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Overview
Combining the raw materials of theatre, circus, minstrelsy, and dance with the newer visual codes of motion pictures, Griffith became the first acknowledged artist of American film. Birth of a Nation in particular demonstrates the degree to which he was influenced by the racist justifications and distorting interpretations of the Civil War and the Reconstruction era. Moving through the major phases of Griffith’s career in chapters organized around key films or groups of films, Mayer provides a mesmerizing account of the American stage and cinema in the final years of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth century.
Griffith’s relationship to the theatre was intricate, complex, and enduring. Long recognized as the dominant creative figure of American motion pictures, throughout twenty-six years of making more than five hundred films he pillaged, adapted, reshaped, revitalized, preserved, and extolled. By historicizing his representations of race, ethnicity, and otherness, Mayer places Griffith within an overall template of American life in the years when film rivaled and then surpassed the theatre in popularity.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781587298400 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2009 |
| Series: | Studies Theatre Hist & Culture |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 328 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
STAGESTRUCK FILMMAKER
D.W. GRIFFITH & THE AMERICAN THEATREBy David Mayer
UNIVERSITY OF IOWA PRESS
Copyright © 2009 University of Iowa PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-58729-790-8
Chapter One
The Mobile Theatre
The birth of narrative film-and, indeed, Griffith's film career-did not begin in a camera or with the technological innovations of such pioneers of filmmaking as Thomas Edison, Edwin Porter, Sigmund Lubin, or even D. W. Griffith himself. Instead, it began for Griffith, as it did for other pioneer filmmakers, in the 1890s. Film began in live performances attended by spectators who had no expectations that any other means of entertainment would ever displace stage attractions. These audiences beheld theatrical productions which, for the most part, had originated elsewhere. They were written or devised elsewhere, their subject matter, dramatic structures, casting, and management policies and practices had all been determined elsewhere. Productions arrived and departed by rail, rarely lingering anywhere for more than a week or two. Thus, the beginnings of American dramatic film can be located on the vaudeville and music hall stages, in the comedies and melodramatic plays that captivated popular audiences in the touring shows of the growing cities and small communities throughout America. Touring "combination" companies, carrying both actors who enacted dramatic narratives and varietyartists who performed specialty acts, provided one developmental line of this early history of film, just as the popular dramatic sketches of the variety stage offered another line. Although film historians prefer to celebrate the individuals, auteurs, who invite us to tell a story of genius triumphant, the actual history of narrative film before 1925 is a gradual and fitful attempt to replicate the products and strategies of the commercial stage.
Griffith's choice of film subjects, his staging techniques, the structures of his films, the organization of his acting companies, and his promotional and management strategies are all legacies of his experiences in the theatre. To understand Griffith as a filmmaker, we consequently require an overview of the American theatre at the turn of the century. We must recognize a pivoting economic balance between the metropolitan centers and the more rural hinterlands and the theatrical forms which arose in response to these fluctuations. Above all, we must recognize a mobile theatre.
The necessary mobility of most theatrical companies affected the roles of large cities, chiefly New York, in determining entertainments for the road. For much of the twentieth century, New York City and Broadway have lain at the economic core of the American theatre industry. Sizeable revenue or outright failure has been largely contingent on a play's reception by Manhattan critics and audiences. However, this pattern did not prevail a century or more ago. New York, in 1900, served equally as a tryout place for traveling companies and a destination for shows after lengthy road trials. Annually, some twenty dramas and musical comedies were designated as successes, but there was no priority accorded to New York, no obligation that a drama be stamped with the New York imprimatur for it to achieve financial success. An actor might make his or her reputation on the New York stage, but many leading performers drew audiences based on their reputations in the provinces. Of course, New York was the "nerve center" of the theatre industry for numerous producing organizations, booking offices, and theatrical agents that had their principal offices there. Many plays intended for the road gathered their operating capital from New York and East Coast investors. Nevertheless, because of the transportation network of railroad companies, the principal theatrical economy was widely dispersed, away from New York and, to some degree, from East Coast metropolises. The overall reception and consequent earnings of a drama-and, indeed, the physical conformation of many popular pieces-were strongly determined by considerations of the road.
The Great Train Robbery (1893-1897), first a stage play and, seven years later, a seminal film, offers such an example of the American theatre on the move. Scott Marble's stage melodrama opened at the Bowery's Star Theatre in October 1896. A month later, by way of New Haven, Hartford, and Providence, The Great Train Robbery company moved northward to Boston's Columbia Theatre before travelling westward along the Pennsylvania rail network to Philadelphia, Cleveland, and into the Ohio Circuit, dipping southward to Cincinnati and, following the Louisville and Nashville spur line, further south to Louisville's Avenue Theatre.
Although the play was first noticed by New York critics, the immediate and continuing success of The Great Train Robbery was not contingent on the approval of metropolitan critics and audiences. Rather, devised and organized for travel, it earned the dramatic company and its producers their livelihood in provincial America, where it played to appreciative, if not necessarily discriminating, audiences. The play remained immensely popular in provincial playhouses and a remunerative theatrical property through 1904, when, after the release of the Edison-Porter film, it repeated its earlier tour.
Davis and Keogh, the play's proprietors, owned outright The Great Train Robbery's performing rights and held joint copyright with its author. These theatrical entrepreneurs had intentionally mounted and organized The Great Train Robbery as a "combination" company, which, designed for mobility and economy, carried on its tour a permanent cast of actors and a second, more fluid, cast of specialty variety performers. Davis and Keogh worked closely with the author to shape the play's narrative structure. They determined the duration of the tour and the principal stops along its circuitous route, cast both the company of actors and the specialty variety performers so essential to the second act, and changed these variety components periodically as the play toured. The company moved between agreed play dates along established railroad routes-its movements and engagements controlled through offices both in New York and in Ohio, as well as by a tour manager who traveled with the company. It was this hands-on tour manager who, sensing fresh audiences or aborting unprofitable engagements, determined intermediate stops at lesser venues.
As a dramatic work, The Great Train Robbery is in no way singular. Its subject is similar to numerous railroad-crime melodramas which circulated along provincial circuits through the 1890s. Such plays, built upon robbery of the mail or special shipments of valuable freight, featured derailings, wrecks, and timely rescues. Its author, Scott Marble (1845-1919), although proficient in generating numerous commercially successful melodramas, comedies, and occasional musical drama, remained unknown and unheralded. At best, his work was occasionally listed in the trade press:
Scott Marble is the author of Black Diamonds, The Colonel, The Cotton Spinner, The Diamond Breaker, Exiles of Siberia, The Free Quaker, Furnished Rooms, [The] Gold Key, [The] Great Train Robbery, [The] House with Green Blinds, The Investigator, The Linwood Case, Man and His Idol, Mugg's Landing, My Wife's Husband, Over the Garden Wall, Miss Plaster of Paris, Rexina, The Royal Pass, [The] Sidewalks of New York, Tennessee's Pardner, and various other plays.
Yet Marble's was never a name to draw investors or audiences. Adept at contriving visual sensations for the stage, Marble switched in 1910 from writing plays to devising motion picture scenarios. Not surprisingly, The Great Train Robbery, strong on physical action, barely reliant on dialogue, and with a love narrative which could be cut without impairing action or meaning, lent itself to adaptation as a film.
The Great Train Robbery, if not altogether typical of the stage fare of the 1890s, may nonetheless be read as an analogue of the theatrical world the young D. W. Griffith was to enter, first as a spectator, later as an actor, and-eventually-as a filmmaker and film promoter, organizing and dispatching numerous productions to support his films. Griffith was to draw on this world of peripatetic actors, mobile theatre companies, and entertainments which frequently and successfully blurred or ignored traditional distinctions between genres for the duration of his professional career. Indeed, Griffith's choice of film subjects, his staging techniques, the structures of his films, the organization of his acting companies, and his promotional and management strategies were all legacies of his experiences in the theatre. To understand Griffith as a filmmaker, we consequently require an overview of this theatrical milieu. The Great Train Robbery, because it was a successful stage drama soon translated into a landmark film, is our first step into this theatrical environment.
In 1897, the year in which The Great Train Robbery reached Louisville, Griffith was twenty-two years old. He had witnessed theatrical performances in most, if not all, of Louisville's theatres and, impressed by what he had observed and enjoyed, had determined on an acting career. Sometime in 1895, Griffith left his job as clerk in a local bookshop to take his first steps as an apprentice actor, progressing from amateur theatricals to a local profit-share company and to small roles with professional companies. For the first time since 1890, when the Griffith family had migrated from Shelby County to Louisville, Griffith left home, traveling beyond Kentucky to Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, and North Dakota, experiencing America-as so many other Americans were doing-by rail. The Griffiths had brought their furniture and personal possessions by spring wagon, traveling at a mule team's pace. Now, although the rail journeys between small-town theatres were short, Griffith was encountering rapid motion and, through the coach windows, sensing speed and observing a linear progression of framed flashing images. These early experiences of the railroads-and of motion, speed, sequential linked images, and mobility-seem never to have left him and repeatedly appear in his films. Many of these-for Biograph and for his own film companies-feature what became a Griffith cliché: last-minute or final-reel rides-to-the-rescue, first on horseback, and, later, in frantic attempts by the occupants of a hastily commandeered automobile to overtake and halt a speeding express train. His experience of being stranded in Minneapolis and traveling home "grabbing the blinds"-clinging to the rods beneath railroad boxcars-furnished material for a comic sequence for W. C. Fields and Carol Dempster in Sally of the Sawdust. Even when he depicted natural landscapes, Griffith turned stillness into motion and speed. Dissatisfied with the snow-covered, hard-frozen lake onto which Anna Moore flees in the theatrical version of 'Way Down East, Griffith changed the motionless lake into a racing river with a pack of broken ice floes slowly gathering momentum in the spring current and accelerating downstream toward a crushing waterfall. Using the river's speed to set the tempo of the sequence, Griffith made the spectacle of her lover, David, perilously leaping from floe to unstable floe to rescue the unconscious Anna before she is swept away, a superb onscreen race between man and relentless natural forces.
Griffith also would have encountered motion as seen through the cine-camera. Periodically, in Louisville between engagements and unable to find theatrical work, Griffith took in the cheap entertainments, including vaudeville and minstrel shows, touring melodramas, and the new penny-in-the-slot muto-scope. Thus, his first views of moving pictures may have been through the eyepiece of a "what-the-butler-saw" machine, with its cranked handle and positive photos rotated before the viewer. And, most probably, he also looked through the viewing lens of another optical device, the kinetoscope, with short loops of film presented to the single spectator, in a Louisville amusement arcade or kinetoscope parlor. Projected film soon followed. In September 1896, Macauley's Theatre offered Louisville's theatre-goers the "Veriscope portraying the contest between James J. Corbett and Robert Fitzsimmons at Carson City, Nevada, March 17." Again, in January 1897, attending a program of Shakespearean tragedies (Othello, Julius Caesar, and Romeo and Juliet) at Louisville's Grand Opera House, Griffith would have witnessed its highly promoted afterpiece "The American Biograph," a succession of films billed as: McKinley at Canton, Niagara Falls, Herald Square Fire Department, Joseph Jefferson's Rip Van Winkle, Trilby and Little Billee, Beach at Atlantic City, Stable on Fire, Niagara Upper Rapids, New York Boulevard, and the Empire State Express. Some of these projected films-falling water, speeding fire apparatus, and passing locomotives-emphasized power, speed, and mobility. Two further films in this group, Rip Van Winkle, and Trilby and Little Billee, hinted at the numerous, still unexploited links between the stage and motion pictures.
Griffith's experience of theatre was directly affected by another major development which began in 1873, two years before his birth. At that date, theatre companies were largely linked to single playhouses. Theatres employed, season by season rather than play by play, a permanent company of actors, each engaged to play roles predictable by the actors' ages, appearance, growing and practiced skills, years and experience in the profession, and favor with the local audience. However, because of a severe national market crash in 1873, these "stock" companies were immediately affected with loss of revenue as local economies collapsed. For similar reasons, variety theatres also found that their patrons could no longer afford to attend, and these theatres also faced bankruptcy. In the face of these grim developments, the railway companies, themselves affected by the depression and seeking fresh business, offered theatrical entrepreneurs a lifeline: an extension of the "combination" system with favorable rates and appealing schedules for traveling theatre companies. The theatre industry was quick to recognize the worth of this proposal. As early as June 1873, as managements prepared for the 1874 season, the New York Clipper recognized in an editorial the gravity of the problem and with remarkable prescience forecast its solution:
[Business]is trifling ... theatres are closing altogether, or venturing a brief season with light or inexpensive entertainments. New York is now the objective point of managers and performers ... and it is here that all meet to compare notes and fix upon some plan of action for the future ... A number of companies have been partially formed, fair salaries meeting with ready acceptance, performers clutching a sure thing rather than hold out for better terms which may never be offered. The country will [be] pretty well travelled by combinations next season, this sort of business paying much better than a permanency in the stock of some city theatre, where the chances of a rise are not so good as in a Wall-street stock.... What is called "legitimate" does not meet with the proper encouragement.... People don't take to it; they prefer something sensational, spicy, emotional, spectacular, etc. The variety element is in good demand, and clever specialists command salaries which, in the olden time, would have been considered big terms by first-class stars.
As local repertory or stock companies vanished, touring combinations increased. In 1876-1877, there were one hundred such companies on the road; by 1880, there were three hundred; by 1900, as many as five hundred combination companies were touring.
The combination system merits our attention not only because of its centrality to the American theatre in the latter decades of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth. Its configurations, although largely unrecognized, are strongly embedded in American narrative films from their earliest days. Not surprisingly, Griffith encountered combinations frequently in the dramas he witnessed in his adolescence, and later, as an actor, toured with a combination company. Given their ubiquity, he was acutely aware of the combination as a dramatic structure and as an established theatrical convention to be met in production. His two plays, A Fool and the Girl (1906) and War (1907), severally recognize the combination convention by creating framing spaces for variety acts which Griffith goes to some pains to specify-Mexican musicians, singers, and dancers, and British Christmas revelers-and which are in harmony with the milieux he depicts. Combinations also directly influenced his films-and other Hollywood films well into the 1930s. Griffith still acknowledged the combination structure in such major films as A Romance of Happy Valley, Way Down East, and Orphans of the Storm even as combinations, no longer necessary to draw audiences or financially viable, had largely fallen from favor.
Combination, as a mutable theatrical term, had been in circulation from 1872 or earlier and was understood, initially, to refer to a dramatic or musical or variety entertainment which toured with its own cast of performers and full complement of scenery. The term also described a business arrangement but not a theatrical result, in effect a temporary partnership and capitalization as two managements pooled their resources for a joint theatrical enterprise. Combination further described a touring theatrical program which brought together numerous stars or headliners on a single bill. Such a program was usually a sequence of variety and short dramatic pieces with the dramatic content being supplied by one-act plays or sketches. All combinations were distinct from their theatrical predecessors in that each production had been capitalized as an individual venture. Loss on a combination's production and its tour almost invariably meant that loss was contained and could not affect other ventures.
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Table of Contents
ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 The Mobile Theatre 31
2 Actor and Playwright 57
3 Griffith at Biograph 87
4 Dramas of Civil War, Ethnicity, and Race 120
5 The Clansman and The Birth of a Nation 142
6 Eclecticism and Exploration 166
7 Way Down East 186
8 Twilight Revels 217
Notes 251
Playlist 273
Filmography 277
Bibliography 281
Index 295