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Reel 03 The scandals of Hollywood, the mad I parties we hear about in the outside world," I asked Lillian Gish, after she had declined to see in the escapades of Mabel Normand anything beyond a sort of sinister luck-"are these symptomatic of what motion-picture personalities have to offer in the future, or are they merely part of the temperament the new art requires? " " neither," Miss Gish replied. "I don't think the scandals, as they are called, are more numerous or notorious than similar affairs elsewhere in society. " I think motion pictures are simply paying the penalty of prominence. The world is familiar with screen faces, and when something unfortunate happens in our public or private careers the editors regard the incident as enormously interesting to their readers. The story is played for all it's worth--and sometimes a bit more. "You see," she developed the theme, "we are in such a strange business out here. We of the screen are more intimately known to the public than any other men or women who ever lived. More people see our faces in one night than saw Napoleon in all his fifty-two years.

We excite the emotions of our audiences; we incited their sympathy or dislike or laughter every evening; they know us by our given names or our surnames or our nicknames. Anything that happens to us is of obvious interest.

" The industry is so new; fabulous sums are talked about; youth and beauty command such dazzling wages and such adulation; all over the world the public knows us in two dimensions--and wonders what we are in the flesh.

" Such novel characters are attracted to the films: capitalists who know little of art, but much of costs and profits; actors who are bred to the footlights and know little, if anything, of the infant they are trying to fondle; actresses whose talents might unhappily have kept them inconspicuous on the stage, but whose features respond to every demand of the camera; writers who scribble in a field about which they are wholly ignorant; directors who are handicapped by their own lack of tradition and training as well as by the producer' insistence that only sure-fire box-office hits be turned out.

" The whole thing is a mystery to the world and the world has ever loved to read about its mysteries. So the press feeds its readers with every shred of realty and fancy it can get hold of in our lives. For every one of our scandals you will find twenty infinitely more sensational to match it elsewhere.

"Surely, there is nothing in our world of pictures to equal the Stillman quadrangle, the Loeb-Leopold case, the Hall-Mills atrocity, the Elwell murder, the Snyder horror, the New York night-club orgies, the Chicago gang wars, the Aimee McPherson affair, the Earl Carroll incident, the Stokers scandals, the government oil betrayals, the baseball briberies, the fixed prize fights, the dishonest horse races.

Finance, politics, society, the ministry, the world of sports--every class has its troubles. Yet nobody regards such distressing events as characteristic of the stratum of life in which they occur.' "But let somebody kill a comparatively obscure motion-picture director like Taylor; let an unfortunate comedian like Arbuckle happen to be in a party where a woman drops dead; or let a genius of comedy like Chaplin become involved in marital discord--and the whole world quivers with ecstatic horror over the latest Hollywood scandal! I wonder whether the rest of the world isn't a bit envious of the youth and beauty and fame and financial remuneration of the men and women in the pictures?

"I don't condone anything wrong that takes place in our world, of course. I do think it could be fair if a sense of proportion dictated the printing and the reading of the story. But, manifestly, the most trivial thing in the picture realm of mystery will inevitably be distorted and overemphasized and relished by the public whose dollars at. the box office they believe entitle them to every detail in the lives of the industry they support.

" I think it really puts a tremendous load of responsibility upon us; and I think we are beginning to appraise correctly our obligation to conduct ourselves in exemplary manner."

Miss Gish offered me a glass of ginger ale. There is an absence of spirituous hospitality in her manner which I found unique in Hollywood.

"Everything is new, indeed, in the picture world--the youngest and I think the seventh of all our industries," she went on. "Do you realize that it is less than twenty-four years since the first successful motion picture, The Great Train Robbery, was exhibited? `A picture called The Kiss was shown in 1896, but the era; really dates from the middle of 1903.

"Think what a world without movies and movie theaters would be now! I believe it conservative to say that boys not yet voting have seen the industry advance a thousand times more than did architecture in the first ten thousand years after the first man built a rude thatch to protect his family against the rain.

"Even now we are groping, experimenting, pioneering, working without background, making of the vast studios a Titan's laboratory in which human emotions are dealt in just as grocers weigh out sugar and flour.

"And without any tradition to guide us we are frightfully handicapped in our efforts to bring to the screen something new. In spite of the fact that hundreds of thousands of men and women have worked to bring the industry from its recent infancy to its present mammoth adolescence; as far as I know only one original bit of business has been introduced into the art of screen acting !

"Mr. Griffith believes that no producer, director, actor, critic, or side-line observer has been able to evolve' one new idea in all the tens of thousands of pictures that have been made, except that one little flash of originality to which I refer.

"That unique contribution came quite by accident, when we were making Broken Blossoms.

Donald Crisp, who played the role of Battling Burrows, my father, was beating me and commanding me to smile while he plied the lash. Mr. Griffith, the rest of the company, and I had conferred a hundred times as to the most effective way to comply with that savage command, and we could not decide on anything. ` "Suddenly it came to me: in the midst of the scene, and. while the camera was grinding, I lifted my hand, spread my index and second fingers, and pushed up the corners of my lips into a ghastly, Axed mouth-smile. " Mr. Griffith leaped to his feet and shouted: 'Hold it!' We did the scene many times until he was satisfied, and then he said to me: "'Lillian, that is the only original piece of acting ! have ever seen in the pictures.' " I don't know whether that is still true, and I dislike to imply that it was a great, or even a good, bit of business. I mention it only to show the abyss of newness in which we are still floundering, and for it I deserve no credit. I -just happened to do it; and if it pleased Mr. Griffith, that was all the reward I asked.

Because I regard David Wark Griffith as incomparably the finest, the greatest director the pictures have yet produced.

" They speak scornfully of this master, these newcomers in our industry. They say the parade has passed him, that he is out of touch with the developments of the modern screen.

" How incredibly wrong these detractors are !"

Why, Griffith is still so far ahead of the procession that his footprints are cold before the others reach them. He has contributed. more to the pictures than any other man who ever lived-and he has not yet produced his Ninth Symphony! He will yet do things that will leave his rivals shaking their heads as they candidly admit the great Griffith once again has showed them the way to truth and beauty.

" What if in late years he has directed plays that are regarded as failures? Not all of Beethoven's compositions were masterpieces; not all of Napoleon's battles were victories.

"What if some of Griffith's pictures have turned to sepia in his eyes, to aloes in his mouth? ' Don't you suppose he realizes this far more clearly than do his critics? Why, I don't think the other leaders in our world have even the faintest conception of what his goal is, 'what heights he longs to reach, what beauties and truths he yearns to put upon the screen.

If he is passÈ, down and out, finished, why haven't the other directors improved on his contributions to the films? With all the countless millions of dollars at their command, the mechanical improvements in lenses and lighting, in wardrobe equipment, in studio facilities, and with all the knowledge we have acquired, why hasn't somebody done' something new-something to compare with the wonders Griffith achieved in the days of meager capital, puny resources, beginners' equipment, and primitive essays into an untrodden wilderness?

" "To comprehend something of what this director did, you must know something about where the pictures came from and their first faltering steps in the path to our present estate.

" First of all, the world laughed at the idea that the flickering, eye-straining, brand-new amusement could ever become anything more than a childish toy.- Laughter is a lethal critic. The only people who could have lifted the early pictures to a plane of dignity and accomplishment, the actors and actresses and directors of the speaking stage, viewed the movies with contempt. It was only when engagements were scarce and their purses empty that they condescended to be seen in the silly things, and even then anonymous names masked their identities.

" Mechanical improvement was tardy, tied up with patent litigation, with jealousy, uncertainty as to what ought to be done with the new discovery, and delayed because capital was timid about backing the strange business.

" From the first year of this century to that first landmark, The Great Train Robbery, in 1903, the pictures were merely tricks and devices to entertain and bewilder those who owned s nickel and cared to spend it at the entrance to the ramshackle, unventilated, debris-littered fire traps we could hire for the exhibition of the dreadful films.

"Biograph and Vitagraph and Kalem and Lubin and the independent Carl Laemmle in this country, and Pathe in France, led the way.

Their difficulties and discouragementÌs and despair are historic yet familiar to almost every adult in the world, because they existed only yesterday.

"You remember, of course,' the trick films, where a pair of tailor's shears cut a suit out of a bolt of cloth without the aid of human hands, the suit crawling down the side of the table, across the floor, and up on s sewing machine, where it stitched itself together, ironed itself on a near-by board, and draped itself around the underweared figure of the hero --a man with a huge mustache and false eyebrows and an idea that screen acting consisted of grimaces and bodily contortions.

"Then came the period of the chaser and the chasee--mock policemen grotesquely made up, chasing an eloping pair, the automobiles running without drivers, the bicycles darting up fire escapes, the leading characters labeled The Boy and The Girl and Her Angry Father and The Brave Police Chief. You remember all these things, of course.

"I shall tell you presently my own connection with that era. Just now I want to tell you how David Wark Griffith stepped into this welter of strangeness, this madhouse of a new art and a new industry in the process of being born, and completely revolutionized it. Probably the most trying barrier that confronted him were the demands of the men who were putting up those early investments, that only infallible hits be turned out, that only duplicates of films which had brought back a little interest on the investment be produced.

For a long time Griffith, as well as the other directors, obeyed orders. Producer, director, writer, actor, cameraman, exhibitor, critic, and the public itself-all were guessing. Nobody knew what the people wanted. The people didn't know because everything offered to them was new. No one' knew whether it was good or bad; there was no precedent, no basis for comparison.

" If the people liked it-and they did, on the-same principle that he who never has tasted butter likes his bread without it --why, the producers and exhibitors repeated the dose. Thus the bad was perpetuated and became a tradition, a profit-making precedent; and the early hunters for truth and beauty, who instinctively recognized the puerility and faults of the films and who sought to hew a new path to fineness and truth, were beset with discouragement, terror, difficulties, scorn, contumely, and almost certain financial distress.

"These things obviously halted the development of real artistry in direction and in acting; and to this day we are suffering from that inevitable pioneering delay.

"But if Griffith was forced to walk in the narrow trail of mediocrity and worse, nevertheless he alone had the dreams and longings and confidence that could lift the baby industry to a worth-while level. He began to assemble that marvelous company of youthful novitiates in the movies--Bobbie Harron, Henry Walthall, Mae Marsh, Wallace Reid, Miriam Cooper, Walter Long, the Burns brothers, and Vestal Pague, and cowboys who could ride like centaurs; others who were to reach dizzy heights on the screen, and myself. One or two of us had been on the stage, but most of us were very young, and very inexperienced, and very timid, and uncertain what it was all about.

WITH that group the master began to make a picture based on The Clansman, a novel of Civil War reconstruction days, by Thomas Dixon. "The thing was done in fragments, and none of us had the remotest idea what it would be like when finished. It took nine weeks.Finally it was cut and titled and run off in the projection room. No one was there except the little group of amateurs who had created it under the craftsmanship of the courageous director When it ended, the testroom was very quiet; and when the lights were turned on we all walked out in silence I don't think' we appreciated the miracle we had witnessed. Mr. Griffith sat there alone. But he knew, he knew, what he had done ! " Later I shall tell you what The Birth of a Nation meant to the whole world, as well as to the industry that owes more to Mr. Griffith than to any other man. He conceived the idea of the close-up --moving the camera to within six feet of the actor's face, there to register and record the finest, mostfleeting evidences of that vital thing, technique. "He it was who discovered the now indispensable process of cutting back and forth in order to pick up the thread of the unvoiced story and bring the emotions and actions to a logical climax. "He first understood and perfected the idea of working up suspense. "He saved the industry countless millions of dollars by discovering that the film could be handled better with cotton gloves than with the bare hands, which ruined the delicate celluloid ribbon or left it splotched and painful to the eyes.

"Griffith it was who invented the fade-out. Once he told me that had he patented this amazing device, which was born of the idea of dissolving the scene by the aid of a cigar-box cover, he would be drawing royalties from every picture that is made anywhere today, because there isn't a picture now produced that ends its scenes abruptly, as they did before he created the fade-out.

"AND Griffith it was who, with the help of Hendrik Sartov and Billy Bitzer, great cameramen, in The Greatest Thing in Life and later in Broken Blossoms, softened the lines of the face and made it ineffably beautiful and appealing by employing the fusing lens--the soft focus."

" But if David Wark Griffith had not contributed all these mechanical aids to the pictures, he would still - have won immortality by one thing--his manner of telling the motion-picture story, a manner employed by every director in every - studio on earth today.

And I believe he will

yet do his greatest work, that he will yet be furnished with facilities and with stories that will make more indelible the stamp the world has put on him--the greatest director of them all.

" And when he and other toilers in our vineyard throughout the world begin to achieve greater pictures than any we have yet seen, I think you will find that these pictures approximate the fairy story rather than the bedtime story.

" By that I mean: the ideal picture will be a fairy story. It suggests so much; it creates sheer beauty; it gives such play to fancy and to the dreams that lie hidden in mankind's heart. Just now we have to give the audiences what I call bedtime stories; that is, a story all diagrammed and explained and leaving little to the imagination or to deduction. The plot now must be all worked out in pantomime that will reach even the most inferior comprehension out there in the darkened theater.

"The ideal picture, as far as art is concerned, would suggest everything, which means that adults would understand and finally demand such stories. The ideal picture, as far as the box office is now interested, tells everything, which means that even an infant can understand.

"They say the films are infantile; and these same intelligentsia maintain that Huckleberry Finn and The Mikado are infantile. Yet these are merely lovely stories that have withstood the wear and tear of the years; beautiful imageries that young and old alike have understood and gathered to their hearts for decades.

"When .I say these things,. two thoughts come to mind: one is, that the greatest picture ever made is Intolerance; and the other, that the most perfect picture yet produced is The Last Laugh.

"The first was twenty years ahead of its time, because with it Griffith tried to make those early audiences think--and they are hardly ready to think, even now.

The second needed no subtitles and has none, thus bearing a testimonial to the genius of Emil Jannings, the actor, and the group that created it. The perfect picture will have no subtitles, of course, because the whole story will be told by the characters. We are far from reaching that stage in a general sense, either as actors or as audiences."

Last modified on: Friday, August 8, 1997.