D.W. Griffith at The Biograph Company: 1908-1913

a Sony video & Hewlett Packard photosmart & scanner picture essay by Ira H. Gallen

TelevisionToys.com will focus upon an era that has been all but ignored by television and Hollywood as well.

It was an era that laid the foundation upon which was built the Golden Age of Cinema; an era whose development and advancement of the moving picture as an art form was inextricably tied to one man's creative and innovative genius.

The Biograph Company New York City, 1912

The man's name is D. W. Griffith--David Wark Griffith--and his story is that of the period between 1908 and 1913 when he created a method of storytelling in purely cinematic terms that was to raise the moving picture permanently out of the category of a scientific curiosity.

The Unseen Enemy, 1912
Dorothy & Lillian Gish

This he did by the use of techniques that broke precedents and created a vocabulary of visual devices for the emergence of film as art as well as by the development of a stock company of actors and actresses with him at the American Mutuscope and Biograph Company in New York, who would later emerge as some of the greatest individual talents during the glory years of the Golden Age.

Cameraman Billy Bitzer and D.W. Griffith

David Wark Griffith's film creation, THE BIRTH OF A NATION, was to make history and achieve immortality when released in 1914.   With THE BIRTH, Griffith was to bring together the words “art" and "film" as a permanent equation for the first time.   Only five years after his initial explorations into the then crude world of moving picture images, his epic, THE BIRTH, was both an historical creation as well as a history making event in its own right.

D.W. Griffith directing The Struggle New York 1931

This one film was to prove to be the catalyst that raised the motion picture form to the level of a social force as well as a way of life in America.   By special request of President Woodrow Wilson, THE BIRTH OF A NATION was to be the first motion picture exhibited at the White House.

Discussions and arguments over the film would range from the corridors of the Congress on down to the lowest of saloons in America, eventually to reach all over the world as the celluloid images of THE BIRTH proved to be both a stimulant and an intoxicant for all who experienced it.

Read Photoplay article on D.W. Griffith 1915 -click-

The Lonely Villa, 1909
Mary Pickford, Marion Leonard and Adele De Garde

The American artist, whom the world would come to recognize simply as D.W. Griffith, became as much a household name as any of his creations on film, and for him the status of “genius" was to be given; a father figure in the birth of film art.

To describe "genius" in finite terms as it applies to the methods of D.W. Griffith is to seek after that which is beyond precise definition.   He felt degraded by motion pictures and therefore sought to raise the level of the medium by breaking all of the conventions and existing practices of filmmaking as they then existed.

Despite the overwhelming importance of D.W. Griffith to the development of cinema art; his name, his work and the work of those who helped him create his moving pictures have become a generally unknown commodity amongst the American public.

Directing on the set of Intolerance, 1915

TELEVISION TOY STORIES will, as a series, represent not only the first intensive examination of D.W. Griffith as a subject for general audiences, but the first indepth portrayal of moving picture-making at a time when each new idea was a pioneering advancement in the development of cinema art.

Directing on the set of Intolerance, 1915

The main principal character, DAVID WARK GRIFFITH, was already thirty-three years old when he began with the Biograph Company. He was born in Crestwood, Kentucky, on January 22, 1815, the son of Jacob Wark Griffith, a former colonel in the Army of the Confederacy.