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Arts & Entertainment

The Birth of an Industry in the Friendly Village

Legendary Filmmaker D.W. Griffith Created Epics in Mamaroneck.

Lights! Camera! Action! Innovation! Controversy!

These first three words are the familiar calling card of the movie industry; the latter two must be attached to any discussion of D.W. Griffith, whose Mamaroneck film studio produced movies that made him one of the most influential figures in the history of cinema.

Perhaps best known as the director of the ground-breaking controversial film Birth of a Nation (1915), Griffith's productions were far more ambitious than the one- reel films that were the standard during the silent film era. He is credited with innovations in the film industry, such as cross-cutting (an editing tactic that alternates shots of different actions occurring at the same time), close-ups, scenic long shots, parallel narratives, camera movement and restrained acting. Some historians, however, have credited some of these innovations to Griffith's cameraman, Billy Bitzer.

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Birth of a Nation was a 190-minute, 12-reel epic. It has been said that the new techniques Griffith employed helped to establish filmmaking as an art form and Griffith as a producer extraordinaire. Not only is he credited with ambitious cinematic firsts, but Griffith was also instrumental in securing Mamaroneck's place in the annals of filmmaking history. 

In 1919, Griffith, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin formed their own production company, United Artists Corporation (UA), designed to secure the freedom they felt they were losing to the emerging, powerful Hollywood studios. UA's first film was Broken Blossoms starring Griffith muse Lillian Gish.

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Coincidentally, Griffith's desire to exercise greater control over his productions and to live in the manner he felt matched his status as America's premier director spurred him to move his troupe of actors and film company from California to Mamaroneck. He purchased the 28-acre Henry Flagler estate on Orienta Point for a reported $375,000 to build his own film studio.  According to Richard Schickel in his sweeping biography D.W. Griffith: An American Life, when Lillian Gish was asked why Griffith chose so expensive a site for his studio, she replied, "He loved beauty." Schickel described the property as "…beautiful, perhaps the most imposing combination of grounds and structure anyone has ever employed for the manufacture of motion pictures."

Purchased as a residential estate, the property was quickly transformed into a movie studio to avoid being out of production for too long.  Armed with the proceeds from his burgeoning directing career, his newly minted reputation as America's "it" director, and his Mamaroneck studio near completion, Griffith made the move east.

Out of his Mamaroneck studio would come the film described by many as Griffith's greatest box office triumph, Way Down East (1920).  It would also be the site where, in spectacular fashion, he replicated 18th century France for his film of the French Revolution, Orphans of the Storm (1921).  For this epic, Schickel describes Griffith's attention to detail:  "Griffith literally covered half his studio's acreage with huge sets representing the Royal Palace, Notre Dame, Versailles, The Bastille; and on days when his streets had to be filled with mobs, extras, literally by the truckload, were brought in."

With his company based in Mamaroneck, Griffith would go on to direct films for UA and other film studios to help keep UA and his Mamaroneck studio afloat and to repay mounting loans obtained to finance his epics.   

In D.W. Griffith: His Life and Work, Robert M. Henderson describes the business arrangement that would mark the beginning of the end of Griffith's position as a principal with UA and his Mamaroneck studio: "He announced that he had agreed in secret to accept $250,000 from [Producer] Adolph Zukor for D.W. Griffith, Inc. against his own commitment to direct three pictures for Zukor."  With this arrangement, Griffith became a contract director for Zukor's Famous Players Corporation—which would become Paramount Pictures—and was no longer an independent filmmaker able to choose his own properties.  

Griffith went on to direct additional films, none of them enjoying the success or publicity of Birth of a Nation, its follow-up Intolerance (1916) or Way Down East. With his star fading and his finances in disarray, Griffith worked to put things in order.

"On January 2, 1925, papers for the sale of the basic Mamaroneck property of 28 acres were signed. A real estate developer who wished to subdivide the land had been found, and he agreed to pay $485,000 for it over the next four years. Another thirty acres, those acquired to bring industrial strength electrical power to the studio, remained unsold for some years, and all of the outbuildings were torn down, with only the Flagler mansion left as a reminder of great wealth and great dreams of it," wrote Schickel.

According to Russell Merritt, professor of Film Studies at UC Berkeley, "The customary view—that Griffith's work became dull and undistinguished when he lost his personal studio in Mamaroneck in 1924—continues to prevail."

While Griffith is generally acknowledged as a most influential figure in films, he had his detractors as well. Made prior to the move to Mamaroneck, Birth stirred tremendous criticism—and some riots in Northern cities—in reaction to his negative depiction of blacks and the positive light he sheds on slavery and the Ku Klux Klan. In answer to his critics, Griffith released Intolerance, which explored the impact of intolerance in four distinct historical periods. The time and expense spent on the film was unprecedented.

D.W. Griffith died from a cerebral hemorrhage in Hollywood, Calif. on July 23, 1948 at the age of 73. He was buried in Kentucky near his birthplace.

D.W. Griffith put Mamaroneck on Hollywood's radar screen in 1919. Today, it is still a "go to" locale for filmmakers. In the coming weeks, Patch will share a few of those films with our readers.

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