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THE TRUST GOES TO SEED 131
Griffith’s scenarios, offered him a job as director, the management had almost to sandbag him into acceptance. The certainty of fifty steady dollars a week probably turned the scale.
For years, indeed, he quarrelled with his fate, swearing, at the expiration of each contract, that he was going to quit the game, then reluctantly signing again. Griffith put new life not only into the Biograph but into the whole business. He began using the close-up to emphasize poignantly emotional moments. He invented “parallel action.” He groped away from stage-acting toward the more realistic acting which suits the film. Above all, he was by training both a journalist and a dramatist ; he knew how to tell a story. Other human discoveries of other companies were making their own improvements. They and Griffith borrowed each other’s ideas back and forth. Yet perhaps he was the leading artistic spirit in that false dawn of the moving picture. Also, he found Mary Pickford.
This most famous of American women has stood subject for a dozen biographies. Here, I merely summarize her life. She was born Gladys Smith of Toronto, Canada; her father was of English extraction, her mother Irish. When she was five years old, her father — a purser on a transatlantic steamer — died suddenly, leaving his widow and his three children destitute. Mrs. Smith found work in a theatre. They wanted a child super in a hurry. Mrs. Smith secured the job for little