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130 THE HOUSE THAT SHADOWS BUILT
ground, like J. Stuart Blackton, began to produce onereelers which really told a story in interesting form. Then about 1909 or 1910 they stopped and set.
The trouble was too much prosperity.
In 1908, there came to the Biograph as actor and director one David Wark Griffith. All through a roving and unsettled youth, life had been training him for this very job. As a newspaper reporter in Alabama and in Louisiana he had acquired a journalistic sense of the popular mind. He took to writing plays, thereby educating himself in dramatic form. His masterpiece was accepted by a Broadway manager and then, by a cruel whimsey of the theatrical business, sent to the storehouse. “And I lost twenty pounds just cursing fate,” he says. Nature gave him expressive and mobile features and in the course of his adventures with rejected plays he learned that he could act. Needing money, he began playing small parts as a stop-gag. He found himself “resting,” with hunger just round the corner. “And so,” he says, “I sold myself down the river.” He entered a studio as scenario writer at $10 a script and actor at ^5 a day. This, he felt, spelt ruin to his stage career; but he had to eat.
The legitimate theatre of Broadway was still pulling its hobble skirts away from its hoydenish little cousin of Union Square. Any actor whose face appeared on the screen acknowledged himself to the profession as a cheap failure. When the Biograph Company, liking