From the New York Times, March 28, 1915, SM16. This interview was also published in the Editor, April 24, 1915, 407–10.
David Griffith is today the biggest figure in the moving picture world. As the creator who is stalking ahead of the procession and lifting it literally by its own boot straps, he is now a marked man throughout filmdom. He has done more subtle things, more delicate things on the screen than any other man.
However, it was not in his capacity as a showman that I approached Mr. Griffith. While he is a producer without a rival and a generalissimo of mimic forces whose work has never been equaled, it was as a thinker, pondering the new problems of filmland, a triumphant Columbus of the screen, that he talked with me for the Sunday Times recently.
“It is foolish to think that the moving picture has reached its climax of development,” said he. “We have the moving picture theatre as well built and as well run as any other theatre; we have the moving-picture show that brings two dollars a seat; we have the foremost writers of the world working for us. So people are prone to think we have gone the limit and there is nothing more to be done. But I tell you that moving pictures are still only in their swaddling clothes.”
“Would you mind predicting something about the maturity of this promising infant,” I suggested.
He smiled that courteous, humorous, knowing smile of the Southerner (his father was a Kentucky Colonel, brevetted Brigadier General of Volunteers by the Confederate States of America). He said that he had been obliged to predict so much for motion picture while talking of their possibilities to capitalists that he would welcome the chance to go into the prophecy business where it costs nothing to make good.
“But,” he added seriously, “I am not a dreamer in the sense that I see fantastic things unlikely of realization. I haven’t dreamed an impossible thing in seven years— since I started in pictures. That is the beauty of this work. It makes dreams come true.
“My first prediction is that a moving picture will be made within three or four years for which the entrance money will be five dollars and six dollars a seat. It is easy to predict that.”
“But will the public pay five dollars a seat merely to see a picture?”
“They are already doing it— to ticket speculators. When I first proposed asking two dollars a seat for my new film not a single man in the theatrical business could be found to say I was making a sound business move. Regular theatres on all sides were cutting prices, not advancing them, and fifty cents a seat had always heretofore been considered a record price for the best films.
“The public is quick to see values. If they are willing to pay five cents to see a picture that costs five hundred dollars to produce and fifty cents to see a picture that cost fifty thousand dollars to produce, they are willing to pay two dollars to see one that costs half a million to produce.
“And when we can put on a picture that will cost $2 million to produce the public will be willing to pay five dollars a seat for it.”
“Two million dollars!” I exclaimed. “Where are you going to get the money and how are you going to spend it?”
“If you had asked me a year ago where we could get the money I would have believed it would be impossible,” replied Mr. Griffith, “for up to that time an investment of fifty thousand dollars was considered utterly daring for a picture; but the days of little things in the pictures are gone by forever. When I started in the business only seven years ago a producer who spent five hundred dollars on a picture was considered very extravagant. Not today. We spend that much on a single scene that runs less than a minute, and then often throw it away because it doesn’t fit or is not just right.
“The experimental work on a big picture costs thousands of dollars. The trying out of new effects to see if they will reproduce is a costly process, and when one has the inventive faculty and is anxious to produce new things he is likely to bankrupt his promoters.”
The mellow smile came back to the Griffith countenance. “However,” he added, “that is the only known way to get the big, big, new effects.”
“What will happen to the regular theatre when its prices are being cut while yours are advancing?”
“The regular theatre,” he continued, “will, of course, always exist, but not, I believe, as now. The pictures will utterly eliminate from the regular theatre all the spectacular features of production. Plays will never again appeal to the public for their scenery, or their numbers of actors and supernumeraries. Pictures have replaced all that.
“The only plays the public will care to see in the regular theatre will be the intimate, quiet plays that can be staged in one or two settings within four walls, and in which the setting is unimportant, while the drama will be largely subjective. Objective drama, the so-called melodrama, will be entirely absorbed in the pictures.
“The audience for these old-fashioned theatres will be drawn from old-fashioned people who remember the days of old and how plays were produced by [David] Belasco and [Charles] Frohman when ‘I was a boy.’ The new generation will be wedded to the movies. You won’t be able to satisfy them with anything else.”
“What of the written and spoken word that is so vital to true drama? Do you intend to kill that, too?”
“On the contrary, we intend to vitalize it. The bane of the drama is verbosity, but we can’t produce any picture without some words. In one of my pictures [The Birth of a Nation] we throw on the screen seven thousand words, in which there are at least four pages from Woodrow Wilson’s history of the United States. That is more words than are used in the average short story.
“We are coming to pay more and more attention to the words we use on the screen. The art of writing for the pictures is developing almost as rapidly as the art of acting for them. And the great rewards to be gained there by a writer will be a powerful incentive for him to learn to tell his story more crisply, more tellingly, more alluringly, than he ever could, even in the best spoken drama.”
“But this will mean a great revolution in our methods of thought?”
“Of course,” answered the multi-parous1 Griffith, “the human race will think more rapidly, more intelligently, more comprehensively than it ever did. It will see everything— positively everything.
“That, I believe, is the chief reason that the American public is so hungry for motion pictures and so loyal to a good one when it comes along. They have the good old American faculty of wanting to be ‘shown’ things. We don’t ‘talk’ about things happening, or describe how a thing looks; we actually show it— vividly, completely, convincingly. It is the ever-present, realistic, actual now that ‘gets’ the great American public, and nothing ever devised by the mind of man can show it like moving pictures.”
At this point the director, who counts that day lost whose low descending sun finds no new idea hatched, produced an illumination for the future right out of his egg (we were at breakfast).
“The time will come, and in less than ten years,” he went on, “when the children in the public schools will be taught practically everything by moving pictures. Certainly they will never be obliged to read history again.
“Imagine a public library of the near future, for instance. There will be long rows of boxes of pillars, properly classified and indexed, of course. At each box a push button and before each box a seat. Suppose you wish to ‘read up’ on a certain episode in Napoleon’s life. Instead of consulting all the authorities, wading laboriously through a host of books, and ending bewildered, without a clear idea of exactly what did happen and confused at every point by conflicting opinions about what did happen, you will merely seat yourself at a properly adjusted window, in a scientifically prepared room, press the button, and actually see what happened.
“There will be no opinions expressed. You will merely be present at the making of history. All the work of writing, revising, collating, and reproducing will have been carefully attended to by a corps of recognized experts, and you will have received a vivid and complete expression.2
“Everything except the three R’s, the arts, and possibly the mental sciences can be taught in this way— physiology, chemistry, biology, botany, physics, and history in all its branches.”
Seven years ago this man who talks thus glibly of “revolutions” was an actor out of work, and a director without a prospect. He was walking along Broadway as are thousands of others today.
While now his annual salary is reputed to be one hundred thousand dollars, Griffith at that time was so hard up that he clutched desperately at the chance to earn fifteen a week as an extra man in “pictures.” His play, A Fool and a Girl, had been produced out of town by James K. Hackett and had run one consecutive week. He had been an actor in California and once had received as much as twenty-seven dollars a week.
Yet he was just turned thirty, in perfect health, with an excellent education. He walked to the office of a little motion-picture concern, the Kalem Company, and asked its manager, Frank Marion, for a job as an extra man. Usually in those days actors changed their names before dropping so low; not Griffith.
He also kept his nerve. Griffith said to Marion: “I believe motion pictures might be dignified and put on a par with the spoken drama. It is my opinion you’ve got to change your whole style of acting. At present it’s only horseplay and not true to life. Moreover, you don’t use the right kind of stories and your photography is rotten.”
“I’m afraid I can’t use you,” said Marion, “you seem to be a bit visionary.”
The next place Griffith applied was the office of the Biograph Company, up in the Bronx.3 He kept his opinions to himself and he got a job at fifteen dollars a week.
What happened after that is a vital part of the history of moving pictures.
To say that Griffith almost single-handedly revolutionized the moving-picture business is only to repeat what many of its students and historians have said before. He introduced naturalistic acting and he began, in a small way, the development of handling crowds that has led to the half-million-dollar picture with eighteen thousand people and fifteen hundred horses.
As soon as he had induced the Biograph people to let him direct in his own way his advancement was rapid. Within four years his annual salary with Biograph was said to be fifty thousand dollars. The Mutual bought him away only at a published price of a hundred thousand dollars a year and a percentage of the profits.
Many of the big stars of the pictures, from Mary Pickford to Blanche Sweet, were “discovered” by Griffith, and a large number of the best directors have learned their trade under him.
For seven years he has been leading the motion-picture procession. If he makes one-quarter the “discoveries,” “improvements,” and “revolutions” in the business in the next seven years that he has in the past seven, then the prophecies of today may be less absurd than was his comment to the manager who first refused him because he was “visionary.
1. An obsolete word meaning “give birth to” or “produce.”
2. Griffith’s notion is reminiscent of the 1953–57 CBS television series You Are There, hosted by Walter Cronkite, which recreated all manner of events from the past.
3. Actually at 11 East 14th Street. The company did not move to its new studio in the Bronx until 1913.