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Griffith studies the bills |
Another good Christmas read from John Aldred, who on the 50th Anniversary of the death of the famous American Director David Wark Griffith tells -
In February 1915 whilst British and French warships attacked Turkish forts in the Dardanelles, film producer DW Griffith was riding on the crest of a wave. In his short career he had already made 400 films, most of them shorts for the Biograph Company, and he was now about to unveil his latest and longest masterpiece 'The Birth Of A Nation', a story about the Civil War roughly based on a book by Thomas Dixon called 'The Clansman'. It had taken nine months to shoot, Griffith working without a script and carrying the storyline in his head! A twelve reel film, it ran for 2 hours and 45 minutes (at 16 frames per second) and was shown in separate parts with an interval. Part 1 depicted the American Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and Part 2, the more vindictive aspects of the period of Reconstruction. 'Birth Of A Nation' was revolutionary in the use of music, and was the first film to exploit fully the dramatic use of a specially composed orchestral score. The film's premiere was at Clune's Auditorium in Los Angeles, accompanied by a 40 piece orchestra and a large choir. The first night audience was profoundly moved by the experience as they laughed and wept, before finally standing up and cheering at the end of the film. Soon after a smaller orchestra was engaged to give President Woodrow and his cabinet a private screening, the first time a film had been presented formally at The White House. Wilson's comment was that it was like painting with lightning! When the film opened at The Liberty cinema in New York, the audience was quite unprepared for the emotional impact of this Civil War drama. They had willingly paid $2 for a seat at a time when the top price for a film was no more then 25 cents. Audiences everywhere were stunned by Griffith's forceful style of directing, and also the creative camera work of Billy Bitzer. Close-ups were prolific at a time when other producers were afraid to cut off the actor's feet. When horsemen charged across the screen the top and the bottom of the screen were masked off to stress the dramatic effect - pre dating wide screen. For long shots the camera was mounted on top of a huge tower where Griffith directed the action with his megaphone. Since he had only 500 soldiers, he told many of them to run round the back of the camera tower and re-enter the battle from the other side. There were also field telephones connected to his assistants, some of whom were situated one mile away. For other scenes the camera was mounted on a racing car so that it could move directly in front of galloping horses whilst filming close-ups of the riders. Margaret Mitchell went to see the film twelve times, and no doubt gained inspiration for her book Gone With The Wind.
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Griffith studies the bills |
The Birth had cost Griffith $61,000 to make, most of which he had to raise himself, and another $60,000 for the exploitation and film printing costs. He not only attended most of the Premieres himself but spoke to the audiences as well. Unfortunately many of these grand occasions were marred by Negro demonstrations, since the film rekindled racial unrest. But this did not deter the success of 'The Birth Of A Nation', and it recouped its initial costs in the first 8 weeks. It ran continuously at Clune's Auditorium for 44 weeks - which was an all time record. By the end of 1915 the receipts in New York alone amounted to $3,750,000, and the film ran for a year in both Boston and Chicago. Louis B Meyer was running a group of cinemas in Massachusetts at the time and mortgaged everything he owned to get the distribution rights for the New England states. In the first two years the film was seen by over 265 million people, and became the biggest money spinner of all time. But as the film's popularity became world wide it became the victim of its own success as the huge demand for prints soon wore out the one and only negative. Since Griffith seldom made more than one take on any scene, there was no spare negative to make repairs. Consequently prints had to be made from other prints, a practice which not only reduced picture quality but led to widespread piracy. The total box office takings for 'The Birth Of A Nation' were probably in excess of $100 million but there were many black market prints in circulation. In 1931 new prints were made with music and synchronise sound effects, which is the version usually shown today. But it is only a tinny echo of the fabulous orchestral sound heard on that first night at Clune's Auditorium. Following the success of 'The Birth Of A Nation', Griffith had no problem in raising finance for his next production, but he was finding it difficult to choose a suitable subject. He finally decided to make an anti-war film showing man's inhumanity to man, with no less than four separate story lines running simultaneously like a fugue. First was to be the story of Belshazzar, King of Babylon, and the destruction of his kingdom by the high priests who betrayed the city to Cyrus, the Persian Emperor. Second was the biblical story of Jesus of Nazareth, ending with his crucifixion. Third was the story of the betrayal of the French Huguenots in 1572, when 50,000 Protestants were murdered in Paris, and the fourth story depicted the struggle between employees and workers in the modern United States. This was based on a report of the shooting of 19 workers by the militia of a chemical manufacturer, and a murder case which was capturing the headlines. Because the four stories were so widely separated in time and geography, Griffith decided to tie them together with close up of a mother rocking a cradle with a subtitle 'Out of the cradle, endlessly rocking'. The film was to be called Intolerance. Griffith now had unlimited funds at his disposal and set about planning everything on a lavish scale. He possessed incredible energy and concentration, and as usual he designed and built sets without any drawings or plans. A small tented village sprang up next to the studio on Sunset Boulevard to provide accommodation for the 700 construction workers, and the Pacific Electric Railroad built a spur right up to the site of the Babylon set for delivering construction materials, and later on, horses and elephants. The set for the feast of Belshazzar stretched for a quarter of a mile, with walls 140 feet high and strong enough to support extras, horses and chariots. Passers by stared up in disbelief at the huge network of scaffolding dominating the skyline, dwarfing the few homesteads. Belshazzar's court was approached by numerous steps, flanked by two colonnades supporting columns 50 feet high, on top of which were statues of elephants standing on their hind legs.
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Intolerance - The Massive Babylon Set |
Whereas in 'The Birth Of A Nation', the civil war was staged with only 500 soldiers, Griffith now required 5000 extras to fill the mammoth Babylon set for the Feast of Belshazzar. Each was paid $2 per day and given a 60 cent lunch box free - generous conditions in those days. Hundreds of dancers accompanied by three bands opened the scene, and once again Griffith used his large megaphone to direct his assistants - many of whom were in costume posing as extras. Griffith was looking for something more dynamic that the usual static camera position, so as an experiment he installed Billy Bitzer in a balloon to gain extra height. Unfortunately, any slight wind caused havoc in trying to maintain camera angles. Griffith then had the idea of construction a camera dolly so that he could move his camera with more precision. This was to be no ordinary dolly as it was 140 feet high and 60 feet wide at the base. In the middle was a rope driven elevator which raised or lowered a 6ft square camera platform supporting Griffith and the camera crew. The whole affair was mounted on six 4-wheel railroad trucks, and manoeuvred into position by 25 men. The sturdy tracks ran deep into the set but could not be seen with so many extras around. This contraption, the first ever camera crane, resulted in one of the most spectacular moving shots ever photographed. Commencing with a long shot of the quarter mile set, the camera glided slowly, in one shot, down over the heads of the extras, coming to rest at one end of the King's table with a close up of a gold chariot drawn by three white doves and holding a rose, the petals of which were pin sharp! A remarkable feat for the hand cranked Pathe Studio camera used at the time. Next came the siege of Babylon, one of the largest scenes ever staged. Griffith filled the screen with mass shots of Cyrus's army, and everybody at the studio including actors from other pictures blended into the mob. During this sequence Griffith offered to pay an additional $5 to any extra who would jump of the wall into a safety net. When the camera rolled almost the entire army jumped from the parapets which prompted Griffith to shout "Cut! Stop those crazy fools! I haven't enough money to pay everybody". There were always nurses and a doctor on the set but no causalities occurred. Next in magnitude were the French court scenes in the Palace of Catherine de Medici, and it was here that Griffith used ceiling shots for the first time. He wanted to show the magnificent ceiling of the throne room, and had Billy Bitzer shoot up towards it - a technique used later with great effect in Citizen Kane. The palace set was filled with magnificent tapestries, brocade curtains and huge candelabra, with a dias supporting a canopy of the most intricate design of mosaics. This set contrasted sharply with the moonlit cobbled back streets of Paris in the 16th Century. In the biblical episode. the construction manager, a carpenter called Huck Wortman who had built all the sets for The Birth, had recreated the stone temples and narrow streets of Cana and Galilee on a vacant lot three miles from the studio. Everyone agreed that the sets looked completely authentic, and it was here that Jesus was filmed on the road to Calvary and eventual crucifixion. As production continued and costs soared, the film's backers Harry and Roy Aitken of Mutual Films, who had already spent nearly half a million dollars, became alarmed and refused to advance any more money. So Griffith in his flamboyant way bought them out, going into debt himself, and then mortgaged a chunk of The Birth Of A Nation to raise more cash. It is estimated that Intolerance cost between one and two million dollars before it was completed, and was the costliest production made up to that time, and for many years afterwards. Working entirely without notes, Griffith commenced the mammoth task of editing. Starting with the modern story he then switched to the gates of Babylon, and from the parapets to the French court, then to the biblical episode. Once the stories were introduced, the time spent on each segment was shorted with parallel action and swift cross cutting. The intricate interweaving of the four stories demanded concentration, and when he had finished Griffith showed the film to the entire crew. He had used tinted film for parts of each story to intensify their impact; night scenes were blue, the battle for Babylon was red, and the French Court was amber. The film ran 8 hours! Griffith had planned to show Intolerance in two 4-hour sections on successive nights but when the exhibitors heard of this they refused to handle the picture. He was advised to cut it down to just one evening's entertainment which he did, much against his own instinct, so the public was never shown Intolerance in its entirety. Its final length was two and a half hours, much too tight to do justice to four stories of such magnitude, It opened in New York in September 1916 at The Liberty theatre, accompanied by the orchestra from the Metropolitan Opera. Once again Griffith received a standing ovation from the first night audience, and critics were lavish in their praise. The Film Daily said the film was 'tremendous, stupendous, thrilling and intense'. In its first four months it outperformed 'The Birth Of A Nation' at the box office, but then attendances begin to fall off and it ran for only one more month. It was the same elsewhere with large attendance initially falling away to almost zero. Eventually the film was taken off release altogether. Something was seriously wrong. Griffith was not slow to realise that he had produced a very expensive failure, apparently without reason. Many excuses were offered for its failure, including the revolutionary style of story telling with four separate themes. But even to this day nobody has seen Intolerance as Griffith intended. Critics demanded to know the names of the players but Griffith was not interested in promoting the 'Star' system. Intolerance carried no screen credits for the actors, and had they been given some publicity the film might have stood a better chance. Another factor was the timing. In 1917 America was preparing for war, and in June the first US soldiers had arrived in France. The film with its message of peace and tolerance seemed out of place, and was banned altogether in some cities. The film had a better reception in London, where it played for eight weeks at the Drury Lane Theatre which had never shown films before. King George V and Queen Mary were given a private screening at Buckingham Palace. In the years since the box office 'failure' of Intolerance it has never ceased to draw admirers, even in it's shortened version, and its influence has been felt in many countries. Theodore Huff, a professor of American Film History at the New York University, hailed Intolerance as the greatest motion picture ever made - provided it was shown in its original form and properly presented - ranking with such works of art as Shakespeare's Hamlet, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Tolstoy's War And Peace. But it left Griffith a wiser and poorer man, and he had to use all his assets to repay his massive debt of $1 million, debt which was to remain with him for the rest of his life. He was just 41 years old.
Ironically enough the film ran continuously in Russia for ten years, made millions of roubles, yet not a single dollar ever found its way to David Griffith! The Russian director Sergei Eisenstein stated that Intolerance had become the basic text book on film craft for the entire Soviet film industry. Judging from one of the themes of Intolerance depicting the treatment labour received at the hands of the capitalists, Lenin decided that Griffith must be a Communist. So in 1922, a Soviet delegation arrived on Griffith's doorstep extending an invitation from Lenin himself to come to Russia and take charge of the country's film production. Griffith declined the offer.