Free Flapper by Joshua Zeitz

playing thelead role; just as the executioner’s ax was set to fall on Mary’s neck, Clark stopped the reel, substituted a dummy for his feature player, and resumed filming. The movie proved a sensational hit with audiences and inspired other attempts at plot-driven movies. The most ambitious of these projects was The Passion Play , a fifty-five-minute feature filmed in 1897 on a New York City rooftop. It was popular in theaters, but costly and difficult to produce. Another fifteen years would go by before motion picture directors revisited the idea of feature-length films.
    Instead, early directors spent the next decade perfecting short, ten- or fifteen-minute movies. Edwin Porter, one of the industry’s pioneers, raised the bar high with The Great Train Robbery , a path-breaking production that used twenty separate shots, including close-ups, and several different indoor and outdoor sets. Audiences had never seen anything like it.
    But nobody—not even Edwin Porter—appreciated the industry’s potential for artistic growth more than David Wark Griffith. Born just ten years after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Griffith—the son of a Kentucky planter who fought for the Confederacy—grew up as a displaced member of the old southern aristocracy. The emancipation of their slaves and the death of his father when David was just a boy left the family in a precarious financial situation. When David was fourteen years old, his mother was forced to sell the plantation and move to Louisville, where she operated a boardinghouse. It was a long way from the idyllic land of magnolias and mint juleps that David would later mythologize in his screen work.
    Griffith spent his teenage years knocking around. He worked for a dry goods store and then a bookstore. He tried his hand at writing fiction and joined a traveling theater troupe that performed throughout the lower Midwest and California. He was going nowhere fast.
    The dawn of the new century found Griffith in New York City, where he scratched out a living by selling short-story treatments to the Biograph Company—America’s leading producer of motion pictures—and appearing in occasional film and stage productions. In 1908, the principals at Biograph decided to give Griffith a shot at directing a short feature, The Adventures of Dollie. It wasn’t his mostmemorable work, but it did the trick. Within a few months, they offered him a contract to serve as Biograph’s lead director.
    Five months into his tenure at Biograph, he wrote and produced an experimental feature, After Many Years , adapted from Tennyson’s Enoch Arden— the tale of a shipwrecked man who finds his way back to civilization, only to discover that his wife has remarried and his children have grown up and forgotten him.
    The bigwigs at Biograph didn’t know what to make of the film. Whereas other directors kept the camera at a respectable distance from the players, thus creating a sensation akin to that of attending a stage performance, Griffith moved it nearer the set so that his actors filled the entire frame. In some shots, he inched the camera so close to the action that the players appeared larger than the frame and were visible only from the waist up. Moviegoers could now study the actors’ facial expressions.
    Griffith also shot the same scenes from multiple perspectives and skipped back and forth between two complementary plotlines—the husband’s ordeal on a desert island and his wife’s perseverance back in civilization.
    Not everyone was enthusiastic about these bold departures in filmmaking. “How can you tell a story jumping around like that?” one of the Biograph bosses asked him. “The people won’t know what it’s about!”
    “Well,” Griffith replied, “doesn’t Dickens write that way?”
    Though he didn’t necessarily pioneer every new technique in the business—Edwin Porter had experimented with close-ups and multiple perspectives in his early work—Griffith soon acquired