Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1916)

The Story <>£ David VVark Griffith 87 when he came to direct "The Last of The Mohicans" he knew thai was .1 "location" he must haw. He asked the management of the Biograph to send him and Ins company there. It was with scorn and wonder that the request was heard and rejected. •' \ hundred miles of travel, railway fares, all manner of expense, for a rural scene? Bosh ! ('■>> up above Harlem for it." Griffith made no reply; he has always of the * >h ! what's the use type, when breasted by impen iousness. For some weeks he had been employed, and his pay had been raised as his value became imperative; never foolishly lavish he had saved quite a little "bank roll," and with this, dismantling his entire fortification against adversity, he paid all the the excursion himself, and that with full knowledge that the items would never V passed on an expense account. but he gol the scenes he had to have. IK' was gambling? No more than the insiders were gambling when a year or more ago they Jit Bethlehem Steel. Griffith knew, and was playing a cinch hand, with Fortune looking over his shoulder and chuckling sardonically at the manager who had refused the railway fares and grub expenses for the trip to Cuddybuckville. "Go to Harlem!" He was on his way to his niche in the Hall of Fame: he paid his fare then, but the world has been paying it ever since. For he had found his Aladdin's lamp by thinking. He had learned that the path ahead was only to be found by discarding all sign left by past travelers ; hv ignoring all experience; in forgetting what everyone had been doing ; and by giving the lie to all tradition as to the manner and method in which things should he done. "I found that picture-makers were following as best they could the theory of the Stage," he says of this period of his work. "A story was to be told in pictures, and it was told in regular stage progression ; it is bad stage technique to repeat ; it would be bad stage technique to have an actor show only his face: there are infinite numbers of things we do in pictures that would be absurdities on the stage, and I decided that to do with the camera only what was done on the stage was equally absurd. "My first anarchistic effort was what We now call the \ lose up.' This made me laughed at again at first ; bul 1 had become used to jeers, and feeling 1 was right 1 kept at it; what caused the fizzle at first was that in mv attempt to the actors closer to the camera I misjudged distance and their heads did not show in the film." lie laughed grimly. Perhaps if you re< dl some actor's heads you have seen in a film von maj grasp the full significance of that laugh. W. C. Cabanne, one of Griffith's most trusted and highly gifted directors, tells of how the idea came to his Chief. "When Griffith began to direct," savs Mr. Cabanne, "we used to act as people do on the stage; preserving distances, and as the story seemed to demand, standing quite a distance from the camera. " 'What's the good of this?' be said one day ; 'your legs and your feet do not act ; it's vour faces that tell the story,' and he marked new limit lines and had us stand so close to the camera that it seemed the result would certainly look foolish." Probably that first attempt with the headless actors did seem to prove that Griffith was as crazy as the anvil chorus players termed him ; but just as Columbus did not have to study long to make the egg stand on end. (Griffith had no trouble in arranging the close-up so that the actors' heads and faces would show. He tried it again, and focused the camera so that all the legs were cut off. Then came the single close-up ; the large, many-times-magnified face with full expression. And then the "switchback ;" this is probably the most effective innovation in picture-making : judged by its quick adoption and persistent use by all other producers, it is invaluable. " ' The switchback.' " says Griffith, "enabled me to follow the story with exactitude and at the same time preserve in the mind of the spectator an unimpaired continuitv. with added emphasis. "For example, a character says to another: 'I hate you;' you show the speaker's face, and then switch in the face of the man to whom the remark is made with