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*&.s I-ve said, I did.nf t know lv£r • Griffith personally, but I knew moving pictures before moving picture:; had the benefit of his talents. I can't understand how we endured them, these shabby, characterless two and three-reelers, assembled apparently ad lib and exhibited in ' converted grocery stores which were suddenly called The Palace Theatre and "The Bijou Dream.
All at once, for those of us who did take an almost furtive interest in those ceiluioid monstrosities, there became manifest a change in them. They took on form. They tola stories. They presented personalities • The great public didn't connect that change with any particular man until TKU BIRTH OF A NATION came along and we knQv\ that we had seen • the Birth of an Industry it was because of the obstetric gift of a certain D.Yf. Griffith.
lie has been credited categorically v/ith such things es the invention or the closeue. I myself don't think the closeup was invented. It was an inevitable step for a man who insisted on wresting personal stories from the medium that had been satisfied with the jumping dots' which populated the early flickers. Certainly it was through Griff ithfe pictures that millions of us first saw the closoup.
To accomplish what ho did in twisting together the threads which ma ke up a gr ea t ma s s med i um , i t wa s most necessar y tha t he be a sh owman, that he be attuned to the taste of the American public at that time. Griffith was. It wasn't the taste of today. ■• It was unashamedly sentimental. Its values were black and v/hite, the motivations it recognized were perhaps primitive, the characters it loved were simplex in the extreme. And Griffith gave the public what it wanted. He painted big canvases with great, vigorous strokes, he. scored smash hi t after smash hit; TEE BIRTH OF A ih.TIOh, IHTQLSiiAIICS* ifl.RTS OF TEH WORLD, 3R0X3H BLOSSOMS, ORPHAN OF THj) STORM, VJiY DOY/U SASJ.
Every picture made strides forwards in photography, set construction, lighting, the mechanics of camera movement* Through the accomplishment of this man they all forged ahead.' I think I can say no single other director ever brought forth such a list of top-notch stars.
To strike the public taste of a certain moment with absolute precision has its penalties, however. That taste changes. The man who knew it best, who perhaps formed it, finds himself suddenly out of touch, incredulously deserted. It was the fate of David Wark Griffith