Star maker : the story of D. W. Griffith (1959)

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The Story Behind the Making of Intolerance 121 thought. The idea stirred him; it was true, it was universal, it was important. There came back to him in a mighty rush of feeling the stories Mattie had read to him as a child. He would trace social injustice through the ages. He would use the little mother in his new story as only part of a mighty story, a story of four periods of time! He would go back to Babylon. He would go to the days of Christ which had meant so much to his own mother. He would go to Paris and tell of the massacre of the Huguenots on Saint Bartholomew's Eve, which Mattie had read to him and which had stirred him so profoundly. And then he would tell the story of the little mother and her fight against injustice. He would, he thought in this moment of exaltation, take these four stories, twenty-four hundred years apart, and weave them together in a film that would stir the world. The idea was breath-taking. But how to weave them together? He sat for some time, thinking, but getting nowhere. Then he dropped it, as he so often did, and let his subconscious deal with it. By chance he picked up his copy of Leaves of Grass and began to thumb through it, flipping the pages, hardly thinking at all what he was doing. Two lines leaped out: . . . endlessly rocks the cradle, Uniter of Here and Hereafter. He would have the "little mother" rocking the cradle of life and in the cradle would be the children of destiny. The cradle would rock between the four stories; it would rock endlessly, just as time goes on without end. People would understand that the cradle was symbolic and that the matter of birth and life held the people of all ages together. He felt ex