From PM, May 19, 1948, M12-M13.
[This interview was reprinted in a different format as part of Ezra Goodman’s The Fifty-Year Decline and Fall of Hollywood, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961. On page 12 of the book, Goodman notes that the interview was rejected by one editor after another, from Harper’s to the New York Times as too “rough.” It was eventually accepted by Ed McCarthy, Sunday editor of PM and published as a lead article. On April 1, 1948, Seymour Stern wrote to Goodman that Griffith was “much pleased with it. I rushed over with it to the hotel at noon, and at his request read it aloud. The old man chuckled and laughed; then when he found his eyeglasses, which had fallen under the couch, he read the whole thing through himself. He told me to express his great appreciation to you.”]
David Wark Griffith, the father of films, the maker of The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, Broken Blossoms, and Way Down East, sat in a hotel room overlooking the heart of Hollywood. He sat in an easy chair, attired in pajamas and a patterned maroon dressing gown, his lordly aquiline features surmounted by sparse white hair. Standing about the room were several trunks. On one of them reposed Griffith’s floppy felt hat, against it leaned his cane. In the kitchen stood two large cans of film containing a rare, good print [presumably 16mm] of the twelve reels of Orphans of the Storm, his successful silent epic of the French Revolution, made in 1922 with Lillian and Dorothy Gish and Joseph Schildkraut.
D. W., as he is called, picked up a double gin at his side and said in his rhythmical, resounding speech:
“I am seventy-three years of age. I can say anything I want about Hollywood. You can print anything you please. What’s the difference? I don’t give a hoot what anyone says about me.
“I was a reporter once myself. You know, they will not print any of this. But I don’t care. I am seventy-three years old and I can say anything I like about the movie business.
“It’s all nostalgia. I would love to be again at 44th and Broadway and love again to see George M. Cohan walking down the street. I would love again to see that. But most of all I would love to see John and Lionel Barrymore crossing the street as they used to be, when they were young and full of youth and vitality, going to a Broadway theater. They’d stop traffic, arm in arm, when they were young, in the blessed days when they were young.”
D. W. sat down his glass on an endtable. The room faced out on a shadowy alleyway in the early evening. The [Knickerbocker] Hotel was one block from the crossroads of the cinema city at Hollywood and Vine. An internationally known giant of the screen, Griffith has not made a movie since 1931. Though library shelves are weighed down with books, monographs, and magazine and newspaper articles about him, he lives a secluded and practically unnoticed existence in the Hollywood he largely helped to create.
“There is a dreadful sameness in the sunshine out here” said D. W. “I love the rain and the sun. I love the change of seasons. I would love to be in New York again. The most brainless people in all the world live in Southern California. No one here has any brains except he comes from the East. But, for certain financial reasons, I am exiled from New York.
“When I first went to New York— I was spoiled in my youth: I had my first poem, better say ‘verse,’ and my first play and story published at the same time…. I thought I was a great genius. That was a lot of baloney. Today nobody is interested in D. W. Griffith. I don’t kid myself. They don’t know who I am.”
“D. W. Griffith and the Wolf— that’s my autobiography— it’s lousy. I stopped writing it after eighty or ninety pages and I don’t know where it is now.1 The Wolf is poverty. Nothing is so sad as poverty. My story would be the story of a fellow who is very poor, whose family lost all its money. In Louisville, Ky. Now, that’s a story— not the young fellow becomes a cheap ham actor and makes a fortune which he loses. That’s what they might be interested in, but not in D. W. Griffith who once made movies.”
Obviously, he has never seen the jam in the Museum of Modern Art’s theater whenever his pictures, enshrined in the museum’s film library, are shown.
Further evidence that interest in him continues is that his life is being written by Seymour Stern, film critic and Griffith’s disciple, who is three-quarters through a 1800-page biography entitled Griffith, which he has been assembling for eight years.2 Stern’s authoritative An Index to the Creative Work of David Wark Griffith, will soon be published by Harcourt, Brace.3 Sidney Skolsky,4 who produced The Jolson Story, has an option to do the Griffith film biography. Skolsky believes that Griffith has been largely neglected by Hollywood and that his story would be the story of the movies, of Hollywood itself.
Stern, who is Preston Sturges’s story editor, accompanied this interviewer to see Griffith. D. W. is rarely accessible to either reporters or anyone else. Occasionally, he can be seen promenading down Hollywood Boulevard, his tall, lean figure crowned with the battered hat and sporting the perennial cane, moving unrecognized through the pedestrian traffic as he gazes into shop windows.
At the other end of Hollywood Boulevard, at another hotel,5 lives Mack Sennett, the famed king of custard pies in the silent slapstick days of the screen. Sennett is also “retired” from moviemaking and lives modestly and quietly. Sometimes the two men encounter each other on the boulevard. Griffith gave Sennett his first job as an actor at the old Biograph Studio on 14th Street in New York about forty years ago.
This interview was obtained after a good deal of effort by the expedient of slipping a note under the door of Griffith’s hotel room. He was not acknowledging telephone calls and his mail box was crammed with three weeks’ letters. He finally got on the phone and agreed to be interviewed after some persuasion on the part of Stern and the writer, who had spoken to him some years previous. After a while he warmed up to the idea of an interview.
“I never read a letter or answer a telephone,” he said. “If it’s important, they get to you. I go out sometimes to see movies. I haven’t seen a picture in some time now. The best pictures I did were not popular. The lousy one, like The Birth of a Nation, only a cheap melodrama, were popular, and Way Down East— they got three dollars for that one in New York, about a girl floating over Niagara Falls and being rescued.
“I think The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek [1944] is the greatest comedy I have ever seen in a long time. I saw Gone with the Wind twice and thought it better than The Birth of a Nation— not really, of course. I saw The Seventh Veil four times.6 That [James] Mason is a great actor. It’s a Wonderful Life [1946] was a piece of cheese, Duel in the Sun [1946] a good melodrama. The Best Years of Our Lives [1946] just okay. My Darling Clementine [1946] lovely. The best directors today are Leo McCarey, Frank Capra, and Preston Sturges, the best actors Spencer Tracy and Lionel Barrymore, and the daintiest, sultry-eyed beauty that Russell girl— not Jane, but Gail.
“I loved Citizen Kane [1941] and particularly loved the ideas he (Orson Welles) took from me. The various cycles, the goddam German pictures. I loved them all. I could see all the stuff they stole from me, because being very modest— George Bernard Shaw said any man who pretends to be modest is a darn fool. No one is modest. I am the only producer on stage and screen who knew Plato and the Vedic hymn[s], the first religioso published,7 the Talmud, too.”
“You can print anything you please. What’s the difference? I’m seventy-three years old. This Washington business, the investigation [the House Committee on Un-American Activities], that’s a lot of baloney. I was called a Communist myself in my youth, when Intolerance was branded radical and dangerous. It’s an old idea. All this stuff gives me a pain in the neck. I wrote The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America to answer my critics. The movies should have the same freedom of speech as the press. There should be no censorship. According to the Constitution, you are allowed to say anything you please, but you are responsible for your speech and conversation by law and may be punished. No one is really allowed to say what he pleases.”
Griffith, a titan of the screen in his time, earned big money as well as world-wide artistic prestige. His best pictures, like Intolerance, embodied a boldness of technique and a moral fervor almost entirely absent from the screen today.
Scholars and critics alike call Griffith’s work “the greatest single contribution toward the development of the motion picture.” He took the storytelling line Edwin S. Porter employed in The Great Train Robbery [1903] and gave it humanity, realism, and unusual technique. Griffith was the first to exploit the close-up, the flash-back, and cross-cutting extensively. He did not hesitate to cut from a contemporary scene to ancient times and back again to tell his story. This plus his sense of pageantry, his use of a thousand or more extras to recreate history in dramatic grandeur, broadened the movie medium and influenced other movie-makers.
Griffith is credited also with having been one of the first to recognize the possibilities of the semi-documentary technique used in current films like The Search [1948], Naked City [1948], The Kiss of Death [1947], Call Northside 777 [1948] and Boomerang! [1947]. For his Isn’t Life Wonderful, a story of post–World War I Germany, he took a troupe of Hollywood actors to actual German locations. His Dream Street, made in 1924, three years before The Jazz Singer,8 was one of the first talking pictures. Dream Street used the [Orlando] Kellum process in which a phonograph behind the screen synchronized dialogue with the action to give the illusion of [stars] Ralph Graves and Carol Dempster singing. His last film, The Struggle, produced in 1931, was a violently realistic film about the evils of liquor in a slum setting that makes The Lost Weekend [1945] look like cinematic near beer. The picture received poor critical notices and Griffith has not worked in the movies since then. His wife [Evelyn Baldwin] divorced him last year and he lives alone today.
Money has always been a bother to Griffith. He lost the fortune he had made from The Birth of a Nation on Intolerance, because he believed in the latter’s message of good will toward men. Intolerance was a box office failure, but is today recognized as a milestone in the history of motion pictures. When the Alexandria Hotel in Los Angeles, where Griffith had lived when he first came to Hollywood, went bankrupt and was gone over by auditors, a packet marked D. W. Griffith— Personal was found in one of the vaults with $26,000 in cash that he had completely forgotten. Recently, Griffith’s lawyer brought him a check for $3,000, representing certain income. The check was never deposited and was apparently thrown out with the wastepaper.
Griffith leaned back. “It is my ambition to see The Treadmill produced,” he said. “It’s a play that I have been writing over the years. It is so beautiful, it is too good for anyone to see. It is a story of the beginning of life to the end of life. It is a play about the earth and solar system, with the idea of eternal recurrence. I began it when I was eighteen or nineteen. It says the universe is nothing but foredoomed to annihilation, of the essence of dust. It is the greatest dream any man has had, ah, the superb egotism of this old man in a cheap hotel.
“It says that no man is God, but woman, the poor mother of the skies, and she has an ugly duckling running around her backyard and she is worried because the great son, Orsus, is streaming through the skies, streaming fecundity, for twice 3,000 trillion miles. And then all the little planets are drinking up the fecundity and each little planet is revolving and re-revolving through the great Heavens. And then the poor mother wonders and says, ‘Where is my great son lost in the depth of eternity?’ And then she finds one of the little planets, a trio of little ducklings, lost, a little duckling— his name was Earth— the ugliest duckling of them all— Earth, an atom on the tail part of a louse.
“There has been no improvement in the movies since the old days,” D. W. Griffith from his easy chair. “We did Browning and Keats then, Pippa Passes. Today you don’t dare do those things. Imagine anyone doing Browning today. They have not improved in stories. I don’t know that they’ve improved in anything.
“What the modern movie lacks is beauty— the beauty of moving wind in the trees, the little movement in a beautiful blowing on the blossoms in the trees. That they have forgotten entirely. They have forgotten that no still painting— not the greatest ever— was anything but a pallid still picture. But the moving picture! Today they have forgotten movement in the moving picture. It is still and stale. The moving picture is beautiful, the moving of wind on beautiful trees is more beautiful than a painting. Too much today depends on the voice. I loved talking pictures properly done. Sometimes the talk is good, often very bad. We have taken beauty and exchanged it for stilted voices.
“In my arrogant belief,” said D. W., “we have lost beauty.”
1. Edited and annotated by James Hart, who had worked with Griffith as a ghostwriter on the autobiography, published as The Man Who Invented Hollywood: The Autobiography of D. W. Griffith (Louisville, Ky.: Touchstone Publishing Company, 1972).
2. Seymour Stern (1917–2009) was, arguably, the most fanatical of Griffith’s followers.
3. An Index to the Creative Work of David Wark Griffith was published in four sections as a special supplement to Sight and Sound by the British Film Institute between April 1944 and May 1947. The series is incomplete in that it ends with Hearts of the World.
4. Sidney Skolsky (1905–1983) is best remembered as a Hollywood columnist who claimed to have invented the term “Oscar” for the Academy Award. He produced two biographical film, The Jolson Story (1946) and The Eddie Cantor Story (1953).
5. The Garden Court Apartments.
6. The Seventh Veil, a 1945 British film, directed by Compton Bennett, and starring James Mason, Ann Todd, and Herbert Lom. It is surprising that Griffith should have seen it, let alone singled it out for commentary.
7. Hindu texts.
8. Actually, Dream Street was released in 1921, and The Jazz Singer in 1927.