D.W. Griffith

Was voted the 15th Greatest Director of all time by Entertainment Weekly.

15 December 1999: Declaring that Griffith "helped foster intolerable racial stereotypes," the Directors Guild of America's National Board - without membership consultation--announced it would rename the D.W. Griffith Award, the Guild's highest honor. First given in 1953, its recipients included Stanley Kubrick, David Lean, John Huston, Woody Allen, Akira Kurosawa, John Ford, Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, and Griffith's friend Cecil B. DeMille.

Is portrayed by Charles Dance in Good morning Babilonia (1987) and by Colm Feore in And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself (2003)

In 1975 the U.S. Postal Service honored him with a postage stamp.

In his last years Griffith lived in a first-floor suite at the Knickerbocker Hotel on Ivar Avenue in Hollywood, just off of Hollywood Boulevard. He suffered a fatal stroke in its lobby in 1948. The Knickerbocker still exists as a retirement home, and a memorial plaque for Griffith can be seen in the lobby.

Was named an Honorary Life Member of the Directors Guild of America (DGA) in 1938. The DGA award for best lifetime achievement was named for Griffith in 1953. Awarded for "distinguished achievement in motion picture direction," its honored include Cecil B. DeMille (the first recipient), John Ford, King Vidor, William Wyler, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Elia Kazan, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Woody Allen, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese. However, in 1999 television director and DGA president Jack Shea persuaded the DGA National Board to rename the award without consulting its membership, due to the "intolerable racism" in Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), even though producer H.E. Aitken, Louis B. Mayer, and many other producers invested and profited from the film which helped fund their vast motion picture empires in Hollywood. An outcry against the decision led the DGA in 2002 to announce that it would not rename the award, although it would keep a lifetime achievement going in its arsenal of kudos.

Was the first person, after Charles Chaplin's special award at the first Academy Awards (Chaplin had had his nominations rescinded and placed out of competition), to win an honorary Academy Award. Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences President Frank Capra thought it would be good publicity for the Academy, which was then structured as a company union, as the Academy was being boycotted by the trade union guilds and turnout at the 1936 Oscar ceremony was predicted to be low. The citation read: "For his distinguished creative achievements as director and producer and his invaluable initiative and lasting contributions to the progress of the motion picture arts."

In the years following "Birth", Griffith never again saw the same monumental success as his signature film and, in 1931, his increasing failures forced his retirement. Though hailed for his vision in narrative film-making, he was similarly criticized for his blatant racism.

Started to write an autobiography, but never finished it. [1926]

America (1924) is regarded as a major turning point in his career. Its failure ended his tenure as the industry's preeminent director.

In 1920 he established United Artists with Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.

On May 26, 1918, he was elected president of the Motion Picture War Service Association, an organization charged with boosting war bond sales.

Lillian Gish claimed that he invented false eyelashes in 1916 for Intolerance (1916). Griffith wanted Seena Owen (who plays Attarea, the Princess Beloved, in the film's Babylonian segment) with lashes luxurious enough to brush her cheeks when she blinked. In collaboration with a wig maker, who did the actual fabricating, the solution Griffith was credited with involved weaving human hair through a fine strip of gauze, creating false eyelashes. However, like many Hollywood legends, this claim proves to not be true. In 1911 a Canadian woman named Anna Taylor received a U.S. patent for the artificial eyelash; hers was a crescent of fabric implanted with tiny hairs. Even before that, hairdressers and makeup artists tried a similar trick. A German named Charles Nestle (nee Karl Nessler) manufactured false lashes in the early 20th century and used the profit from sales to finance his next invention--the permanent wave. By 1915 Nestle had opened a New York hair-perming salon on East 49th St., with lashes as his sideline. In addition, one of the earliest known attempts to enhance eyelashes was during the times of the ancient Egyptians, when royalty used black powder called "kohl" to protect their eyes against sand, dust and bugs. However, this was to provide practical benefits, rather than cosmetic.

, where he directed over four hundred and fifty short films, experimenting with the story-telling techniques he would later perfect in his epic The Birth of a Nation (1915). Griffith and his personal cinematographer G. W. Bitzer collaborated to create and perfect such cinematic devices as the flashback, the iris shot, the mask and cross-cutting.

Ironically, he produced and directed the Biograph film The Rose of Kentucky (1911), which showed the Ku Klux Klan as villainous, a sharp contrast to The Birth of a Nation (1915) made four years later, in which the KKK was portrayed in a very favorable light.

He produced and directed the first movie ever made in Hollywood, In Old California (1910) which was produced by the American Mutoscope & Biograph Co. which is still in existence today and the oldest movie company in America. The film was rediscovered by Biograph and shown on the 6th of May 2004 at the Beverly Hills Film Festival attended by the President of Biograph Company Thomas R. Bond II and Mikhail Vartanov. On the same day, a monument was erected near the site where the film was made (Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street. However, almost a year later in 2005, the 2.8 ton monument was stolen overnight, under mysterious circumstances and is no longer there, but was found almost one year after its disappearance near a garbage bin not far from where the monument stood on Vine Street in Hollywood.

Pioneered the technique of parallel editing, which he used extensively after 1909.

Was hired as a first-time director in 1908 at the American Mutoscope & Biograph Co., when the chief director fell ill. Over the next two decades many of the biggest names of the silent screen would get their first movie jobs from Griffith and Biograph, including Mary Pickford, Mack Sennett, Blanche Sweet, Lionel Barrymore, Lillian Gish,Dorothy Gish and Florence Lawrence. The American Mutoscope and Biograph Company was active from 1895 to 1928. A new corporation with the same name was incorporated in California in 1991.

David Wark Griffith was born in rural Kentucky to Jacob "Roaring Jake" Griffith, a former Confederate Army colonel and Civil War veteran. Young Griffith grew up with his father's romantic war stories and melodramatic nineteenth-century literature that were to eventually shape his movies. In 1897 Griffith set out to pursue a career both acting and writing for the theater, but for the most part was unsuccessful. Reluctantly, he agreed to act in the new motion picture medium for Edwin S. Porter at the Edison Company. Griffith was eventually offered a job at the financially struggling American Mutoscope & Biograph Co.

Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume One, 1890-1945". Pages 415-427. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987.