Between 1908 and 1913 (the years he directed for the
Biograph Company), Griffith produced 450 short films, an enormous number even for this period. This work enabled him to experiment with
cross-cutting, camera movement,
close-ups, and other methods of spatial and temporal manipulation.
On Griffith's first trip to
California, he and his company discovered a little village to film their movies in. This place was known as
Hollywood. With this,
Biograph was the first company to shoot a movie in Hollywood:
In Old California (1910).
Influenced by a European feature film
Cabiria from Italy, Griffith was convinced that feature films could be financially viable. He produced and directed the
Biograph feature film
Judith of Bethulia, one of the earliest feature films to be produced in the United States. However,
Biograph believed that longer features were not viable. According to actress
Lillian Gish, "[Biograph] thought that a movie that long would hurt [the audience's] eyes". Because of this, and the film's budget overrun (it cost US$30,000 dollars to produce), Griffith left
Biograph and took his whole stock company of actors with him. His new production company became an autonomous production unit partner in
Triangle Pictures Corporation with
Keystone Studios and
Thomas Ince. Through David W. Griffith Corp. he produced
The Clansman (1915), which would later be known as
The Birth of a Nation.
The Birth of a Nation is considered important by film historians as the first
feature length American film (previously films had been less than one hour long). It was enormously popular, breaking box office records, but aroused controversy in the way it expressed the racist views held by many in the era (it depicts Southern pre-
Civil War black slavery as benign, and the
Ku Klux Klan as a band of heroes restoring order to a post-
Reconstruction black-ruled South). Although these views matched the opinions of
many American historians of the day (and indeed, long afterwards), the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People campaigned against the film, but was unsuccessful in suppressing it. It would go on to become the most successful box office attraction of its time. "They lost track of the money it made,"
Lillian Gish once remarked in a
Kevin Brownlow interview. Among the people who profited by the film was
Louis B. Mayer, who bought the rights to distribute
The Birth of a Nation in New England. With the money he made, he was able to begin his career as a producer that culminated in the creation of
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios.
Margaret Mitchell, who wrote
Gone with the Wind, was also inspired by Griffith's Civil War epic.
The production partnership was dissolved in 1917, so Griffith went to Artcraft (part of
Paramount), then to
First National (1919-1920). At the same time he founded
United Artists, together with
Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and
Douglas Fairbanks.
Though United Artists survived as a company, Griffith's association with it was short-lived, and while some of his later films did well at the box office, commercial success often eluded him. Features from this period include
Broken Blossoms (1919),
Way Down East (1920),
Orphans of the Storm (1921) and
America (1924). Griffith made only two sound films,
Abraham Lincoln (1930) and
The Struggle (1931). Neither was successful, and he never made another film. For the last seventeen years of his life he lived as a virtual hermit in Los Angeles.
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