BY THE TIME Kathleen Morrison—rechristened Colleen Moore—hopped the Santa Fe Chief for Los Angeles, the film industry had traveled a long road from guardian of Victorian morality to purveyor of youth culture.
In its first two decades, the motion picture industry left a lot to be desired.1 For one, the technology was bad. Rudimentary film projectors caused moving images to flicker and pulse. The film often came apart and crumbled after only a few screenings. Because projectionists still rotated the reels by hand, screen images often moved at erratic speeds.
But the problem wasn’t just with the machinery. The plotlines were weak. Short clips featured everyday people engaged in mundane or humorous activities. Juggling. Running. Swimming. Sleeping. It didn’t take long for people to realize that they could watch their husbands and wives do the very same things—but in real life, and for free. Somewhat more engaging, though salacious, were short takes like What Happened on 23rd St., NYC (the answer: The wind blew a woman’s skirt over her head); What Demoralized the Barber Shop (the answer: A woman’s skirt got snared on a foreign object and revealed some skin); and The Pouting Water Model, featuring a nude young woman with her back to the camera.
Around 1895, Alfred Clark, an early director, thought it might be a good idea to stage dramatic productions for film. His early short, The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, starred a male actor playing the lead role; just as the executioner’s ax was set to fall on Mary’s neck, Clark stopped the reel, substituted a dummy for his feature player, and resumed filming. The movie proved a sensational hit with audiences and inspired other attempts at plot-driven movies. The most ambitious of these projects was The Passion Play, a fifty-five-minute feature filmed in 1897 on a New York City rooftop. It was popular in theaters, but costly and difficult to produce. Another fifteen years would go by before motion picture directors revisited the idea of feature-length films.
Instead, early directors spent the next decade perfecting short, ten- or fifteen-minute movies. Edwin Porter, one of the industry’s pioneers, raised the bar high with The Great Train Robbery, a path-breaking production that used twenty separate shots, including close-ups, and several different indoor and outdoor sets. Audiences had never seen anything like it.
But nobody—not even Edwin Porter—appreciated the industry’s potential for artistic growth more than David Wark Griffith. Born just ten years after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Griffith—the son of a Kentucky planter who fought for the Confederacy—grew up as a displaced member of the old southern aristocracy. The emancipation of their slaves and the death of his father when David was just a boy left the family in a precarious financial situation. When David was fourteen years old, his mother was forced to sell the plantation and move to Louisville, where she operated a boardinghouse. It was a long way from the idyllic land of magnolias and mint juleps that David would later mythologize in his screen work.
Griffith spent his teenage years knocking around. He worked for a dry goods store and then a bookstore. He tried his hand at writing fiction and joined a traveling theater troupe that performed throughout the lower Midwest and California. He was going nowhere fast.
The dawn of the new century found Griffith in New York City, where he scratched out a living by selling short-story treatments to the Biograph Company—America’s leading producer of motion pictures—and appearing in occasional film and stage productions. In 1908, the principals at Biograph decided to give Griffith a shot at directing a short feature, The Adventures of Dollie. It wasn’t his most memorable work, but it did the trick. Within a few months, they offered him a contract to serve as Biograph’s lead director.
Five months into his tenure at Biograph, he wrote and produced an experimental feature, After Many Years, adapted from Tennyson’s Enoch Arden—the tale of a shipwrecked man who finds his way back to civilization, only to discover that his wife has remarried and his children have grown up and forgotten him.
The bigwigs at Biograph didn’t know what to make of the film. Whereas other directors kept the camera at a respectable distance from the players, thus creating a sensation akin to that of attending a stage performance, Griffith moved it nearer the set so that his actors filled the entire frame. In some shots, he inched the camera so close to the action that the players appeared larger than the frame and were visible only from the waist up. Moviegoers could now study the actors’ facial expressions.
Griffith also shot the same scenes from multiple perspectives and skipped back and forth between two complementary plotlines—the husband’s ordeal on a desert island and his wife’s perseverance back in civilization.
Not everyone was enthusiastic about these bold departures in filmmaking. “How can you tell a story jumping around like that?” one of the Biograph bosses asked him. “The people won’t know what it’s about!”
“Well,” Griffith replied, “doesn’t Dickens write that way?”
Though he didn’t necessarily pioneer every new technique in the business—Edwin Porter had experimented with close-ups and multiple perspectives in his early work—Griffith soon acquired a reputation as the industry’s most daring and innovative practitioner of the new art of cinematography. He placed cameras on rolling dollies so that he could follow his actors as they moved, thereby eliminating the vast, black space between the lens and the stage that occupied the bottom third of frames in other early productions. He merged short cuts from different perspectives to achieve a sense of action, motion, and complexity. In 1908, he even went so far as to use forty different shots in a single ten-minute film.
Almost single-handedly, he made the movies modern. His 1915 masterpiece, The Birth of a Nation, cost a record-breaking $60,000 to produce and ran over three hours.2 Filmgoers were enraptured by its intertwining plotlines, its colorful and detailed set designs, its intricate character development, and its dramatic historical reenactments. The climactic scene depicted hundreds of white Klansmen on horseback, galloping off to save white womanhood from the black rapists whose primitive fury was unleashed by emancipation and radical Reconstruction. It was bad history and suffused with the sort of Jim Crow mentality that pervaded American culture in those days. But because—not in spite—of that, the audiences loved it.
If he was the industry’s leading trailblazer in those days, Griffith remained stubbornly backward in his social outlook. His films exalted the bygone world of the nineteenth century and scored the new urban-industrial order in which men found themselves wage slaves and women found their virtue compromised by the vice and corruption of the metropolis.
Lillian Gish, a popular actress who starred in many of Griffith’s early masterpieces, believed the great director was fundamentally a solitary and forlorn figure who glorified Victorian femininity on-screen but was terrified of women in real life. His heroines weren’t the “buxom, voluptuous form popular with the Oriental’s mind,” she observed with a tactlessness common to the time, but delicate, ghostly images who were the “very essence of virginity.”
Lillian and her sister, Dorothy Gish, were exactly the kind of leading ladies whom Griffith favored. Growing up in the Midwest, they had attended convent schools. Lillian had even thought of becoming a nun. On the set, they were closely chaperoned by their mother. There was little chance they would try to circumvent the director’s famously severe strictures against vice and intemperance.
So as to avoid even the “taint of scandal,” Griffith forbade his women players to entertain men in their dressing rooms.3 They faced dismissal if they developed blemishes on their skin, as such imperfections, Griffith claimed, were surely a mark of a debauched character. And they were subjected to endless sermons on the virtues of clean living, for “women aren’t meant for promiscuity,” he explained. “If you’re going to be promiscuous, you will end up with some disease.”
So insistent was he on maintaining stringent standards of feminine virtue that Griffith forbade his on-screen characters to kiss. They could only embrace.
Though he used African American actors to play the parts of slaves in The Birth of a Nation, when the script called for black characters to assault white women, the director used white actors in blackface. It simply wouldn’t do to have black men touching white women. Not in a D. W. Griffith production, anyway.
Griffith placed his leading ladies in front of white sheets, which reflected back the powerful glow of strobe lights and created a kind of “hazy photography” that served, in his mind, as “a great beauty doctor.”4 The frail, angelic women who received this treatment personified the director’s larger moral scheme. The movies were America’s new, national pulpit, and Griffith eagerly ascended that pulpit to preach the nineteenth-century virtues of self-ownership, independence, reticence, sacrifice, and asceticism.
“It was all nonsense about youth going away from the old morals,” he maintained. “Never since the beginning of time have there been so many girls and boys who were clean, so young, their minds are beautiful, they are sweet. Why? To win the dearest thing in the world, love from mankind. That is the motive that separates out civilization from dirty savages.”
Griffith was well within the currents of the early motion picture industry. Most first-generation filmmakers were Protestant moralists who used the new medium to drive home the importance of virtue in an unvirtuous world. And this went double for women, whose intrinsic goodness was surely subject to a grave challenge from the forces of modernity.
Early movies like The Fate of the Artist’s Model (1903), in which an innocent young lass is seduced into a sexual affair by a lecherous artist who then leaves her high and dry, and The Downward Path (1900), the story of a young country girl who is tricked by a depraved theater agent into becoming a soubrette and commits suicide before her parents can come to her rescue, continued to inform Griffith’s style well into the late 1910s.5
Writing a few years later, in 1925, the actress Linda Arvidson Griffith, Griffith’s wife, acknowledged that this plotline was growing increasingly irrelevant in the years leading up to World War I.6 “We were dealing in things vital in our American life,” she observed, “and [were] not one bit interested in close-ups of empty-headed little ingénues with adenoids, bedroom windows, manhandling of young girls, fast sets, perfumed bathrooms or nude youths heaving their muscles.”
The problem was, by 1920 or so these were precisely the things that a lot of American moviegoers wanted to see. “D. W. Griffith is an idealist,” observed Irving Thalberg, the production chief of MGM Studios in 1927, “and his love scenes on the screen were idealistic things of beauty … but his pictures are not stressed today because modern ideas are changing.7 The idealistic love of a decade ago is not true today. We cannot sit in a theater and see a noble hero and actually picture ourselves as him.”
Thalberg had a point. The same social forces that were producing a revolution in morals and manners were rendering obsolete the didactic themes that informed Griffith’s work.
Films produced between 1908 and 1912—those directed not just by D. W. Griffith, but by all the major production outfits—tended to follow set plotlines. Leading men and women turned inward to find strength and thereby prevailed over insidious threats to Victorian virtue—over alcohol, material indulgence, sexual urges, crime, passion. By 1913 or 1914, those themes began to give way to a glorification of pleasure, excitement, physical comedy, athleticism, and luxury—that is, to the consumer ethos that was coming by and by to dominate American culture. Moviegoers now reveled in the antics of Charlie Chaplin, “the little tramp,” and the Keystone Kops, whose bumbling incompetence appealed to the lowest common denominator of popular humor.
The most popular film personages of the new era were Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, whose off-screen love affair—and, later, marriage—seemed to mirror perfectly the on-screen magic they produced in dozens of films.8 Doug was a man’s man for the new age—athletic, handsome, dazzling, perfectly attired, and suave to a fault. Mary, on the other hand—“our Mary,” “Little Mary”—was demure and childlike, yet carefree and full of life. She represented the altar of youth before which so many Americans were dropping to their knees. “We are our own sculptors,” she advised her devotees. “Who can deny that passion and unkind thoughts show on the lines and expressions of our faces … young people seldom have these vices until they start getting old, so I love to be with them.”
So compelling was her cinematic exaltation of youth and vivacity that the poet Vachel Lindsay composed an ode to Little Mary for McClure’s magazine:
Oh Mary Pickford, Doll Divine,
Like that special thing Botticelli
Painted in the faces of his heavenly
creatures. How you made our reverent
passion rise, our fine desire you won.
Oh, little girl, never grow up.
In fact, Little Mary did grow up. When the big distributors began clamping down on talent—insisting on lower salaries and more artistic oversight—she and Fairbanks combined forces with D. W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin to form a new company, United Artists, which arranged its own production deals and distributed its own films. Mary was a driving force behind the idea, and it made her one of the wealthiest women in America.
On-screen, though, she was still “Our Mary.” And by the 1920s, the public craved something more. It would take a new breed of movie men to grasp that business was business.
“If the audience don’t like a picture,” Samuel Goldwyn insisted, “they have a good reason.9 The public is never wrong. I don’t go for all this thing that when I have a failure, it is because the audience doesn’t have the taste or education, or isn’t sensitive enough. The public pays the money. It wants to be entertained. That’s all I know.”
If he wasn’t the most articulate of wordsmiths, few could deny that Goldwyn had his finger on the pulse of the national film audience. He was a leading member of a small group of studio pioneers who were making the “movies”—a term that didn’t come into popular use until the early twenties—a top-dollar entertainment industry. Over were the days of Victorian moralizing. In were the currents of change.
Clara Bow bids farewell to 1927.