The second decade of the twentieth century disappointed many Americans from all walks of life who had hoped for increased freedom and opportunity. Immigrant poverty remained an overwhelming problem: Women, African-Americans, and other minorities had to struggle to overcome their second-class status. Then there was the European war overshadowing events near the beginning of the decade, and causing concern for many first and second generation Americans who still had family there.
But there was plenty of opportunity to escape these pressing problems and daily anxieties with a booming industry in melodramatic magazines, novels, and silent movies. The flavor of entertainment in the 1910s was light and frothy, a soothing balm for the worry-worn masses. Sentimentality and romance flooded the silent screen as flickering black and white images of love-struck heroines and dashing heroes filled America’s movie houses and lined the pockets of Hollywood’s first movie moguls.
Star Making and Moviemaking Boom
These were boom years for Hollywood, California. The city itself was warm and welcoming, the green surroundings creating a perfect, lush backdrop for filming. There was no film union in those days, and wages were so low that when Europe’s film industry was forced by the war to reduce production, the city’s filmmakers were in the perfect position to take center stage. As American movie production intensified, a few directors, actors, and actresses gained significant power within the industry. Between 1908 and 1913, America’s foremost director, D. W. Griffith, directed hundreds of short movies for American Mutoscope & Biograph. Later he directed feature length films for United Artists, which he co-owned with screen stars Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin.
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D. W. Griffith. (1875-1948) |
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"The motion picture … is boundless in its scope and endless in its possibilities. The whole world is a stage, and time without end its limitation." So said D. W. Griffith, the man universally acknowledged as the primary genius of the silent silver screen. He perfected and corrected many existing innovations and film techniques in ways that would change the course of movie production. David Wark Griffith was born on January 22, 1875, in Kentucky. His first ambition was to be a playwright. But after his only production, A Fool and a Girl, failed, he went to work for Thomas Edison’s American Mutoscope & Biograph studio. At the time, no actor with any dignity would appear in "the flickers" (movies), but Griffith was desperate for money and once in the business, he loved it, never caring how others felt about his career. By 1909, Griffith was directing many of Biograph’s movies, improving such innovations as the long shot, the close-up, the fade-out, and panning. He was also an early user of lighting for symbolic effect. All of Griffith’s films were ten to fourteen minutes long, until he made his first feature, Judith of Bethulia, in 1911. This was also Griffith’s last film for Biograph, as he struck out on his own to be an independent director, taking many of Biograph’s best actors with him. One movie Griffith directed was believed to have changed the business of making films forever. The Birth of a Nation, made in 1915, was an epic about the Civil War and Reconstruction. The most expensive movie made during the early 1910s, it became the top grossing silent film in movie history, bringing in approximately twenty million dollars. The Birth of a Nation also proved that moviegoers would sit through a three-hour movie and that they would pay two dollars instead of five or ten cents to see a film. However, it also proved that racial stereotypes were still prevalent in America. The African-Americans in the film, played by white actors in black makeup, were portrayed as savages who attacked upstanding white men and tried to steal the innocence and purity of white women. The white supremacist group, the Ku Klux Klan, was shown saving "innocent" white southerners from the "heathens." President Woodrow Wilson endorsed this film, which served as the standard portrayal of degrading African-American stereotypes used in movies for the next forty years. In 1919, Griffith helped Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and William S. Hart form United Artists, a distribution company for independently made films. Shortly after this, distribution of Griffith’s films suffered because he couldn’t bring himself to incorporate increasingly popular themes of sex, alcohol, and money into his movies. As these themes became more prevalent, new filmmakers came on the scene in the 1920s.
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Griffith developed basic filmmaking techniques still used today. When Griffith arrived on the film scene, most filmmakers were using the camera in a fixed position. In order to obtain the most dramatic effects, Griffith moved his camera closer and closer to the actors until the entire screen was filled with a face or a hand and pistol. He created tension and excitement by editing his films to show scenes from multiple viewpoints and by mixing long shots with close-ups. He also developed the epic style of filmmaking with his film, The Birth of a Nation. This 1915 film set out to interpret Reconstruction after the Civil War through the eyes of both a southern and a northern family. More recently, the film has been attacked as racist because it glorified the Ku Klux Klan, but Griffith’s supporters falsely claimed the epic also documented the exploitation of newly emancipated southern blacks by northern white bankers and industrialists. At the time of its release, The Birth of a Nation was a box office smash, and Griffith followed it up with Intolerance in 1916. This film was less successful, although it was mass produced and marketed throughout the United States.
The introduction of mass production techniques in 1915 had meant that hundreds of copies of a single film could be made and distributed simultaneously across the country. By the end of the decade, films reached every corner of the United States through a "block booking" system. This required exhibitors to buy a package deal that included some star studded movies plus a few films by lesser knowns, one or two of which might be sleepers, but which generally were simply awful. It didn’t matter: Film and story quality were immaterial to an American audience with an unquenchable appetite for light entertainment, and they simply clamored for as much as they could get.
