple were married on May 14, 1906, in Boston’s Old North Church. The marriage license gave his age as thirty (he was actually thirty-one) and his occupation as “writing.”28
Griffith’s Writing
Griffith would later claim to have “been writing more or less all my life.” One of his stage directors
remembered him as “forever writing or reading from a manuscript which he carried with him” and Linda was deeply impressed in the early days of their relationship by the fact that he traveled with “a trunk full” of writings. Yet Griffith at first had entertained little hope of profiting financially from his hobby.29 He apparently once sold the New York World for $5 an article he had written about Southern cooking. His first real success as a writer was a short vaudeville play set during the American Revolution and called In Washington’s Time. After opening in Springfield, Massachusetts, in early 1901, it was also staged in Worcester, Washington, D.C., and New York. Four years later, it had a brief run in San Francisco, with Griffith and Linda Arvidson (her stage name) in the cast. It was, indeed, during his years in California that Griffith, encouraged by Linda, began to think more seriously about becoming a playwright. While working as a hop-picker, he began to gather material for a play he proposed to write. During the summer of 1906, living with his new wife in an apartment on New York’s West Fifty-sixth Street, he finished that play, a romantic melodrama he called A Fool and a Girl. With the play finished, he set out both to sell it and—to stay financially afloat in the meantime—to find work as an actor. In retrospect, what then happened was a first step on the road to The Birth of a Nation, for Thomas Dixon Jr. had turned his anti-socialist novel The One Woman into a stage-play he hoped would enjoy the same theatrical success as The Clansman. When the play (like The Clansman) opened in Norfolk, Virginia, it had Griffith playing the lead role and his wife in the cast.30
Many years later, Griffith would use the climactic scene of the play—the main character being sent to the gallows as the first wife and the governor race in a car to reprieve him—in the ending of Intolerance. In the early fall of 1906, however, all that Dixon’s adaptation of his novel seemed to hold out to Griffith and his wife was the hope of a long engagement. That hope, however, was not to be: after two months of touring with the play in Virginia, West Virginia, and the Carolinas, both Griffith and Linda received two weeks’ notice.31 In the long run, Griffith’s firing by Dixon does not seem to have affected the relationship of the two men, and it was with Griffith’s help that Dixon would finally be able to see his novel and play The Clansman transformed into a film.
Out of work, Griffith went back to the dreary daily round of theatrical agents and producers. Just before Christmas, his luck seemed to have changed. Actor/producer James K. Hackett bought the rights to A Fool and a Girl for $700 (according to Mrs. Griffith) or £1,000 (Griffith’s own later recollection). Whatever the amount, it was the most money Griffith had ever had. He decided to stop touring for a while and devote himself to writing. For a time, it seemed that his gamble was paying off. The editor of Cosmopolitan paid him three cents a word for a story (Linda remembered $75), though he did not finally publish it in the magazine. Leslie’s Weekly, by contrast, printed in early January 1907 a poem by Griffith called “The Wild Duck,” for which they paid $15 (Griffith’s recollection) or $6 (Linda’s). Despite his best efforts, however, Griffith was unable to sell anything else and the summer of 1907 found him back in Norfolk, Virginia, pounding the boards in a historical pageant called Pocahontas. In the early fall, A Fool and a Girl opened in Washington. Constant changes were made to the play itself at the request of the cast during rehearsal (Griffith later remembered many occasions on which he was “ejected into the alley behind the theatre for objecting to changes in the script”). On opening night, a high proportion of the audience walked out. The critics savaged the play (prompting Griffith to publish a detailed rebuttal of one accusation that it offended propriety by mimicking “the art of Zola”). The controversy meant that the last performance of the week’s run in Washington played to a full house, but after another week in Baltimore the play folded. Far from discouraged, Griffith promptly researched and wrote a four-act play, set in the era of the American Revolution, which he called War. When it was finished, however, it failed to find a producer. What must have seemed a complete disaster to Griffith at the time seems retrospectively the best thing that could have happened to him. For near the end of 1907, looking for work to see him through a difficult winter, he turned to the movies.32
Griffith and the Movies
Griffith claimed that he saw his first motion picture at a Fourteenth Street nickelodeon after he returned to New York from Washington in 1907. Richard Schickel, by contrast, suggests that this may have happened as early as 1898 while he was acting in Chicago.33 But like most stage actors, Griffith looked down on movies and felt his reputation would be undermined if people saw him in one. Writing for the movies, however, was something different: it was anonymous and also paid comparatively well (from $5 to $30 for a scenario). There are differing accounts of who first recommended that he try his hand at the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, usually known as the Biograph. Linda Arvidson remembered the suggestion coming from Max Davidson, an old acquaintance from the days of the Twilight Revellers who later graduated from the Yiddish theatre to silent film comedy.34 Griffith would subsequently attribute it to the advice of a gloomy looking actor named Harry Salter. Sometime in December 1907, however, he presented himself with “an armful of hurriedly written scenarios” at the Biograph studio on 11 East Fourteenth Street. Interviewed by George McCutcheon, Biograph’s only director, he also indicated his availability for acting roles.35 It was, indeed, as an extra at $5 a day that Griffith began his relationship with the Biograph Company. His first small role was in Falsely Accused!, filmed in late December 1907.36
Although later writers would associate Griffith only with the Biograph, he also approached the Edison Studio in the Bronx hoping to sell a scenario (loosely based on Tosca). The studio was uninterested in the script but hired him to play the lead role in Rescued from the Eagle’s Nest, filmed in early January. For a short time, Griffith alternated between the two studios: he was an extra for Biograph in Classmates in mid-January and for Edison in Cupid’s Pranks around three weeks later.37 But from mid-February, he seems to have worked exclusively for the Biograph Company. He had a principal role in The Princess in the Vase, made in February, and wrote the scenario for Old Isaacs the Pawnbroker, filmed in March. He had a leading role in The Music Master and was an extra in The Sculptor’s Nightmare, both of them produced in April. In the same month, he appeared in When Knights Were Bold with Linda Arvidson, whom he had also encouraged to look for work at the studio (no one there knew until much later that the pair were married). During May and June, he acted in six more Biograph films, some based on his own scenarios, and seems increasingly to have specialized in villain roles.38
As a screen actor, Griffith was far from outstanding. He had a tendency to wave his arms about too much—G. W. “Billy” Bitzer, who photographed several of the films in which he appeared, was told off by the Biograph management for making it seem, in one of them, that Griffith had three or four arms. Bitzer also subsequently recalled advising him not to overact when playing a minor role as a bartender.39 It did not matter very much because Griffith’s rather brief career before the camera was already almost at an end. During the summer of 1908, McCutcheon became too ill to work. By this stage, Griffith had apparently already spoken of his desire to direct. After experimenting with a number of stopgap solutions (including McCutcheon’s son, Wallace), the studio offered the job to Griffith. After a little hesitation (he was worried that he would cease to be employable as an actor), he accepted.40
The Adventures of Dollie, Griffith’s first film as director, was a brief melodrama about a child stolen by gypsies, who is enclosed in a barrel and floats down a river until she is rescued by some boys out fishing. After studying other Biograph films, he offered the role of the anguished mother to his wife, whom he found (rather to his surprise) to be rather good at conveying emotion on screen. Unimpressed with the studio’s leading men, he took a tour of theatrical agencies and hired Arthur Johnson, whom he met coming out of one of them, as the father. Charles Inslee, an actor Griffith had known on the Wes
t Coast, was asked to play the leader of the gypsies. The cameraman on the picture was Arthur Marvin, but Griffith apparently turned frequently for advice (though he did not always take it) to Bitzer, the other Biograph cinematographer. The film itself, Griffith later recalled, was made in two days at a total cost of $65. When it was completed, he moved on to other films: Griffith had already begun work on his sixth motion picture when Dollie opened. Linda Griffith remembered the favorable reaction of the audience at the Union Square nickelodeon to the single-reel, 713-foot film and subsequent demands for the film greatly exceeded that of any previous Biograph release. The company, quickly realizing that it had found its man, offered Griffith a permanent contract as its principal director.41
Griffith directed all Biograph films made between June 1908 and December 1909, as well as all the important ones over the next four years. During the 1908–1913 period, he directed in all more than 450 films, averaging around two every week.42 Many of these were fairly short and simple. Griffith recalled that the pictures he had been making in 1909 and 1910 “ran about six or seven minutes on the screen and their cost averaged … about $150.”43 The films offered a vast range of stories. Griffith was fond of adapting classical or modern literature into motion pictures, and this tendency would increase over the years. He also directed Westerns, sea stories, and comedies. He was adept at producing urban crime melodramas, including The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), seen by one expert as introducing the principal themes and settings that would characterize “crime” films until today.44 While the great bulk of his films had contemporary urban or rural settings, some were set in foreign parts and historical circumstances. One such circumstance, of course, would be of major importance for the future. Early American cinema, according to Jack Spears, regarded dramas played out against a Civil War background as a staple product.45 Given his Kentucky background and recollections of his father, it is unsurprising that no less than eleven of Griffith’s Biograph movies dealt with Civil War themes: The Guerrilla (1908), In Old Kentucky (1909), The Honor of His Family (1910), In the Border States, or A Little Heroine of the Civil War (1910), The House with Closed Shutters (1910), The Fugitive (1910), His Trust and His Trust Fulfilled (1911), Swords and Hearts (1911), The Battle (1911), and The Informer (1912).46 These films, as Robert Lang has pointed out, often introduced “themes and scenes that would appear later in The Birth of a Nation.”47 The shot of the “Little Colonel’s” home-coming in Birth, for example, was prefigured in In Old Kentucky. Elements of Birth of a Nation can be discerned in Swords and Hearts (the story of two families, one Northern and one Southern), His Trust and His Trust Fulfilled (loyal, faithful slaves) and The Battle (for the battlefield sequences).48
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