Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/462877
20 CINEMONTAGE / WINTER 2015 on features of the time. The Kentucky-born Griffith based his story of the war's losing side on The Clansman, a novel and a play by Southern clergyman Thomas Dixon, and another Dixon novel, The Leopard's Spots. He enlivened the war half of the film with the tales he heard from his Confederate colonel father, "Roaring Jake" Griffith. The heart of the post-war story, though, was the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, noted in an intertitle as "the organization that saved the South from the anarchy of black rule." The film does not acknowledge the brutality of slavery or the humanity of African Americans beyond loyalty shown to their former masters. In a 1943 interview, camera operator Karl Brown recalled leading lady Gish asking the filmmaker if his depiction of race might cause problems when the picture was released. Welcoming controversy, like many a producer since, Griffith said, "Then you won't be able to keep audiences away with clubs." After six weeks' rehearsal, production began, with high- minded symbolism intended, on July 4, 1914. It was shot in 12 weeks spread over five months in the Kinemacolor Studio and locations in the San Fernando Valley, Whittier, Ojai, Big Bear and the cotton fields of Calexico. There was no shooting script. Griffith directed the entire film from a visualization of the story worked out in his mind, fine-tuning it as he went along from set-up to set-up and, later, in editing. Occasionally, he took time off from shooting to raise more money. The budget finally rose to $110,000, making it the most expensive film yet produced in America. Among its investors were a Hollywood lunchroom proprietor, a Ford dealer from Pasadena, an enterprising widow and William Clune, who owned the theatre in which the film would open. By the time the film premiered as The Clansman, it was 12 reels (13,058 feet) and ran over three hours — the longest feature to date. Fearing financial disaster, Mutual refused to release it, leaving Griffith and Aitken to form the Epoch Producing Corporation to handle distribution. The movie's impact was immediate. In Los Angeles alone, it ran exclusively at Clune's for seven months. The most sophisticated features of the time rarely exceeded 100 separate shots, but Griffith and editors Smith and Richtel cut together over 1,500 shots to carry audiences through the story. The silent film's editing rhythms were heightened by an orchestral accompaniment arranged by composer Joseph Carl Breil. With Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" as a background, no wonder viewers cheered the Ku Klux Klan's ride to the rescue of whites beset by rampaging black hordes. Just 10 days after the premiere, the film became the first motion picture screened at the White House — at the request of President Woodrow Wilson's friend from graduate school, Clansman author Dixon. A Southerner himself, Wilson permitted the exhibition. Flattered perhaps by the film's use of quotes from his own book, History of the American People, the president was afterwards quoted as saying, "It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true." Freshly re-titled, The Birth of a Nation opened on March 3 at New York City's Liberty Theater, at the unprecedented film ticket price of two dollars — and to growing and vocal opposition. In an interview published in the New York American, Griffith disparaged this criticism as "stupid persecution brought against the picture by ill-minded censors and politicians playing for the Negro vote." The reaction against the movie brought together an alliance of the black community, led by the NAACP and white social reformers. These included Harvard President Charles Eliot, social worker Jane Addams and sociologist Thorstein Veblen, who called it "a triumph of concise misinformation." In agreement, the New York Evening Post characterized the film as "a call for racial prejudice." The Birth of a Nation, Photofest.