“The motion pictures give man a place to go besides the saloons.”
D.W. Griffith is unanimously considered the greatest American filmmaker of the Silent Era and the first American “auteur.” A notorious perfectionist, he began by making silent shorts for Biograph Films in New York City. Griffith soon moved west and became both the first director to shoot a film in Hollywood (In Old California, 1910) and the first American director to make a feature-length film (Judith of Bethulia, 1914). Credited with pioneering almost every device that now constitutes modern cinematic language, from basics like fades, dissolves, and close-ups to the more complicated techniques of flashbacks and crosscutting. He launched the careers of Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Constance Talmadge, and director Raoul Walsh, among others. Griffith’s controversial second feature, The Birth of a Nation (1915), was the first Hollywood blockbuster, but his follow-up a year later, Intolerance (now considered one of the top ten films of all time), was a box office failure that began a steady decline in his output and popularity. When sound arrived, Griffith insisted that it ruined the poetry of filmmaking—and would be a passing fad.
EVERYTHING HAD BEEN FINE just minutes ago. The party of four were sitting in a discreet booth at the swanky Hollywood restaurant Romanoff’s. There was studio mogul Samuel Goldwyn, his wife Frances, the hot new director Billy Wilder, and his fiancée Audrey Young, all laughing and sharing stories. Wilder was fresh off the success of what would become two of his great classics, Double Indemnity and that whiskey-soaked horror show The Lost Weekend. Goldwyn was eager to produce his next film. The problem was, Wilder had no idea what he wanted to do next.
It was then that Wilder spotted him at the bar—a tall drunk staring them down. The man was dressed like a deposed czar: his clothes regal but frayed, stained with drink. To Wilder’s growing consternation, the man started heading toward their table. He walked unsteadily, and everyone could smell gin when he stuck his finger in Goldwyn’s face. “Here you are, you son of a bitch,” he muttered, “I ought to be making pictures.” Although Goldwyn was too stunned to muster a response, his wife Frances did. She told the “silly drunk” to leave them alone immediately. The old man acquiesced and walked away. Immediately, Wilder asked Goldwyn who the hell that was. Goldwyn ordered another drink. “That,” he said, “was D. W. Griffith.”
He had grown to like sound films, which he once predicted would be dead within a decade: “The trouble with the whole industry is that it talked before it thought.”
There had been rumors that the increasingly reclusive Griffith had been spotted out on the town again. Only a few weeks earlier, journalist Ezra Goodman had heard that Griffith had been holed up at the Knickerbocker Hotel for almost three years, having meals and liquor delivered to his room. Goodman showed up unannounced and tried to interview the great director; his request was declined. A few days later, he showed up with a beautiful young girl, who called alone. Griffith immediately let her in. Quickly, Goodman elbowed his way in after. Unable to kick Goodman out, and after a few drinks, Griffith engaged in an actual interview that would be his last.
He had grown to like sound films, which he once predicted would be dead within a decade. (“The trouble with the whole industry is that it talked before it thought.”) He blamed himself for his career problems. He’d grown to dislike The Birth of a Nation, which he called a lousy, cheap melodrama. He had lived in the hotel for a few years; before that he had homes in Los Angeles and Kentucky. He had some money and was comfortable. He may have grown to like sound films, but he hated current cinema. Sound wasn’t the problem—the lack of good directors was. He liked Sturges, Walsh, and a couple of others. He liked Gone with the Wind, saw it twice. He loved Citizen Kane, “particularly the ideas Welles took from me.” “Ah, the superb egotism of the old man in his hotel room!” Goodman commented in print later.
Eventually, things grew quiet and Goodman took his cue to leave. Griffith had been assuming the girl would stay. When she didn’t, Goodman didn’t know if Griffith’s parting words were about movies or the interview: “We have taken beauty and exchanged it for stilted voices.”
Goodman’s article was the type of story that has since become an old saw of arts journalism—young fan finds old master living in squalor, brings the forgotten master to public attention, and master has an artistic renaissance. The problem was that in 1948, nobody liked such stories. They contained too much truth. Goodman eventually got it printed in a B-grade gossip rag when Griffith died a few months later from a cerebral hemorrhage.
Nobody paid attention to Goodman’s story until he turned it into a book a decade later, but at least one man was profoundly affected by Griffith’s final months: Billy Wilder. When Goldwyn told Wilder that he’d just seen the ghost of the man who single-handedly dragged film from vaudeville novelty to genuine art—Griffith being one of Wilder’s idols—Wilder was deeply affected. Goldwyn would only understand how much so when he got the script for Wilder’s next film some months later. It was titled Sunset Boulevard—the definitive elegy for the fading stars of the silent era.
A FORGOTTEN PRECURSOR to today’s Screwdriver, the near-obsolete Orange Blossom was one of the most popular cocktails of the Silent Era. Fatty Arbuckle’s costar, Virginia Rappe, was downing Orange Blossoms at San Francisco’s luxurious Hotel St. Francis the night she met her demise. Authorities would charge that she’d been crushed under Fatty’s great weight. Louise Brooks and Chaplin were drinking Orange Blossoms the night the little tramp painted his penis red with iodine and chased her around the hotel suite.
But perhaps the most dedicated aficionado was D. W. Griffith. As an old man, living alone at the Knickerbocker Hotel, the silent era’s greatest director kept his windows lined with plump oranges, the key ingredient to his favorite cocktail.
WHEN IT OPENED, IN 1906, the Alexandria Hotel was immediately crowned the swankiest hotel in Los Angeles; its posh lobby and opulent ballroom (added in 1911 and named the Palm Court) gave it glamour unrivaled by any hotel in the dusty outcroppings of Hollywood or Edendale—or anywhere in town, for that matter.
Presidents held speeches in the ballroom, oilmen and industrial titans closed deals in its restaurant, and soon enough, rich and powerful film industry players would congregate in its bar. In the lobby, between crystal chandeliers and marble floors, lay “the million-dollar carpet,” so named because of the many film deals that closed within the walls of the hotel.
Actors would linger in and around the lobby, hoping to be noticed. (Free sandwiches at the hotel bar didn’t hurt either.) In 1918 Rudolph Valentino charmed his way into his first lead roles in film here. Chaplin would rent a suite and try out some of his gags in the lobby. Cowboy actor Tom Mix rode his horse through the entrance. Jack Warner lived there, and Gloria Swanson met her first husband there.
The hotel’s luster began to fade as Hollywood developed; by the 1960s, the rooms had crumbled into tenements and the ballroom, long neglected, had become a training ring for boxers. Renovations in the 1980s and 2000s led to its reopening, in 2008, as the most fabulous and historic low-income apartments in Southern California.
