From The Griffith Project, Volume 12: Essays on D. W. Griffith, edited by Paolo Cherchi Usai (London: British Film Institute, 2008). Reprinted by permission of Russell Merritt.
This is best told, I suppose, as a long-ago bedtime story about D. W. Griffith. It could also be called, “How I Bonded with Sam Fuller (Sort of).” But it’s really an account of how Griffith appeared in the wild-eyed vision of one of America’s great maverick directors, and how Fuller gave the father of film a new kind of patrimony.
My conversation with Fuller took place, appropriately enough for him, in a noisy downtown Ohio bar. Fuller, the guest of honor at the 1980 Athens International Film Festival, was holding court off-hours at a large table amidst smoke and low-slung lights. I joined the party, and learned he already knew I was working on Griffith. He asked me a few questions (“What’s your angle? What’s your hook?”), and then turned away. Later, as the conversation with the others grew stale, he turned back to me.
“You know what’s wrong with you?” he said. “You’re too old, and you lack imagination.”
Unimaginative? Too old?
I was a little more than half Fuller’s age at the time, but otherwise the elder at a table of college kids and hangers-on. Fuller had been pushing the crowd to make movies. Mainly he was listening to story ideas, and making connections to his own work. I was the sorrowful example of what happens when you choose, instead, an academic career.
He continued, with me as target.
“If I could do it, I’d put a sharpshooter on the roof across the street, and when you came out, I’d have him shoot you between the eyes! You’re sitting on a great idea and you’re too dumb to know it.”
How long was I supposed to be polite? But maybe this requires a bit more context which, the reader needs to be warned, will only grow relevant as the story unfolds. In describing my Griffith angle, my hook, I had mentioned an enormous photo collage from Griffith movies that Griffith’s adoring grandniece, Geraldine, had constructed on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday. Fuller had seen Griffith in a book posing with the collage, and wanted to know what happened to it. I told him. For this I was going to be killed?
Not exactly. But, then, he was just warming up.
“Listen to me!” He held up his hands, as if he were framing a shot, holding his cigar erect. “You start on the ass of a whore.”
I had no idea of what he was talking about. But he had my undivided attention.
“Keep the camera tight on her ass. I want it in black-and-white. Grainy. It’s night. Make the music greasy. Then, get that ass moving. Make her GRIND those cheeks! And—KEEP UP WITH HER!!”
Keep up with the ass of a whore?
For Fuller, it was all to be in one shot. The camera was to follow her to the street corner; stop when she left the sidewalk, tilt up slightly to see the street sign—Ivar & Hollywood—and then come back down to find her across the street, talking to two johns.
He continued.
We get close enough to hear them talking. They go back and forth. She wants twenty dollars; they’ll give her ten dollars, maybe more if she shows them some nice tricks. They walk to the cheap hotel behind them. The camera—”DON’T CUT!! Just stay with them!!”—follows them up through the small lobby, up an elevator—”Make one of the guys short and bald, and have him knee her when they’re close in the elevator, just to keep it interesting”—and they get out. The two men have the girl knock on a door. The door opens. A bewildered old man looks out. The johns shove the girl aside, rush inside the room, and throw the old man back onto a chair.
“The camera cuts to a tight close-up on the old guy. Voice over: ‘WHEN I FIRST MET D. W. GRIFFITH, HE WAS DRUNK!’
“CUT!!! CREDITS!!!!”
What was this all about? Fuller was remembering Ezra Goodman’s notorious interview with Griffith published in PM Magazine in 1948, in which Goodman and Seymour Stern used a secretary to gain access to Griffith’s hotel room. In the Fuller version, the interview was to provide the frame story for a low-budget action picture which, if he were to let me live, I was to write. The secretary was turned into a hooker!
Fuller knew nothing about the real-life Goodman or Stern, and had no interest in them. “Your hook,” he told me, “is the whore. Make sure she’s got blood on her mouth from when the guys shove her out of the way. Have her knock her mouth on something when she falls down.”
The point was to give her something to do while a befuddled Griffith gradually agrees to answer Goodman’s questions about his movies. She’s bored and quiet, but she wants her twenty dollars. She’s pressing a cold towel to her mouth; she’s wandering around the room, half-interested in an enormous collage of photos from Griffith’s films—Geraldine’s collage—now mounted on the hotel wall.
The whore would stare at the stills. She would also find Griffith’s straw hat on a coat rack—similar to the one Griffith wore while directing The Birth of a Nation. Fuller needed this to connect to Griffith at work in 1914—Griffith sitting inside a tent having his head shaved bald amidst the chaos of preparing for Birth’s battle scene. Cameraman Billy Bitzer, assistant directors, secretaries, money guys are all coming in and out, giving Griffith things to sign, calling for him, looking for direction. At the end of the scene, the barber would hold up a mirror, A bald-headed Griffith would stand, put on his straw hat (the one Lillian Gish describes with the large hole in it to let the sun rays through) and then walk out to direct his scene. Fuller said we could come back later to the battle scene itself. If there was no money to pay for it, we could cheat and not film it.
Fuller wouldn’t leave it alone. On another occasion at Athens, Fuller returned the conversation to Griffith and “our” movie.
His idea was to have the prostitute steal the hat and, at the end of the film, walk off with it—and her twenty dollars. Then, sudden inspiration from Fuller—”THIS IS A PISS CUTTER!!”—she is to wander down into the lobby, and find the bar. At the far end, a man—”an African American, a colored guy”—is playing piano. Cross-cut to Griffith and his interviewers back at the room while the whore flirts downstairs with the piano man. Back and forth until we’re finally at the bar where she’s dancing and playing with the hat and the black guy. Then, just before she leaves, she tosses Griffith’s hat on the piano man’s head. And sashays out. “USE IT!!! IT’S A GODDAMN, MOTHER-FUCKING PISS CUTTER!!”
Griffith meant a lot to Fuller. Although he called John Ford his “original inspiration” and The Informer his favorite film of all time, Griffith movies, he said, gave him energy. He recalled how he took the bait when Darryl Zanuck jokingly challenged him to write an unfilmable script about the movies. Fuller’s idea: start with a scene of the Ku Klux Klan riding to the rescue in The Birth of a Nation. The camera pulls back to reveal that the movie is being projected on the side of a barn. We see the 16mm projector on a table; the projectionist; and men in overalls watching it. One guy passes a pouch of chewing tobacco. We’re at a Klan recruiting rally, and the gist of the dialog is that this is the best goddamn movie ever made.
Fuller had another way of connecting Griffith’s life to his art. We said goodbye at the local airport while he waited for his plane and I waited for mine. We ended where we started: Fuller coming out of nowhere with a surprise punch. Up to this point, our airport conversation had been desultory, but Griffith, as ever, had become our lingua franca. Without warning, Fuller rapped me on the arm. He had one final bit of advice. I was to be “goddamn sure” that I got into the script what made Griffith a brilliant filmmaker. The secret wasn’t the technical innovation. It was that Griffith lived all his life in a dream world—of feeling, sensation, and emotion—and found the power to transform it into a tangible universe. It’s the kind of gift, Fuller said, that leaves you defenseless in the real world. “When you write about Griffith, you gotta remember that.”