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The Story of David Wark Griffith

His Early Years; His Struggles; His Ambitions and Their Achievement

By Henry Stephen Gordon

This is the first and only authorized Griffith story. It is the premier chronicle of the greatest art-form of modern times. Next month, the extraordinary adventuresof "Larry" (D.W.) Griffith, a veritable Francois Villon of the Twentieth Century.

"The photoplay world is mine," might say David Wark Griffith.

He might say it, if he were not David Wark Griffith; other people say it for him; he has nothing of the stagey theatricalism of an Edmond Dantes in his nature--except the courage.

He discovered a world of moving pictures; puerile, vulgarly debasing in their triviality; an entertainment one degree removed from a magic lantern show; a passing joke that was novelly attractive as dime museums formely attached, and as the melodramas of Theodore Kremer and Owen Davis had previously attracted; sustenance for the people who gape, and first aids to the yawn.

That moving picture sphere in the universe of banalities received him coldly, apprehensively, as if it foresaw its dissolution into fertilizer for Art, thought, genius.

But he was a sane genius: ambition requires a meal ticket quite as actually as does commonplace contentment. So he at first only slightly punctured with his swordlike genius the armor of stupidity he found encasing picture-making, and his first work was the direction of a "moving picture." This was called "The Adventures of Dolly."

You can see by the title that it was "moving pictures ;" it was a one reel picture, as they all were at that time, and in its story it was no different from what had gone before.