Trivia

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.

In 1920 he established United Artists with Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.

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.

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 The Birth of a Nation (1915) made four years later, in which the KKK was portrayed in a very favorable light.

His The Birth of a Nation (1915) is generally considered as the birth of modern American cinema.

Ironically, the release of The Birth of a Nation (1915) inspired many African-Americans to start making their own films in an attempt to counter the film's depiction of them and to offer positive alternative images and stories of the African-American people.

Lillian Gish called him "the father of film". Although Griffith considered her a close friend, she had so much respect for him that she never referred to him as other than "Mr. Griffith", even long after he died.

The NAACP attempted to have The Birth of a Nation (1915) banned. After that effort failed, they then attempted to have some of the film's more extreme scenes censored.

He has been called "the father of film technique," "the man who invented Hollywood," and "the Shakespeare of the screen".

America (1924) is regarded as a major turning point in his career. Its failure ended his tenure as the industry's preeminent director.

He directed more than 450 films for Biograph. Amazingly, 440 of them still survive, accounting for a large portion of Biograph's shorts that survive.

By 1909 he was turning out two to three films per week.

Charles Chaplin called him "the teacher of us all".

Started to write an autobiography, but never finished it. (1926)

Lillian Gish claimed that he invented false eyelashes in 1916 for Intolerance (1916). Griffith wanted Seena Owen (who plays Attarea, the Princess Beloved, in the film's Babylonian segment) with lashes luxurious enough to brush her cheeks when she blinked. In collaboration with a wig maker, who did the actual fabricating, the solution Griffith was credited with involved weaving human hair through a fine strip of gauze, creating false eyelashes. However, like many Hollywood legends, this claim proves to not be true. In 1911 a Canadian woman named Anna Taylor received a U.S. patent for the artificial eyelash; hers was a crescent of fabric implanted with tiny hairs. Even before that, hairdressers and makeup artists tried a similar trick. A German named Charles Nestle (nee Karl Nessler) manufactured false lashes in the early 20th century and used the profit from sales to finance his next invention--the permanent wave. By 1915 Nestle had opened a New York hair-perming salon on East 49th St., with lashes as his sideline. In addition, one of the earliest known attempts to enhance eyelashes was during the times of the ancient Egyptians, when royalty used black powder called "kohl" to protect their eyes against sand, dust and bugs. However, this was to provide practical benefits, rather than cosmetic.

After The Birth of a Nation (1915) was released and criticized as being racist, Griffith was very hurt. He decided to make Intolerance (1916) as a follow-up, to show how damaging and dangerous people's intolerance can be.

15 December 1999: Declaring that Griffith "helped foster intolerable racial stereotypes," the Directors Guild of America's National Board - without membership consultation--announced it would rename the D.W. Griffith Award, the Guild's highest honor. First given in 1953, its recipients included Stanley Kubrick, David Lean, John Huston, Woody Allen, Akira Kurosawa, John Ford, Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, and Griffith's friend Cecil B. DeMille.

Some of the investors for his controversial film The Birth of a Nation (1915) were Louis B. Mayer, H.E. Aitken and Jesse L. Lasky, among many others in Hollywood at that time. The film's success is what financed Mayer, Aitken and Lasky into forming their own studios in Hollywood, eventually becoming MGM and Paramount, among others.

His first sound film was Abraham Lincoln (1930).

He tried to sell a story to The Edison Company, which ended up hiring him as an actor instead.

On May 26, 1918, he was elected president of the Motion Picture War Service Association, an organization charged with boosting war bond sales.

Is portrayed by Charles Dance in Good Morning Babylon (1987) and by Colm Feore in And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself (2003)

On August 17, 1908, Biograph signed him to a contract at $50 per week plus a small royalty on each film.

Pioneered the technique of parallel editing, which he used extensively after 1909.

He went from being a bit player to the industry's leading director in a period of only five years.

In 1975 the U.S. Postal Service honored him with a postage stamp.

He is one of the the most prolific directors of all time, with over 450 shorts and over 80 feature-length films to his credit. Of non-television directors, he ranks as the fourth most prolific after Louis Feuillade and Georges Méliès, both of whom also directed silent shorts, and Dave Fleischer, an animated short director.

He was said to have been an imperious, humorless man.

Began his career as a playwright, then moved to stage acting, then film acting, and finally (and famously) to film directing.

In his declining years he lived off the income from an annuity he had invested in when he had been on top in Hollywood.

After the 1915 release of The Birth of a Nation (1915), riots broke out in several black neighborhoods across the country.

Ironically while he was known to have no real sense of humour it's he who can be credited as designing the blueprint for screen slapstick.In 1908 he made a short film about a man who accidentally breaks a curtain pole. He gets a new one and after drinking several pints wrecks havoc throughout the town by delivering the pole in his car to his sweetheart. He's pursued by an angry mob for the film's finale. The film called The Curtain Pole starred an actor by the name of Mikhail Sinot who changed his name to Mack Sennett.

Several filming innovations belong solely to Griffith (some of which he invented during his collaboration with G.W. Bitzer at The Biograph Co. They include the flashback, the iris shot, the mask, the systematic use of the soft focus shot and the split screen.

Was the first person, after Charles Chaplin's special award at the first Academy Awards (Chaplin had had his nominations rescinded and placed out of competition), to win an honorary Academy Award. Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences President Frank Capra thought it would be good publicity for the Academy, which was then structured as a company union, as the Academy was being boycotted by the trade union guilds and turnout at the 1936 Oscar ceremony was predicted to be low. The citation read: "For his distinguished creative achievements as director and producer and his invaluable initiative and lasting contributions to the progress of the motion picture arts."

Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume One, 1890-1945". Pages 415-427. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987.

In his last years Griffith lived in a first-floor suite at the Knickerbocker Hotel on Ivar Avenue in Hollywood, just off of Hollywood Boulevard. He suffered a fatal stroke in its lobby in 1948. The Knickerbocker still exists as a retirement home, and a memorial plaque for Griffith can be seen in the lobby.

He has directed six films that have been selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant: Lady Helen's Escapade (1909), A Corner in Wheat (1909), The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), The Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916) and Broken Blossoms (1919).

Interred at Mount Tabor Methodist Church Graveyard, Centerfield, KY (30 minutes north of Louisville).

Was voted the 15th Greatest Director of all time by Entertainment Weekly.

Was named an Honorary Life Member of the Directors Guild of America (DGA) in 1938. The DGA award for best lifetime achievement was named for Griffith in 1953. Awarded for "distinguished achievement in motion picture direction," its honored include Cecil B. DeMille (the first recipient), John Ford, King Vidor, William Wyler, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Elia Kazan, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Woody Allen, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese. However, in 1999 television director and DGA president Jack Shea persuaded the DGA National Board to rename the award without consulting its membership, due to the "intolerable racism" in Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), even though producer H.E. Aitken, Louis B. Mayer, and many other producers invested and profited from the film which helped fund their vast motion picture empires in Hollywood. An outcry against the decision led the DGA in 2002 to announce that it would not rename the award, although it would keep a lifetime achievement going in its arsenal of kudos.

Was hired as a first-time director in 1908 at the American Mutoscope & Biograph Co., when the chief director fell ill. Over the next two decades many of the biggest names of the silent screen would get their first movie jobs from Griffith and Biograph, including Mary Pickford, Mack Sennett, Blanche Sweet, Lionel Barrymore, Lillian Gish,Dorothy Gish and Florence Lawrence. The American Mutoscope and Biograph Company was active from 1895 to 1928. A new corporation with the same name was incorporated in California in 1991.

Was an ardent Jeffersonian.

The younger Griffith liked to start each day with an ice bath. When he was living at L.A.'s Alexandria Hotel in the 1910s, the staff nicknamed him "Polar Bear" because of the buckets of ice chips that were brought to his room every morning.

Boxing was Griffith's preferred form of exercise. He shadowboxed to relieve stress and later employed a former prizefighter as a regular sparring partner.

The Adventures of Dollie (1908), a Biograph release, was his directorial debut.

Griffith was said to have lacked a sense of humor, but he was not above pulling the occasional prank. One day on the Fine Arts studio lot, director Allan Dwan and star Douglas Fairbanks were sitting outside discussing plans for their next film. They froze in terror when they suddenly saw a lion walking towards them. Then Griffith appeared, said "Come here, kitty kitty", and gently led the docile lion away.

When he was cranking out short films for Biograph, Griffith tried hard not to show favoritism with members of his stock company. An actor could play the lead in one film and then be cast as an extra in the next. Griffith believed this would keep the players' egos in check and also stimulate a competitive spirit amongst them. He retained this attitude on Intolerance (1916), giving his best actress, Lillian Gish, the thankless symbolic role of "The Mother Who Rocks the Cradle".

Aimed for a more naturalistic acting style in his films. Critic James Agee wrote that as a director, Griffith was "remarkably good, as a rule, in the whole middle range of feeling".

In 1936, the press announced that George Beranger, Frank Borzage, Malcolm St. Clair, Tom Brown, Alan Mowbray, Henry Mollison, Guinn 'Big Boy' Williams, and Boyd Martin of the Louisville Courier-Journal were selected to attend a dinner held in honor of Griffith and Mack Sennett.