11/8/23
Newsletter #507
The Crack of Dawn
My buddy Mike asked me recently, “Which movies had a social impact?” which I think is a good question. “Social impact” is a somewhat vague idea, and not easy to gauge. It’s easier to pinpoint which movies were meant to have an impact, then to know if they really did. In any case, I’ve been thinking about it.
In 1895 Thomas Edison introduced the Kinetoscope, a wooden contraption in which you inserted a nickel, looked in the viewer, turned a crank and saw a 90-second movie. This was the very beginning of the “film industry,” meaning the making of movies with the intention and expectation of being remunerated. For the first eight years of the film industry, dominated by Edison, though including many others, such as George Melies and the Lumiere brothers, movies were simply a single scene – a strongman lifting a barbell, a woman performing a fan dance, two cats boxing – any kind of novelty. For Melies it was performing camera tricks, for the Lumiere brothers it was showing the world’s capitals.
There was a big social impact in simply introducing a new form of cheap entertainment. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants were arriving from everywhere all the time with very little money. Then, quickly, movies took a huge geometric increase with the introduction of the projector in 1900. Instead of one person and one nickel at a time, now you could show your film to 100 people at the same time. However, for their nickel or their dime, people demanded more than one 90-second movie; they demanded at least a half hour of entertainment. And this was happening all over the world. Edison, Melies and the Lumieres couldn’t come anywhere close to fulfilling the sudden overwhelming need for movies.
The Edison Manufacturing Company released The Great Train Robbery in 1903, directed by Edwin S. Porter, and coming in at a shockingly long, 12-minutes (740-feet). The film introduced storytelling, as well as the intercutting between two stories. Now movies could tell whole stories, and quickly millions of people around the world began going to the movies all the time. So, movies were a cheap form of entertainment at a time when that was needed, and that’s a social impact.
For the next decade, 1905-1915, movies were all one-reel or two-reels, meaning 10-minutes or 20-minutes. This was when I believe that the single most important film director in the brief history of movies, D.W. Griffith, worked and reshaped the entire film form. Ironically, he really made such an enormous blunder with his material, that his film had a huge social impact, not what I think he expected, and ultimately to his detriment.
As a film nerd, this section of film history is my favorite. Thankfully, Mr. Griffith took very good care of his negatives. As we old guys in the movie business understand, the only thing positive about the film business is the negative. The negative of movie film is the actual 35mm film that ran through the camera. 90% of all silent movies are lost forever, but thank goodness most of the films of Griffith, Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Von Sternberg, Garbo, are still around. In any case, most of the films D. W. Griffith made for the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company in New York, still exist. Griffith started working there as an actor, and this is his debut, called Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest (1908) – Rescued from an Eagle's Nest (1908) Edison - YouTube – which has a cool effect of a fake flying blackbird – obviously not an eagle – clutching a real, seriously unhappy, baby in its claws. Griffith switched to directing the same year. In the next seven years Griffith would invent, compile, organize and present the language of cinema. He made 48 short films for Biograph, and I think 40 still exist (due to him, I bet). I’ve seen many of them, and you can simply watch as he figures this puzzle out. You start with a wide shot; cut into a medium shot; a close-up for each character; an insert of what they’re looking at; pan; tilts; tracking shots; push-ins to close-ups – every movie convention. It’s truly awesome, and everybody working in the film business, which was already a multi-million-dollar industry, was watching him. Whatever Griffith did, that’s what everybody started doing. From these films I feel like I got a sense of D.W. Griffith through the stories he told, which were straight forward, congenial, believable and entirely inoffensive.
I haven’t lost my point; I’m building up to it.
By 1915 D. W. Griffith had accumulated enough power, money, respect, and autonomy, to have his own film studio in Hollywood, known as Griffith-Fine Arts Studio, located where Hollywood Blvd. and Sunset Blvd. cross. And this is where he made the famous, infamous, trendsetting, upsetting, inappropriate, awe-inspiring, film, The Birth of a Nation (1915). Forget everything else, this was the biggest moneymaking movie for the next 25 years, until Gone With the Wind in 1939, which was really 1940 because it came out at Christmas, ‘39.
The Birth of a Nation is now considered the height of bad taste because the Ku Klux Klan are the good guys, which is legitimately shocking. It was so shocking in 1915 that it caused race riots in a number of American cities. That’s certainly not what Griffith wanted, and he was not a racist. There isn’t a trace of racism in any of his other movies. Casting Richard Barthelmess as Chinese in Broken Blossoms (1919) looks stupid now, but it was a huge hit in 1919.
Griffith was from Louisville, Kentucky, and was born a mere 10 years after the Civil War, in 1875, but honestly, nothing I’ve read points in any way to him being a racist. He really wasn’t. But what I did finally track down was an interview, in print, where he admitted that what he’d done was stupid, even if it paid off big. The Birth of a Nation was based on a book, Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman, which was a controversial book, and a big bestseller.
When Griffith read the book, he thought, and admitted to much later, “This will set off a controversy. This will make people angry. This is volatile material. It’s exciting, and it will sell tickets.” And he was right, and it made a lot of money, and it changed the whole film industry. But I think he knew he’d made a bad choice, and I don’t think it was based on racism, I think it was based on ambition and greed.
Keeping in mind the circumstance, that Griffith was spending more on a movie than anyone ever had — $100,000 — and the film was more than three hours long. Back then theaters cut scenes out they didn’t like, so the film was seen in lengths from 130-minutes all the way up to 190-minutes.
However, within five years Griffith was considered old fashioned. By 1925 he was considered painfully out of style. By 1930 and sound, he was washed up. He spent the final 18 years of his life at the bar at Musso & Frank Grill on Hollywood Blvd.
But thank goodness he took care of his negatives.
I feel like an apologist, and I am, but I also think my assessment is also true.
A new day has dawned.