Since 1975, therefore, with all rights in The Birth of a Nation reverting to the American public, it has theoretically been possible for anyone to remake the film. Practically, however, in today’s more pluralistic—and at the same time more politically correct—world, a new version of so controversial and racist a film is almost inconceivable. Thus, although “director” Dalton Freed (Maurice Sonnenberg) in Woody Allen’s Celebrity (1998) claims he is planning to remake The Birth of a Nation in “an all-black version,” Manthia Diawara has linked the chase sequence in Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple (1985) to Gus’s chase of Flora in Birth of a Nation,146 and Michael Moore appropriated actual images of Gus and Flora in Bowling for Columbine (2002) to reinforce his argument that the media fomented fear of blacks, the closest to any kind of remake is likely to remain the simulated footage of some of the Ku Klux Klan sequences from Birth in Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump (1994).
After-lives
For David W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation marked a clear turning point in his career. Before Birth, he had directed 460 films in seven years. After Birth, in the sixteen years of active filmmaking that remained to him, he would produce only twenty-seven. One reason for the disparity in numbers, of course, was that most of the films from the early part of his career were Biograph one-reelers. Griffith had already started to produce longer films before 1915, but his shortest film after The Birth of a Nation was six reels. His final fourteen films, released between 1921 and 1931, were all between nine and twelve reels.147 Birth created expectations, both for Griffith and his audiences, that helped make it impossible to go back to the Biograph style of filmmaking.
Judith of Bethulia (1913) had already demonstrated Griffith’s fondness for the epic and spectacular; Birth encouraged this taste. The immense commercial success of the film, moreover, fostered Griffith’s faith that his way of doing things was the right one: he would seek to preserve as much as possible of his directorial independence in the years ahead, he would try for as long as he could to make films using a company of actors rather than individual stars, he would continue to see big pictures as the way to big profits, and he would consider road shows the most direct means of realizing such profits. All these views would put him significantly at odds with the way the film industry was developing after 1915 and in combination with other errors of judgment on his part would weaken his reputation so much that he would make no more films for the last seventeen years of his life.
The initial evidence of the impact of Birth of a Nation on Griffith’s output came with the fate of The Mother and the Law, a short feature he had begun work on before Birth was released. When it was completed, sometime in mid-1915, it already seemed a throwback to an earlier time: Lillian Gish, present at a screening for Griffith and members of his team, remembered that “we all agreed with him that the film was too small in theme and execution to follow The Birth.”148 During the fall of 1915, Griffith tentatively began to revise The Mother and the Law and subsume it into a wider work: a study of prejudice and bigotry in four distinct historical epochs. Intolerance (1916), as a French critic noted, “evoked the fall of Babylon, the death of Christ, Saint Bartholomew’s [massacre] and the life of an American worker all at the same time.”149 With its spectacular sequences, including Belshazzar’s feast, the new film cost almost four times as much as Birth. In the beginning, it seemed likely to follow the same path as Birth: previewed in Riverside, shown at the Liberty Theater in New York, for the first three or four months it was successful at the box office. Then audiences began to fall away, and in the end, the film was a commercial failure. (Wark Productions, the company Griffith had formed to produce and distribute Intolerance, would go bankrupt six years later in 1921.) Ultimately, Intolerance, whatever its impressive spectacular effects, was too fragmented a film to appeal to the kind of mass audience Birth had attracted. Louis Delluc, the French critic quoted above, put his finger very accurately on Griffith’s failure to unite the four stories into any coherent artistic narrative when he irreverently observed that for many people, the picture “quickly turned into an inexplicable chaos in which Catherine de Medici visited the poor of New York just as Jesus was baptizing the courtesans of Balthazar and Darius’ armies were beginning to assault the Chicago elevated.”150
In 1917, Griffith finally deserted the Aitkens to sign up with their principal adversary, Adolph Zukor. His contract obliged him to direct six feature films for Zukor’s Paramount-Artcraft distribution company, each to cost a maximum of $175,000. The contract also allowed him to make a “big picture” which Zukor would finance, in return for the general distribution rights after Griffith’s own company organized the initial road show release. Griffith opted to make this larger picture straight away. A few months earlier, he had been approached by the British government with an invitation to make a feature film about the war: the result would be The Hearts of the World (1918). The director spent six months in Europe, mostly in England but with two trips to France, including a visit to the trenches. He was fêted by the British literary and political establishment, including Prime Minister David Lloyd George. He was even permitted to film Queen Alexandra and various society ladies, including Lady Diana Manners and Elizabeth Asquith, and this footage would appear in his next Artcraft release, The Great Love (1918).151 The Hearts of the World, like The Birth of a Nation, was structured around the wartime experiences of two American families, in this case expatriate neighbors in a small French town. Again, like Birth, the battles scenes came in the middle of the film and Lillian Gish, as the heroine, was once again threatened by rape (this time the would-be rapist was a German spy).152 Griffith’s biographer has underlined the main problems with this film: it does not really offer “any realistic sense of this war as it was actually fought” and its final part was little more than “a creaky and unpersuasive” melodrama. On the other hand, it did quite well at the box office, making a profit of more than $600,000 on its initial release.153
Of the six “normal” Artcraft films Griffith delivered under his contract with Zukor, two—The Great Love and The Greatest Thing in Life (1918)—have been lost. At least one other—Scarlet Days (1919), his final Western—according to Scott Simmon is “best forgotten.”154 But three of the other films are worthy of note. A Romance of Happy Valley (1919) and True Heart Susie (1919) were both simple, well-made rural romances demonstrating that Griffith could still produce intimate, more personal films as well as spectacular epics. The Girl Who Stayed at Home (1919), by contrast, is perhaps the least convincing of all Griffith’s war movies. It is important, however, because it is the first film in which Carol Dempster replaces Lillian Gish (who had influenza) as the leading lady. Dempster, who was Griffith’s lover, would be the heroine of many of his films up to 1926. She was neither especially beautiful nor an especially good actress. The moviegoing public never seems to have warmed to her and so Griffith’s insistence on using her for so long helped weaken his own position.
Gish might have been replaced as Griffith’s personal favorite but the two continued to work together until 1921. Immediately after The Girl Stayed Home they collaborated on Broken Blossoms (1919), in some respects the most remarkable film Griffith ever made. A story of implicit (but not actual) miscegenation between a Chinese man and a young white girl brutalized by her father, the movie ended tragically with the death of all three. It showed a rare sensibility that impressed both critics and filmgoers, who made it Griffith’s most profitable film after The Birth of a Nation. This commercial success was all the more welcome because in February 1919, Griffith joined with Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and William S. Hart to form United Artists (UA). Broken Blossoms became the first Griffith film to be distributed by UA. At this stage UA was only a distribution agency, and its founders needed to raise the money if they were to make their films themselves; so shortly thereafter Griffith also signed an agreement with First National—founded to check Zukor’s growing power over the movie industry—to finance and dis
tribute his next three films.155
In 1920, Griffith moved temporarily with most of his company to Florida, where he produced The Idol Dancer (1920) for First National and The Love Flower (1920) for United Artists. Both were essentially old-fashioned melodramas, as was Way Down East (1920), a film based on a highly popular classic of the legitimate stage. With its nostalgia for a simpler time and marvelous storm sequence at the end, Way Down East provided Griffith “with his last major box office success.” That success, Richard Schickel argues, would in the end prove very much a mixed blessing as it concealed fatal flaws in the Griffith approach to filmmaking. For 1920 was also the year in which Griffith acquired his own studio by buying the Henry Flagler estate near Mamaroneck, New York, and converting it for his uses. While in some ways a logical development of Griffith’s “company” approach to filmmaking, establishing an independent studio solely for producing films was significantly out of step with the way much of the American movie industry was now evolving. By the early 1920s, Famous Players-Lasky, Fox, and Universal were well on their way to being vertically integrated industrial conglomerates. They produced sufficient numbers of films to sign exclusive contracts with movie houses to provide with “blocks” of movies, and they were beginning to build up their own theater chains. Griffith’s studio was outside this system—as, at this stage, was also United Artists. With the profits of his earlier films tied up in buying and setting up the studio itself, his only hope of long-term survival, as Schickel points out, “was to produce cheaply and quickly, using the cash flow from one production to finance the next.” The profitability of Way Down East managed to hide this reality for a time.156
Between the première of Way Down East in September 1920 and the summer of 1924, Griffith released five more films. All were distributed by United Artists. None gave Griffith the profits he needed to break free from his increasing mountain of debt. All either lost money or failed to make money fast enough to help Griffith’s increasingly desperate struggle to keep his studio going. Dream Street (1921), a picture dealing with a romantic triangle, lost around $150,000. Orphans of the Storm (1921), which featured Lillian Gish for the last time in a Griffith film, was essentially the story of a lost child set against the background of the French Revolution. It cost almost a million dollars to produce, and although it did quite well at the box office, the profits it accrued were slow in arriving. One Exciting Night (1922), a mystery film with elements of comedy, included a hugely expensive storm sequence that doomed the film’s financial prospects. The White Rose (1923), which brought Mae Marsh temporarily back into the Griffith orbit, was the mildly sensational story of a clergyman’s sexual transgressions. It made back more than double its production costs, although again the profits were slow to arrive. Finally, Griffith was drawn to make America (1924), a spectacle set against the backcloth of the American Revolution, which cost nearly $900,000 to produce. When the film was released to tepid reviews, it rapidly became clear that Griffith’s own studio was doomed and the Mamaronek estate would need to be sold.157
The game of “what if …?” is always intriguing to play. Griffith might have kept his studio if he had been less drawn to the spectacular. This quality, first seriously in evidence with Judith of Bethulia, had been encouraged by Birth of a Nation. It was a major influence on the making of Intolerance, Orphans of the Storm, and disastrously, America. Griffith might have kept his studio if he had been less profligate as a director; his wish, particularly after the success of Birth, to spend whatever was necessary to achieve the effect he wanted meant that the budgets for his pictures were rarely adhered to. (Robert W. Chambers, the scenarist for America, wrote an amusing “playlet” that focused on Griffith’s lack of concern for costs as part of his growing megalomania; at one point, he had Griffith’s assistants gold-plating the Woolworth building in case the director needed to shoot there).158 Griffith might have kept his studio if he had been less committed, in light of the experience with Birth, to road showing. Road shows were expensive to organize, slow to produce income for less spectacular or well-publicized pictures, and ultimately cut profits by delaying general release. Griffith might have kept his studio if he had been less loyal to Carol Dempster and less determined to force her on an unwilling moviegoing public. By the same token, his films might have made more money if he had been willing to develop or use more recognizable “stars.” Griffith might also have kept his studio if he had been prepared to increase his output by collaborating with another small studio; he twice turned down such offers from William Randolph Hearst, who had founded Cosmopolitan Productions to showcase the acting talents of his mistress, Marion Davies.159 Finally, Griffith might have kept his studio if United Artists had been able, as it was much later, to help more in financing its own productions.
“What if …?”—but in 1924, Griffith was confronted with pressing financial realities. Secretly, in June he abandoned UA to sign a contract to direct four films for Zukor’s Famous Players-Lasky. Zukor even guaranteed a bank loan so that Griffith could produce a last, contractually required film for UA. This film, Isn’t Life Wonderful (1924), shot partly on location in Europe, was a simple, unaffected study of a family’s struggle to survive in postwar Germany. In the end, for Griffith to cut his links with UA proved harder than he expected, until the still-obliging Zukor agreed that UA would distribute the first film made under his new contract. This was Sally of the Sawdust (1926), a fairground comedy starring W. C. Fields in his first major screen role. It was, notes Richard Schickel, Griffith’s “first quickly and distinctly profitable picture since Way Down East.” Griffith, however, was now a studio contract director and Famous Players compelled him, against his will, to direct That Royle Girl (1925), revolving around the story of a Chicago flapper who solves a murder case. The picture failed to make a profit, mainly because its cost had been inflated by an expensive storm sequence Griffith insisted on adding. When his next film, The Sorrows of Satan (1926), also came in $300,000 over budget and rapidly proved a commercial disaster, Zukor decided to cancel Griffith’s contract.160
Although the Famous Players experience had demonstrated that Griffith did not fit easily into the disciplined world of studio production—and, to an extent, film critics had started to turn against him—his career did not end in 1926. In early 1927, he accepted an invitation from Joseph Schenck to rejoin United Artists. Unfortunately for Griffith, none of his first three films for UA could really be accounted a success. Drums of Love (1928), a depressing “love triangle” story, did poorly at the box office. The Battle of the Sexes (1928), essentially a plagiarism of Griffith’s own 1914 film of the same title, was a curious combination of comedy and tragedy. Reviewers found it confused and amateurish.161 Lady of the Pavements (1929), based on a scenario by Sam Taylor,162 explored the themes of love, faithlessness, and revenge. Reviewers on the whole liked the star of the film, “Whoopee Lupe” Velez, much better than they liked the film itself. By this point, Schenck had probably decided to get rid of Griffith, yet he still allowed him, though with much more stringent financial conditions, to make his first “talkie”: Abraham Lincoln (1930).163
Based on a script by young poet Stephen Vincent Benét, this project allowed Griffith to revisit for the last time Birth of a Nation–style territory. The actual making of the picture, however, involved a nightmarish war between Benét and Griffith on the one hand and UA producer John Considine Jr. on the other. In the end, Griffith virtually withdrew from the film, leaving its editing, dubbing, and scoring primarily in the hands of Considine. Instead of fighting for his film, Griffith preferred to concentrate on shooting a trailer for the new synchronized version of Birth of a Nation—a film in which both he and Walter Huston (who had played Lincoln in the 1930 film) appeared. Reviewers, who Schickel suggests may have felt guilt over their treatment of Griffith in recent years, tended to be highly positive in their treatment of Abraham Lincoln. Some suggested that Griffith had now returned to a position of leadership in the movie industry. In reality, the
conclusion Griffith had drawn from the experience and the film’s uneven performance at the box office was that he should withdraw completely from the studio system of production. He had no intention, ever again, of trying to satisfy studio factions. Henceforth, he would make a film only if he controlled the whole process, and he was prepared to wait until the right project came along.164
Griffith’s attitude might have been realistic in 1914, with The Birth of a Nation just around the corner. It was deeply unrealistic in 1930. What destroyed his career finally, however, was the selection of his next film. About as far from Birth of a Nation as it was possible to get, The Struggle (1931) was an old-fashioned melodrama about alcoholism. Griffith borrowed heavily to finance it and the film was a commercial and critical disaster. Although Griffith would be honored by filmmakers (he received a special Oscar in 1936) and directors such as George Cukor, Preston Sturges, and Jean Renoir paid homage to him, he would never make another film. David O. Selznick did think privately of hiring Griffith as an adviser to George Cukor on Gone With the Wind. He also considered asking him to direct the second-unit shooting of “the evacuation of Atlanta and other episodes of the war and Reconstruction period.” In the end, however, he seems to have decided that Griffith was simply too controversial a figure to associate with his greatest production.165 During the last seventeen years of his life (he died in July 1948), Griffith was a virtual exile from the movies he had done so much to pioneer. Looking back over the rest of his career, he must have known that he had never succeeded in reproducing the kind of success he had enjoyed with The Birth of a Nation in 1915–16.
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