After working some menial jobs to make ends meet, Griffith decided that he wanted to become a playwright; he only ever had one play produced, but his efforts did lead to him getting a few acting roles. In 1907, he brought one of his scripts to the attention of Edison Studios, in New York. They rejected it, but gave him work as a screen actor. Soon after, he left to act in some films for the nearby Biograph Company. In 1908, Biograph lost their main director, and on a whim replaced him with young Griffith. A renowned, celebrated, and controversial career was born.
Over the course of his career, mostly from 1908 to 1931 (he never directed a full film after that point), he made over 500 films, most of which were silent shorts produced between 1908 and 1913. In an era where film directors were often marginalized, Griffith began to push the newly burgeoning artform in new directions, making it something much more than a filmed stageplay. He often utilized techniques such as irises, tracking shots, pans, close-ups, and other devices that have now become standard in filmmaking, but at the time were fairly revolutionary. The Biograph "stock" of actors included such notable names as Mack Sennett (who would later become a ground-breaking director in his own right), Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Mary Pickford, and Lionel Barrymore. Beginning in 1910, Griffith began taking his crew out to the picturesque Los Angeles area to shoot, notably filming his short, In Old California, in the tiny village of Hollywood. It was the first movie ever filmed there.
Griffith, growing more ambitious with the form, began secretly filming a feature-length (six reel) film with Biograph's money. Titled Judith of Bethulia, it ended up being a bit of a mess, and Biograph was less than pleased. The money men ended up chopping his film to pieces, bringing the running time down to four reels. While he could have stayed on as a successful single reel director/producer, he decided to pursue his passion for the longform film elsewhere. He left Biograph, and made a few shorts to raise money while in the planning stages on his next, epic project; an adaptation of Thomas Dixon's novel, The Clansman.
The film, retitled The Birth Of A Nation, became both Griffith's greatest triumph, and greatest controversy. Over three hours in length, and shown in two parts, it chronicles the story of two families; one from the North, one from the South. In part one, it details their trials and entanglements during the Civil War, climaxing in the assassination of President Lincoln (SPOILERS!!!). In part two, it deals with what was the popular view of the Reconstruction Era South at the time the film was made; that, under their new black "leaders", the South fell into a state of anarchy, and that the Ku Klux Klan was the "natural and noble response" of the Southern Aryans. In the climax of the film, men in white hoods quite literally ride to the rescue. Here's the poster:
The movie, and source material that it's based on, are quite odd and contradictory in tone, in that they're anti-slavery, but pro-segregation. Though the novel was a very adamant political statement, it's quite possible that Griffith's racism was more unconsciously manifested, and that the film was simply his use of popular history for the means of telling an entertaining story. In fact, for all it's railing against integration in the narrative, the film ends with a heavy-handed plea to end war (?!). Whatever his motivations, the film is so blatantly racist that it caused a stir even at it's time of release in 1915 (which, as you might imagine, would have to be pretty damn blatant). Screenings of the film were protested by groups such as the NAACP, and there were often riots in conjunction with the film being shown. The film ended up being banned in several cities, and even a few states.
Controversy aside, Griffith was rolling in money. The film, while an expensive production for the time, ended up making over $10 million dollars domestically (it didn't hurt that ticket prices were jacked up to $2, from the average of around 15 cents), and critics considered it (deservedly so) the most artistically accomplished film to date. Louis B. Mayer, who was simply the East Coast distributor, used the fortune he earned from the film to eventually found MGM Studios.
Griffith attempted to top the extravagant success, and respond to critics of Birth, by directing an even more ambitious project; Intolerance (1916). Intolerance, a cross-cutting between four different stories from four different time periods, tells the stories of The Fall of Babylon, the Crucifixion of Jesus, the St. Bartholowmew's Day Massacre, and a "modern day" anti-capitalist story. With the loosely binding theme of "intolerance through the ages", this film cut back and forth between the different periods as the story progressed, not telling each story separately. This proved to be too artistically ambitious for audiences at the time, and the movie ended up faltering because of that. Not a bomb by any means, but not the financial godsend that his previous film was. The artistic merits of Intolerance are debated by film critics to this day, but it's hard to deny that it's superior to Birth in almost every technical aspect, and also in the subtleties of the acting. Griffith also had several notable assistant directors on the project, including W.S. Van Dyke, Erich von Stroheim, and Victor Fleming.
Another notable work was the superb, and more intimate, film Broken Blossoms (1919), which tells the interracial love story between a white girl from London, and a Buddhist missionary from China. Soon after, Griffith created United Artists Studios with co-founders Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks. Way Down East (1920), an adaptation of an old stageplay, was hokey even for the time, but accomplished enough in it's direction to score Griffith another financial and critical windfall.
By the middle of the 20's, Griffith's pioneering style was seen as outdated, and his "old-model" direction was beginning to be overshadowed by the new bucks, such as Fritz Lang, King Vidor, and Sergei Eisenstein. These were new and exciting voices, ones not content with warmed over melodrama. He was becoming passe. He had one last, great gasp; Abraham Lincoln (1930), starring the incredible Walter Huston in the title role. It was Griffith's first (of two) sound features, and was as ambitious in it's day as The Birth Of A Nation was in the previous. It was a hit with critics, but a financial failure. He made one more, independently produced feature, and never directed another film again.
While generally revered by several of the great film directors and historians, his life has always been shadowed by the stain of Birth Of A Nation's racism, to the degree that the Director's Guild Of America's highest honor, the D.W. Griffith Award, had it's name changed in 1999 to simply the DGA Lifetime Achievement Award. Still, he will be a director who is remembered, both for his artistic achievements, and for his one great failure.
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