Birth of Hollywood (2011): Season 1, Episode 1 - Episode #1.1 - full transcript
Here we go. Good luck, everyone.
This is Hollywood!
MUSIC: "Hooray For Hollywood"
One of the most famous places
on the planet - Hollywood,
one word with a million
cinematic associations.
But if you and I were standing on
exactly the same spot 100 years ago,
we would be looking out on hundreds
and thousands of orange groves,
growing a million oranges.
And amidst that budding fruit -
a small town.
So how and why did
the American film industry
end up here, in this rural hamlet
and who were the geniuses,
the visionaries, the eccentrics,
who created this weird alchemy
of art and industry?
This is the epic story
of the birth of Hollywood
and how it set the blue print
for today's cinema industry.
Film began as simple, silent images
trapped inside a wooden box
viewed by one person at a time
at funfairs.
Yet within 20 years, film had become
both a legitimate art form
and the dominant
entertainment medium of its age.
Silent films transcended language
and visual jokes could be
appreciated throughout the world.
Hugely-popular films
transformed previously anonymous
stage actors
into the most famous people
on the planet.
In just a few short years,
they became movie stars.
The DNA of Hollywood was established
in two tumultuous decades,
from 1910 to 1930.
By the end of the silent era,
every aspect of movie-making
had been conquered.
The big studios, the big stars,
documentaries, animation,
sound, colour, and yes, even 3D.
An extraordinary spurt
of creative growth,
but the American film industry
did not begin here in Hollywood.
It began here in New York,
3,000 miles away.
New York - the physical
embodiment of the 20th century.
Sky scrapers,
millions of people, traffic noise.
But of course, back at the beginning
of the 20th century,
it didn't sound like this.
It sounded more like this...
HORSES' HOOVES
As the film industry
took its first faltering steps,
America was a very different place.
Industrialisation
was changing the country.
TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWS
Millions of immigrants sailed
to this new land of opportunity.
Ellis Island -
the newcomers'
first experience of America.
In the first decade
of the 20th century,
approximately ten million immigrants
arrived in America,
many of them escaping poverty
or persecution in Europe.
After sailing 3,000 miles
across the ocean
they were processed here
in the main hall on Ellis Island.
On a busy day, there'd be
thousands of people in here,
their various languages
bouncing off each other.
Scattered amongst the millions
pouring in to America,
were several penniless young men
who would one day run
the American film industry.
They would become the movie moguls
behind the most celebrated
film studios in the world.
But the first big character
in our story is Thomas Edison.
The prolific American-born inventor
personified the spirit of the age -
a tireless pursuer of new ideas.
Thomas Edison's most famous
invention, the phonograph,
was the world's first device for
recording and playing back sound.
He was based here
in West Orange, New Jersey,
in these buildings behind me.
He headed a creative team
of inventors,
a juggernaut of creative output.
These buildings now
are the Edison Museum.
Another Edison company invention
was the Kinetoscope.
This is the pattern shop
where the prototype for the
Kinetoscope was first developed.
The Kinetoscope worked rather like
a "what the butler saw"
peepshow machine.
Viewed by one individual at a time,
the viewer would have
to crank their own handle.
The Kinetoscope
was all the rage in 1893.
People would watch moving images
of strong men, cock fights
and exotic dancers.
For the first time ever,
people could witness events
they weren't present at.
Boxing matches
were illegal in many states,
but now you can watch a boxing match
any time you liked.
Just put your eyes
to the viewfinder and there it was.
The Kinetoscope was like
a primitive version of YouTube.
Both inventions exhibited
a taste for the brutal,
the entertaining
and the downright daft.
The Kinetoscope used 35mm film
with a line of sprocket holes
either side.
This is still
the industry standard today.
These early films were made
inside the world's first
purpose-built movie studio.
And this is the replica of it
behind me here.
The whole thing is mounted on
a turntable so it can follow the sun
with a hole in the roof allowing
the sunshine to flow inside
to illuminate the action.
This is inside the replica
of the world's first film studio.
Edison claimed the credit,
but the real driving force
behind the Kinetoscope,
in fact he invented it, was one of
Edison's employees, William Dickson.
It was he who produced and directed
these early films.
This is William Dickson
playing the violin.
This experimental film was made
before the invention of women.
William Dickson, the true inventor
of the Kinetoscope,
left the Edison company in 1895
to set up his own studio,
the American Mutoscope and Biograph
Company, here in Manhattan,
and their studio was up on the roof,
up there.
Because the Kinetoscope
only allowed one person to view
the contents at any one time,
it was destined to remain
a fairground novelty.
The final step into cinema
was taken by the Lumiere brothers
in Paris in 1895,
when they successfully projected
images onto a big screen.
Film, no longer exclusively
a solitary experience,
now had an audience.
The first classic of the American
screen, The Great Train Robbery,
wasn't made until 1903.
This colourful effect
was achieved by hand-painting
the individual frames.
The film was produced
by the Edison company
and directed by Edwin S Porter.
Edwin Porter was heavily influenced
by the European pioneers,
and particularly the Englishman
James Williamson, born in Brighton.
Here is Williamson's Fire in 1901.
And here is Edwin S Porter's
Life Of An American Fireman,
released two years later.
By the mid-1900s,
millions of blue-collar Americans
were flocking to rudimentary
cinemas called nickelodeons.
These were mostly
converted shop fronts -
cramped, stifling, smelly places
filled with enthusiastic audiences
captivated by the light
shining in the dark.
Not all nickelodeons
were in converted shop fronts.
Other empty buildings
were used as well.
The Sunshine behind me
used to be a Dutch Reformed Church.
The audiences who attended
these early nickelodeons
were largely immigrants.
Russian Jews, Germans,
Italians, Polish.
Though they had little grasp
of English,
they were able to enjoy
this new visual medium.
The first nickelodeons
opened up in 1905,
and the audiences
tended to get very involved
in the on-screen happenings.
EXCITED MURMURING
The American film industry
grew to meet the demands
of the nickelodeon audience.
I'm in the New Jersey town
of Fort Lee, just across
the Hudson River from Manhattan.
A lot of the very early film
companies made their home here
in Fort Lee.
Fort Lee had great scenery
and plenty of it.
The term "cliffhanger" was first
coined to describe films made here,
literally on the edge of a cliff.
This is The Perils Of Pauline,
starring Pearl White.
These early films,
with the same character every week,
were the forerunner
of today's soap operas.
The films may have had height
but they lacked distinction.
Stage actors looked down
on the so-called "flickers",
and if you were caught
working in a film,
this could be considered detrimental
to your professional
stage reputation.
No, the prestige lay in
legitimate theatre - Shakespeare -
not in showing
mute black-and-white images
on a dirty bed sheet,
designed to entertain lower classes.
But that attitude would change.
Enter DW Griffith, an unsuccessful
stage actor and playwright
who found himself
in Fort Lee one summer
looking for acting work in films.
DW Griffith
was born in Kentucky in 1875.
His father,
a casualty of the Civil War,
had fought on the side of the South.
His love of storytelling
began as a young boy.
Griffith would listen, transfixed,
as his father told battle stories
about his experiences
in the American Civil War.
These were highly-partisan accounts,
but DW worshipped his father Jacob
and believed every word.
As an adult,
DW Griffith's love of storytelling
played a hugely significant part
in establishing the American movie
as an art form.
But by 1907, artistic immortality
was still eluding DW.
He thought of himself
as a man of the theatre,
a man of great destiny.
Unfortunately,
destiny wasn't impressed.
In that same year, 1907,
he became a movie actor,
working for the Edison company
here in Fort Lee,
making a film called
Rescued From The Eagle's Nest.
Intended as a melodrama, it has many
unintentional comic moments.
Here is DW Griffith
attempting to rescue the baby.
Stand amazed as he fights
a battle to the death
with an eagle that's clearly
been dead for some time.
In 1908, Griffith found acting work
at the Biograph film company
in New York.
One of the directors
didn't turn up one day
and DW was offered a chance
to direct his first movie,
The Adventures Of Dollie.
The film,
a fast-paced kidnapping melodrama,
was greeted enthusiastically
by audiences.
The director's job at Biograph
in 1908 was really quite simple.
Because the camera never moved,
somebody had to make sure
that the actors wouldn't suddenly
walk out of the frame and disappear
entirely from the film.
Someone had to tell them
to walk back into the shot.
In fact, the most important person
on the set was not the director
but the cameraman.
In this case, Billy Bitzer.
Billy had to hand-crank the camera
at a constant rate,
ensuring the film didn't suddenly
speed up or slow down.
But DW Griffith
was a great organiser
and a great believer in himself,
which helped him quickly
become a prolific director.
In 1908, he made 60 films.
If you think that's going some,
in 1909 he made over 100,
most of the films
being around 15 minutes long.
Often, the films were improvised,
with very little script
worked out in advance.
Griffith rapidly gained
a reputation as a director
who was good with actors.
They trusted him.
As the films were silent,
Griffith could coach his cast
through the performances he wanted.
Here is Mary Pickford
in The New York Hat.
Griffith saw himself as
a great artist, a sensitive poet.
His repertory company
were deeply in awe of him.
A reverential hush
would settle on the set
whenever DW was ready to direct.
Are you ready, Bitzer?
Ready, sir.
Camera...
and...
and...
action.
You're having a bad dream.
Think of the hat.
Now wake up!
And you're thinking of the hat again.
You realise it will never be yours.
Now the minister comes in.
You're taking the hat out of the box.
You feel faint.
You're remembering
your mother's last wishes.
Mixed emotions.
Mixed emotions.
Beautiful.
Although Biograph's studios
were in New York,
DW very rarely used
New York exteriors.
One notable exception
was The Musketeers Of Pig Alley.
The film was praised
for its bold framing.
New York gangsters on screen
were pussycats in comparison
to the real-life crooks
who were proving to be a nightmare
for many film makers.
And that was largely down
to Thomas Edison.
This is Edison's office.
He asserted that the movies
were his invention alone.
For every single foot of film
run through a camera or a projector,
then you owed Edison money.
In 1908, he established a cartel,
or a "Trust",
as he preferred to call it,
who insisted to exhibitors that
only their films could be shown.
The Biograph film company
was one that joined
and paid Edison
for the right to make films.
The Trust enforced its will
by employing thugs or hired goons
to destroy the camera equipment
of companies not belonging
to the trust.
These smaller companies
couldn't afford to pay Edison
and so they decided, many of them,
to make the 3,000-mile rail journey
from New York
to Southern California.
In California, they were
beyond the reach of Edison's thugs
and when they came here,
they realised the sun shone
300 days of the year,
land was cheap to rent,
and there was enough space
to stretch out and experiment.
They sent word back to Fort Lee,
"We have discovered film-making
heaven and it's called Los Angeles."
In this freer environment,
many directors became directors
for the very first time.
Allan Dwan was one of them.
They got me a little megaphone
and then they carefully taught me
what to say.
First, you say, "Camera,"
and the camera starts to turn.
Then you say, "Action,"
and when we get through acting,
you say "cut".
Now you learn that,
"Camera, action, cut."
So I studied all day and learned it.
And the director was away
on a binge, he was an alcoholic,
and they were waiting for him
to come back and put them to work.
So I wired the company in Chicago
and said,
"You have no director,
I suggest you disband the company."
And they wired back, "You direct."
So I told the company,
I got them together and I said,
"Now, either I'm a director,
or you're out of work."
And they said, "You're the best
damn director we ever saw."
DW Griffith was one of the first
directors to move to California.
In January 1910, DW Griffith
brought his Biograph actors
to this hotel here,
the Hotel Alexandria in Los Angeles.
As an employee of one
of the Trust companies, he had
no need to fear Edison's thugs,
but he wanted to avoid
the short days and weak sunlight
of the eastern winter.
The plan was to make a dozen films
around these streets here
and up in the hills
and then eventually return east.
This early Griffith film,
called Faithful,
shows Hollywood as it was
100 years ago.
Among the performers that DW brought
to Hollywood was Mary Pickford.
Mary Pickford first appeared on
stage at the age of eight years old.
By 1909, at the age of 17,
she was looking for a job.
Like all stage actors at that time,
she looked down on the movies.
This was rather ironic,
as stage actors themselves were
considered the lowest of the low,
so it was a bit of a novelty
for them to be able to look down
on somebody else.
She'd heard that the Biograph
film studio in New Jersey
were hiring young actresses
so she went along.
She met DW Griffith. She wasn't
particularly impressed by him.
He, on the other hand,
was mightily impressed by her.
He liked her fieriness,
her sense of self-esteem,
her insistence on being called
"Miss Pickford",
and also that she was
a proper actress who appeared
on the proper stage.
DW Griffith hired her,
moved her to Hollywood
and together in their first year,
they made 42 films.
From these simple beginnings
with Biograph and Griffith,
Mary would go on to become
the most powerful woman
Hollywood has ever known.
Although she was immensely popular,
cinema audiences
didn't know her name.
She was simply "the Biograph girl".
Mary was also a tough
and shrewd businesswoman.
Mary Pickford was walking
down the street one day
when she noticed a large crowd
gathered outside a cinema.
She went over.
She saw they were advertising
a film starring "the Biograph girl",
with huge photographs of her.
To Mary's mind, this meant
that Biograph should be paying her
a hell of a lot more money.
Biograph didn't agree. To them,
the actor was the most expendable
part of any film.
Mary Pickford had no intention
of either being expendable
or anonymous.
She was tempted away from
Biograph by Carl Laemmle's company,
Independent Moving Pictures,
which would later become
part of Universal Pictures.
As well as substantially more
money, Pickford was promised
that her name would be placed above
the title of all her films
and in all cinema advertising.
During 1911, Mary Pickford
appeared in 34 films for Laemmle.
In The Dream, we vividly witness
two acting styles -
the berserk
against Mary's naturalism.
Carl Laemmle was born into
a German Jewish family.
Following the death of his mother,
he emigrated to America
when he was 17 years old.
He was part of a new breed
of entrepreneur,
businessmen who had grasped
the huge potential of the movies -
a business so new,
it had no established anti-Semitism.
It was my father, Joseph,
who travelled to America first.
That was sometime in the 1880s.
Then the next one was Carl,
Carl Laemmle. Mm-hm.
He was only 17
when he came to America
He was only 17
when he came to America
and, of course,
he did not speak the language and...
..it was going to be a tough goal,
because they only had
$50 apiece on them,
and so they were headed
for an adventure.
He bought a theatre, yes, and it...
They had the nickelodeon.
I think it was five cents,
something like that. Yes, yes.
And...
he ended up buying another theatre.
He liked the picture business.
He liked that, showing films,
and, of course,
he ended up with Universal.
And I believe there was a zoo.
Was there a zoo?
Oh, there was a fabulous zoo.
And what sort of animals?
It had just about every animal
you can imagine.
One in particular, a camel,
that would frequently get loose
and travel the mile
up to the front lot where we lived,
and there was a huge lawn there
that was very tasty for camels
and he would graze there
and I would wake up sometimes
in the morning and there he would be.
And so I'd get a little dish
of oatmeal and I'd lure him
into one of the garages
and he seemed to be comfortable
there with the oatmeal
and then I'd come back
and phone down to the zoo
and tell them that I had their camel,
you know,
and to come up and pick him up.
But it was so much fun.
It was wonderful. I loved it.
Another European immigrant
was the Hungarian-born Adolph Zukor.
He would become head
of Paramount Pictures.
He was 16 years old
when he arrived in America.
He got a job in the fur trade,
which taught him that the public
were happy to pay more
for extra quality.
Adolph Zukor wanted to appeal
to the burgeoning middle classes.
He reasoned they had more money
and would be prepared to spend it
to watch good-quality
theatrical productions.
He bought the film rights
to a French movie
about Queen Elizabeth, starring
the celebrated stage actress
of a generation, Sarah Bernhardt.
Sarah Bernhardt's acting technique
was formed on stage
in the latter half
of the 19th century.
Can you spot the moment
she discovers there's a dead man
in the room?'
But the film achieved
what Adolph Zukor wanted.
A serious actress in a serious
play conveyed instant prestige.
Attracting a middle class audience
to the movies was a key element
in the development
of film as an artistic medium.
Yet another European immigrant,
Charlie Chaplin,
was born in London.
By the age of nine he was appearing
on the professional music hall.
At the age of 24 he was touring
America in a stage show
when he was spotted
by Mack Sennett's studios.
Mack Sennett was Hollywood's
biggest comedy producer.
He ran Keystone Comedies.
Here is Charlie's first day working
inside Sennett's Keystone lot.
Mack Sennett took one of the more
traditional routes into
movie-making.
He'd been a mediocre stage actor
before becoming a mediocre
film actor.
If you think that's a bit harsh,
have a look.
Perhaps the worst comic
actor in the history of the movies.
'Let's put that spit back
where it belongs.'
Mack Sennett opened up
the Keystone Studios,
the world's first studios entirely
devoted to the making
of comedy films.
It opened here in 1912 - the big
white building behind me.
Soon they were churning out
two to three short films a week.
Mack Sennett was quite
open in admitting that he stole
most of his ideas
from the early
French Pathe comedies.
This is a Pathe Comedy featuring
hapless policemen falling over.
And here are Mack Sennett's
Keystone Kops.
Initially, Keystone Comedies
were made without a script
or much pre-planning.
When Mack Sennett heard that
the lake here in Echo Park
was being drained,
he sent over a cameraman and a cast
of comedians to make a film.
The drawback of this approach
is inherently clear in the movie.
Once the water is drained
from the lake, we are left
with two stuck boats
with little prospect of the famous
Keystone fast-paced action.
Psychological motivation was never
a strong concern
at the Sennett Studios
and here the actors,
for no plausible reason,
throw themselves off stationery
boats and into the glorious mud.
This bridge is in exactly
the same location as the original
Echo Park bridge,
and that bridge featured in a hell
of a lot of Keystone comedies.
Roscoe Arbuckle, Charlie Chaplin -
they all ran across this bridge...
and now it's my turn.
The Keystone philosophy
was to always end on a chase,
and the custard pie fight was also
heavily associated with the studio.
It's one of the things we
know about silent comedies -
they're full of people throwing
custard pies at each other.
Except they're not. Very few
Keystone films feature them.
Occasionally there is the flung
pastry here and there
but generally speaking,
the object of choice to be
thrown is the simple brick,
easily found at the side
of the road,
whereas a custard pie fight can only
plausibly take place in a bakery.
In Mabel At The Wheel,
Charlie Chaplin in the distance
is giving as good as he gets.
Mabel At The Wheel nearly finished
Charlie Chaplin's film career.
He argued with the star and
director, Mabel Normand,
that he wasn't being given enough
time to develop his gags.
She threw him off the picture.
After tempers calmed down, it was
agreed that Charlie would help Mabel
to finish her film,
providing he was allowed to direct
his next.
This is a pivotal
moment in film history.
One moment Chaplin's career
was nearly over,
the next he's directing
his own pictures
and taking a giant step to becoming
the most famous man in the world.
Mack Sennett, Mabel Normand
and Charlie Chaplin
later starred together
in a Keystone comedy,
just to show
there were no hard feelings.
Mack Sennett created
the conditions for comedy to thrive.
The relaxed relationship
between Charlie and his employer
is glimpsed here,
much to Charlie's amusement.
But at the film's finale, we are
in no doubt as to who's boss.
Chaplin needed to direct
his own work.
In this early Keystone film
not directed by Charlie
the director immediately cuts away
from the legs hooked on
to the windowsill.
Under his own direction
in The Rounders,
Charlie allows the hooked legs
to properly register.
Charlie Chaplin's co-star
in The Rounders was Roscoe Arbuckle.
Roscoe worked under the name
of Fatty, a name he detested.
His friends always called him
Roscoe.
Roscoe had been a successful
Vaudeville actor when he first met
Mack Sennett
but within a few months of working
at Keystone, Roscoe was directing
his own films.
When Charlie came up with
the idea of the tramp character,
he borrowed a pair of Roscoe's
outsized trousers for comic effect.
In The Rounders, the two of them
are chased through this park
before eventually
they both fall into the lake.
Two young comedians
on the brink of world fame.
That same year, 1914,
also saw the film
debut of one of Hollywood's most
famous directors, Cecil B DeMille.
Born in Massachusetts,
he'd been an actor and a playwright
but was still looking for something
to do with his life
when he was approached to direct
a film for Adolph Zukor
and his partners.
The film that Cecil directed,
The Squaw Man, was over
80 minutes long.
I'm sitting in Cecil B DeMille's
office.
In 1913 Cecil and producer Jesse
Lasky had bought the film rights
to an old stage hit called
The Squaw Man, a western.
The plan was to film it in Arizona
but when they got to Arizona
they found it was lying
under two feet of snow -
not very good for a Western.
Who's ever heard of Big Chief
Snowplough?
So Cecil decided to come on
to Los Angeles,
where he heard about a barn that was
available for rent here
in Hollywood -
The very barn that I'm sitting
in now.
Cecil rented it, they shot
The Squaw Man in about 18 days
and it went on to become American
cinema's first feature length film.
The Squaw Man demonstrates
a bold approach to cinema,
keen to exploit its possibilities.
Here we see our hero's
inner thoughts.
The Squaw Man's status as American
cinema's first feature length film
no doubt infuriated DW Griffith,
who saw himself as the great pioneer
and he had ambitions
to make his own feature films.
Griffith was hugely frustrated
by Biograph's lack of vision
and by the sense that others
were stealing his thunder.
'He was inspired by the artistic
ambition
of such Italian
epics as Cabiria.
Imaginative sets and a cast
of hundreds
give Cabiria
a massive sense of scale.
While European directors were making
feature films over an hour long,
Biograph were restricting
DW Griffith to one reelers,
that's approximately 12 minutes
of screen time.
It made sense for them.
Short films could be made
very cheaply in two to three days,
but also make an enormous profit.
Griffith decided,
if he wanted to make a longer film,
he'd just have to go ahead
without telling Biograph.
DW Griffith filmed the battle
scenes for his first feature,
Judith of Bethulia,
here, north of Hollywood in 1913.
Judith was Griffith's response
to the Italian epics he so admired.
Although he didn't have
their budget,
he tried to match their scale.
100 years ago, these hills were
alive with the sound of extras
walloping each other across the head
with wooden swords.
DW Griffith must have been
in his element,
walking around this pretend
battlefield,
choreographing
hand-to-hand combat.
Judith of Bethulia is
a very difficult film to watch.
It's combination of excessively
wordy title cards, for example:
"In the eighteenth year
of his reign,
"Nebuchadnezzar,
King of the Assyrians,
"sent forth Prince Holofernes
"with the army of Assur
"to lay waste
all the countries of the West."
That, combined with
old-fashioned, over-the-top acting,
makes the film seem ancient
and plodding.
It's easy to believe
it was filmed before
the Old Testament was written,
making the Bible
the book of the film.
It's also extremely tedious because
there's no sense of humour anywhere.
Any laughs there are,
are purely unintentional.
The beheading scene
is so clumsily staged,
you would be forgiven
for missing it altogether.
The film looks awkward and bogus
in comparison to Cabiria,
which was made the year before.
The First World War gave Hollywood
an enormous advantage.
The European film industry
was severely hit.
With the competition gone,
Hollywood was king.
And Mary Pickford became its queen.
Tess of the Storm Country
was the feature length film
that catapulted Mary
to world stardom.
In Tess, we see the feisty side
of her screen image.
As a vivid illustration of how
famous film stars had become,
in 1910, audiences
didn't know Mary Pickford's name.
And here she is,
just a few years later,
appearing in front of thousands
of fascinated New Yorkers.
Mary's old boss, DW Griffith,
was also kicking up a storm
at the box office.
In 1915, DW Griffith made
the hugely successful blockbuster,
Birth Of A Nation.
At three hours long, it was
his most ambitious film to date.
History judges it
as both a masterpiece
and arguably the most
controversial film ever made.
The first half of the film
deals with the tragedy
of the American Civil War.
The Birth of a Nation
was told entirely
from the point of view
of the South.
The stories that Griffith
grew up with as a child
were dramatised on the screen.
DW Griffith and his cameraman
Billy Bitzer
made good use
of the Hollywood hills behind me,
and would judiciously place
smoke bombs
that made the battle scenes
gripping and epic.
Directorally,
the film has great flourishes.
But it also had long patches
of tedium.
While we're looking at this letter,
some of you might want
to raise a family,
or go to Canada and back!
The tedium is difficult
to sit through,
but Griffith offends more
than artistic taste.
At the end of the Civil War,
black African Americans briefly
attained some political power.
Here, Griffith depicts
the black parliament members
'as racial stereotypes,
barely civilised in their
behaviour.
Birth Of A Nation was released
just 50 years after the end
of the Civil War.
Its public screenings were
spectacular events,
accompanied by 35-piece orchestras.
This is the music
the public would have heard:
Wagner's Ride Of The Valkyries.
Griffith's heroes
are the Ku Klux Klan.
MUSIC: "Ride of the Valkyries"
by Wagner
William Walker saw the film
in 1916.
And some people were crying.
You could hear people saying,
"Oh, God."
And some say, "Damn,"
like you could hear them because
of the reaction of the people.
You had the worst feeling
in the world,
it just felt like
you were...
you were not counted,
you were just out of existence.
The Birth Of A Nation
is a racist film,
based on a racist novel,
The Clansman.
But so much of the film's power must
be down to Wagner's stirring music.
Let's take that same music
and put it over a Mack Sennett
comedy.
STIRRING MUSIC
MUSIC: "Ride of the Valkyries"
by Wagner
All the tension and suspense
of DW Griffith,
without the inherent racism.
If there's any one film that
demonstrates the power of cinema,
it's The Birth Of A Nation.
Griffith's divisive film
broke box office records.
The film was so effective
that the Klan,
which had been dormant for decades,
was re-established in 1915,
and not just in the lynch mob happy
south.
Within a few years,
thousands of Klan members
from all over America
were marching through
Washington DC.
The film's many opponents
tried to get it banned,
with little success.
DW Griffith,
with the extroadinary arrogance
of a man who is never wrong,
declared the critics of him
and his film, Birth Of A Nation,
were guilty of intolerance.
Griffith realised this could be
a theme for a new epic,
intolerance through the ages,
four parallel stories
told over the course of
three very long hours.
He was also partly inspired
by a visit to San Francisco in 1915
to see the World Fair.
He marvelled at the architecture,
like the magnificent
Palace of Fine Arts behind me.
He hired the same designers
and craftsmen
to build him a massive film set.
Although impressive in scale,
as a film, it's a mess.
Following the four continuous
stories is impossible.
And there are terrible
moments of weak plotting.
A woman looks out the window
and sees a street walker.
So impressed is she,
she dreams of becoming
a streetwalker herself.
The beheading, which is so badly
fumbled in Judith of Bethulia,
is better represented in
Intolerance.
The effect is more comic
than DW might have liked.
Although there are some
genuinely horrific moments.
DW Griffith was a man
who created his own myth,
claiming to have invented
techniques such as the close-up.
The truth is, he didn't.
The grammar of cinema had been
invented in Europe.
Griffith was an important
American pioneer.
But, as techniques progressed,
his style of melodramatic film
looked increasingly old-fashioned.
SIRENS
A new urban realism
was entering the American cinema.
These new films were shot
in real locations
and featured people
that didn't look like film stars.
Raoul Walsh, a former assistant
director to Griffith,
rivalled and even surpassed him
with his 1915 New York drama,
Regeneration.
Set amongst the tenements,
it was a gritty, riveting,
realistic portrayal
of how the poor lived their lives.
It brought a new freshness to the
American screen, a new realism,
real people, as opposed to the
melodramatic heroes and villains
of Griffith's era.
Also in 1915,
Cecil B De Mille
directed The Cheat.
Its atmospheric lighting
and depiction of physical violation
gripped audiences
throughout the world.
1915 was also a pivotal year
for Charlie Chaplin.
In his short film, The Tramp,
he successfully combined comedy
with emotion.
He was now a fully rounded
character audiences cared about.
Films stars' prestige and power
reached startling heights
at the end of the decade
when DW Griffith, Charlie Chaplin,
Mary Pickford and her husband-to-be
Douglas Fairbanks
stunned Hollywood by forming
their production company,
United Artists,
guaranteeing
their creative independence.
Film actors had gone from earning
five dollars a day
to becoming
world famous millionaires.
In ten years, Hollywood had
transformed itself
from a rustic, back water
stuffed with oranges,
into something much more
than a place:
a state of mind.
Power, excess,
fame, wealth, ambition.
Hollywood.
Film was now
the dominant entertainment medium
with millions going
to the cinema every day.
Its stars were young, charismatic
talented and newly wealthy.
This confident young industry
looked towards the 1920s
with a degree of confidence,
and licked its lips.
After all,
what could possibly go wrong?
In our next episode,
the decadence of 1920's Hollywood
threatens the industry
with extinction.
The sun shining behind me used to be
a Dutch reformed church.
Audiences attending
these nickleodeons...
CAR HORN
..were largely immigrants,
Russian Jews,
Germans, Italians, Spanish...
People hooting car horns to make
sure we have to do another take.
ITALIAN ACCENT: It's OK, it's all
right. I'm here anyway, you know.
The more acceptable object of
throne, desire, choice,
thing, bang-bang-bang. Pick a word,
put it in a sentence,
rearrange that sentence.
I'll start again.
OK, if I don't get this next time,
this is definitely voiceover.
This is Hollywood!
MUSIC: "Hooray For Hollywood"
One of the most famous places
on the planet - Hollywood,
one word with a million
cinematic associations.
But if you and I were standing on
exactly the same spot 100 years ago,
we would be looking out on hundreds
and thousands of orange groves,
growing a million oranges.
And amidst that budding fruit -
a small town.
So how and why did
the American film industry
end up here, in this rural hamlet
and who were the geniuses,
the visionaries, the eccentrics,
who created this weird alchemy
of art and industry?
This is the epic story
of the birth of Hollywood
and how it set the blue print
for today's cinema industry.
Film began as simple, silent images
trapped inside a wooden box
viewed by one person at a time
at funfairs.
Yet within 20 years, film had become
both a legitimate art form
and the dominant
entertainment medium of its age.
Silent films transcended language
and visual jokes could be
appreciated throughout the world.
Hugely-popular films
transformed previously anonymous
stage actors
into the most famous people
on the planet.
In just a few short years,
they became movie stars.
The DNA of Hollywood was established
in two tumultuous decades,
from 1910 to 1930.
By the end of the silent era,
every aspect of movie-making
had been conquered.
The big studios, the big stars,
documentaries, animation,
sound, colour, and yes, even 3D.
An extraordinary spurt
of creative growth,
but the American film industry
did not begin here in Hollywood.
It began here in New York,
3,000 miles away.
New York - the physical
embodiment of the 20th century.
Sky scrapers,
millions of people, traffic noise.
But of course, back at the beginning
of the 20th century,
it didn't sound like this.
It sounded more like this...
HORSES' HOOVES
As the film industry
took its first faltering steps,
America was a very different place.
Industrialisation
was changing the country.
TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWS
Millions of immigrants sailed
to this new land of opportunity.
Ellis Island -
the newcomers'
first experience of America.
In the first decade
of the 20th century,
approximately ten million immigrants
arrived in America,
many of them escaping poverty
or persecution in Europe.
After sailing 3,000 miles
across the ocean
they were processed here
in the main hall on Ellis Island.
On a busy day, there'd be
thousands of people in here,
their various languages
bouncing off each other.
Scattered amongst the millions
pouring in to America,
were several penniless young men
who would one day run
the American film industry.
They would become the movie moguls
behind the most celebrated
film studios in the world.
But the first big character
in our story is Thomas Edison.
The prolific American-born inventor
personified the spirit of the age -
a tireless pursuer of new ideas.
Thomas Edison's most famous
invention, the phonograph,
was the world's first device for
recording and playing back sound.
He was based here
in West Orange, New Jersey,
in these buildings behind me.
He headed a creative team
of inventors,
a juggernaut of creative output.
These buildings now
are the Edison Museum.
Another Edison company invention
was the Kinetoscope.
This is the pattern shop
where the prototype for the
Kinetoscope was first developed.
The Kinetoscope worked rather like
a "what the butler saw"
peepshow machine.
Viewed by one individual at a time,
the viewer would have
to crank their own handle.
The Kinetoscope
was all the rage in 1893.
People would watch moving images
of strong men, cock fights
and exotic dancers.
For the first time ever,
people could witness events
they weren't present at.
Boxing matches
were illegal in many states,
but now you can watch a boxing match
any time you liked.
Just put your eyes
to the viewfinder and there it was.
The Kinetoscope was like
a primitive version of YouTube.
Both inventions exhibited
a taste for the brutal,
the entertaining
and the downright daft.
The Kinetoscope used 35mm film
with a line of sprocket holes
either side.
This is still
the industry standard today.
These early films were made
inside the world's first
purpose-built movie studio.
And this is the replica of it
behind me here.
The whole thing is mounted on
a turntable so it can follow the sun
with a hole in the roof allowing
the sunshine to flow inside
to illuminate the action.
This is inside the replica
of the world's first film studio.
Edison claimed the credit,
but the real driving force
behind the Kinetoscope,
in fact he invented it, was one of
Edison's employees, William Dickson.
It was he who produced and directed
these early films.
This is William Dickson
playing the violin.
This experimental film was made
before the invention of women.
William Dickson, the true inventor
of the Kinetoscope,
left the Edison company in 1895
to set up his own studio,
the American Mutoscope and Biograph
Company, here in Manhattan,
and their studio was up on the roof,
up there.
Because the Kinetoscope
only allowed one person to view
the contents at any one time,
it was destined to remain
a fairground novelty.
The final step into cinema
was taken by the Lumiere brothers
in Paris in 1895,
when they successfully projected
images onto a big screen.
Film, no longer exclusively
a solitary experience,
now had an audience.
The first classic of the American
screen, The Great Train Robbery,
wasn't made until 1903.
This colourful effect
was achieved by hand-painting
the individual frames.
The film was produced
by the Edison company
and directed by Edwin S Porter.
Edwin Porter was heavily influenced
by the European pioneers,
and particularly the Englishman
James Williamson, born in Brighton.
Here is Williamson's Fire in 1901.
And here is Edwin S Porter's
Life Of An American Fireman,
released two years later.
By the mid-1900s,
millions of blue-collar Americans
were flocking to rudimentary
cinemas called nickelodeons.
These were mostly
converted shop fronts -
cramped, stifling, smelly places
filled with enthusiastic audiences
captivated by the light
shining in the dark.
Not all nickelodeons
were in converted shop fronts.
Other empty buildings
were used as well.
The Sunshine behind me
used to be a Dutch Reformed Church.
The audiences who attended
these early nickelodeons
were largely immigrants.
Russian Jews, Germans,
Italians, Polish.
Though they had little grasp
of English,
they were able to enjoy
this new visual medium.
The first nickelodeons
opened up in 1905,
and the audiences
tended to get very involved
in the on-screen happenings.
EXCITED MURMURING
The American film industry
grew to meet the demands
of the nickelodeon audience.
I'm in the New Jersey town
of Fort Lee, just across
the Hudson River from Manhattan.
A lot of the very early film
companies made their home here
in Fort Lee.
Fort Lee had great scenery
and plenty of it.
The term "cliffhanger" was first
coined to describe films made here,
literally on the edge of a cliff.
This is The Perils Of Pauline,
starring Pearl White.
These early films,
with the same character every week,
were the forerunner
of today's soap operas.
The films may have had height
but they lacked distinction.
Stage actors looked down
on the so-called "flickers",
and if you were caught
working in a film,
this could be considered detrimental
to your professional
stage reputation.
No, the prestige lay in
legitimate theatre - Shakespeare -
not in showing
mute black-and-white images
on a dirty bed sheet,
designed to entertain lower classes.
But that attitude would change.
Enter DW Griffith, an unsuccessful
stage actor and playwright
who found himself
in Fort Lee one summer
looking for acting work in films.
DW Griffith
was born in Kentucky in 1875.
His father,
a casualty of the Civil War,
had fought on the side of the South.
His love of storytelling
began as a young boy.
Griffith would listen, transfixed,
as his father told battle stories
about his experiences
in the American Civil War.
These were highly-partisan accounts,
but DW worshipped his father Jacob
and believed every word.
As an adult,
DW Griffith's love of storytelling
played a hugely significant part
in establishing the American movie
as an art form.
But by 1907, artistic immortality
was still eluding DW.
He thought of himself
as a man of the theatre,
a man of great destiny.
Unfortunately,
destiny wasn't impressed.
In that same year, 1907,
he became a movie actor,
working for the Edison company
here in Fort Lee,
making a film called
Rescued From The Eagle's Nest.
Intended as a melodrama, it has many
unintentional comic moments.
Here is DW Griffith
attempting to rescue the baby.
Stand amazed as he fights
a battle to the death
with an eagle that's clearly
been dead for some time.
In 1908, Griffith found acting work
at the Biograph film company
in New York.
One of the directors
didn't turn up one day
and DW was offered a chance
to direct his first movie,
The Adventures Of Dollie.
The film,
a fast-paced kidnapping melodrama,
was greeted enthusiastically
by audiences.
The director's job at Biograph
in 1908 was really quite simple.
Because the camera never moved,
somebody had to make sure
that the actors wouldn't suddenly
walk out of the frame and disappear
entirely from the film.
Someone had to tell them
to walk back into the shot.
In fact, the most important person
on the set was not the director
but the cameraman.
In this case, Billy Bitzer.
Billy had to hand-crank the camera
at a constant rate,
ensuring the film didn't suddenly
speed up or slow down.
But DW Griffith
was a great organiser
and a great believer in himself,
which helped him quickly
become a prolific director.
In 1908, he made 60 films.
If you think that's going some,
in 1909 he made over 100,
most of the films
being around 15 minutes long.
Often, the films were improvised,
with very little script
worked out in advance.
Griffith rapidly gained
a reputation as a director
who was good with actors.
They trusted him.
As the films were silent,
Griffith could coach his cast
through the performances he wanted.
Here is Mary Pickford
in The New York Hat.
Griffith saw himself as
a great artist, a sensitive poet.
His repertory company
were deeply in awe of him.
A reverential hush
would settle on the set
whenever DW was ready to direct.
Are you ready, Bitzer?
Ready, sir.
Camera...
and...
and...
action.
You're having a bad dream.
Think of the hat.
Now wake up!
And you're thinking of the hat again.
You realise it will never be yours.
Now the minister comes in.
You're taking the hat out of the box.
You feel faint.
You're remembering
your mother's last wishes.
Mixed emotions.
Mixed emotions.
Beautiful.
Although Biograph's studios
were in New York,
DW very rarely used
New York exteriors.
One notable exception
was The Musketeers Of Pig Alley.
The film was praised
for its bold framing.
New York gangsters on screen
were pussycats in comparison
to the real-life crooks
who were proving to be a nightmare
for many film makers.
And that was largely down
to Thomas Edison.
This is Edison's office.
He asserted that the movies
were his invention alone.
For every single foot of film
run through a camera or a projector,
then you owed Edison money.
In 1908, he established a cartel,
or a "Trust",
as he preferred to call it,
who insisted to exhibitors that
only their films could be shown.
The Biograph film company
was one that joined
and paid Edison
for the right to make films.
The Trust enforced its will
by employing thugs or hired goons
to destroy the camera equipment
of companies not belonging
to the trust.
These smaller companies
couldn't afford to pay Edison
and so they decided, many of them,
to make the 3,000-mile rail journey
from New York
to Southern California.
In California, they were
beyond the reach of Edison's thugs
and when they came here,
they realised the sun shone
300 days of the year,
land was cheap to rent,
and there was enough space
to stretch out and experiment.
They sent word back to Fort Lee,
"We have discovered film-making
heaven and it's called Los Angeles."
In this freer environment,
many directors became directors
for the very first time.
Allan Dwan was one of them.
They got me a little megaphone
and then they carefully taught me
what to say.
First, you say, "Camera,"
and the camera starts to turn.
Then you say, "Action,"
and when we get through acting,
you say "cut".
Now you learn that,
"Camera, action, cut."
So I studied all day and learned it.
And the director was away
on a binge, he was an alcoholic,
and they were waiting for him
to come back and put them to work.
So I wired the company in Chicago
and said,
"You have no director,
I suggest you disband the company."
And they wired back, "You direct."
So I told the company,
I got them together and I said,
"Now, either I'm a director,
or you're out of work."
And they said, "You're the best
damn director we ever saw."
DW Griffith was one of the first
directors to move to California.
In January 1910, DW Griffith
brought his Biograph actors
to this hotel here,
the Hotel Alexandria in Los Angeles.
As an employee of one
of the Trust companies, he had
no need to fear Edison's thugs,
but he wanted to avoid
the short days and weak sunlight
of the eastern winter.
The plan was to make a dozen films
around these streets here
and up in the hills
and then eventually return east.
This early Griffith film,
called Faithful,
shows Hollywood as it was
100 years ago.
Among the performers that DW brought
to Hollywood was Mary Pickford.
Mary Pickford first appeared on
stage at the age of eight years old.
By 1909, at the age of 17,
she was looking for a job.
Like all stage actors at that time,
she looked down on the movies.
This was rather ironic,
as stage actors themselves were
considered the lowest of the low,
so it was a bit of a novelty
for them to be able to look down
on somebody else.
She'd heard that the Biograph
film studio in New Jersey
were hiring young actresses
so she went along.
She met DW Griffith. She wasn't
particularly impressed by him.
He, on the other hand,
was mightily impressed by her.
He liked her fieriness,
her sense of self-esteem,
her insistence on being called
"Miss Pickford",
and also that she was
a proper actress who appeared
on the proper stage.
DW Griffith hired her,
moved her to Hollywood
and together in their first year,
they made 42 films.
From these simple beginnings
with Biograph and Griffith,
Mary would go on to become
the most powerful woman
Hollywood has ever known.
Although she was immensely popular,
cinema audiences
didn't know her name.
She was simply "the Biograph girl".
Mary was also a tough
and shrewd businesswoman.
Mary Pickford was walking
down the street one day
when she noticed a large crowd
gathered outside a cinema.
She went over.
She saw they were advertising
a film starring "the Biograph girl",
with huge photographs of her.
To Mary's mind, this meant
that Biograph should be paying her
a hell of a lot more money.
Biograph didn't agree. To them,
the actor was the most expendable
part of any film.
Mary Pickford had no intention
of either being expendable
or anonymous.
She was tempted away from
Biograph by Carl Laemmle's company,
Independent Moving Pictures,
which would later become
part of Universal Pictures.
As well as substantially more
money, Pickford was promised
that her name would be placed above
the title of all her films
and in all cinema advertising.
During 1911, Mary Pickford
appeared in 34 films for Laemmle.
In The Dream, we vividly witness
two acting styles -
the berserk
against Mary's naturalism.
Carl Laemmle was born into
a German Jewish family.
Following the death of his mother,
he emigrated to America
when he was 17 years old.
He was part of a new breed
of entrepreneur,
businessmen who had grasped
the huge potential of the movies -
a business so new,
it had no established anti-Semitism.
It was my father, Joseph,
who travelled to America first.
That was sometime in the 1880s.
Then the next one was Carl,
Carl Laemmle. Mm-hm.
He was only 17
when he came to America
He was only 17
when he came to America
and, of course,
he did not speak the language and...
..it was going to be a tough goal,
because they only had
$50 apiece on them,
and so they were headed
for an adventure.
He bought a theatre, yes, and it...
They had the nickelodeon.
I think it was five cents,
something like that. Yes, yes.
And...
he ended up buying another theatre.
He liked the picture business.
He liked that, showing films,
and, of course,
he ended up with Universal.
And I believe there was a zoo.
Was there a zoo?
Oh, there was a fabulous zoo.
And what sort of animals?
It had just about every animal
you can imagine.
One in particular, a camel,
that would frequently get loose
and travel the mile
up to the front lot where we lived,
and there was a huge lawn there
that was very tasty for camels
and he would graze there
and I would wake up sometimes
in the morning and there he would be.
And so I'd get a little dish
of oatmeal and I'd lure him
into one of the garages
and he seemed to be comfortable
there with the oatmeal
and then I'd come back
and phone down to the zoo
and tell them that I had their camel,
you know,
and to come up and pick him up.
But it was so much fun.
It was wonderful. I loved it.
Another European immigrant
was the Hungarian-born Adolph Zukor.
He would become head
of Paramount Pictures.
He was 16 years old
when he arrived in America.
He got a job in the fur trade,
which taught him that the public
were happy to pay more
for extra quality.
Adolph Zukor wanted to appeal
to the burgeoning middle classes.
He reasoned they had more money
and would be prepared to spend it
to watch good-quality
theatrical productions.
He bought the film rights
to a French movie
about Queen Elizabeth, starring
the celebrated stage actress
of a generation, Sarah Bernhardt.
Sarah Bernhardt's acting technique
was formed on stage
in the latter half
of the 19th century.
Can you spot the moment
she discovers there's a dead man
in the room?'
But the film achieved
what Adolph Zukor wanted.
A serious actress in a serious
play conveyed instant prestige.
Attracting a middle class audience
to the movies was a key element
in the development
of film as an artistic medium.
Yet another European immigrant,
Charlie Chaplin,
was born in London.
By the age of nine he was appearing
on the professional music hall.
At the age of 24 he was touring
America in a stage show
when he was spotted
by Mack Sennett's studios.
Mack Sennett was Hollywood's
biggest comedy producer.
He ran Keystone Comedies.
Here is Charlie's first day working
inside Sennett's Keystone lot.
Mack Sennett took one of the more
traditional routes into
movie-making.
He'd been a mediocre stage actor
before becoming a mediocre
film actor.
If you think that's a bit harsh,
have a look.
Perhaps the worst comic
actor in the history of the movies.
'Let's put that spit back
where it belongs.'
Mack Sennett opened up
the Keystone Studios,
the world's first studios entirely
devoted to the making
of comedy films.
It opened here in 1912 - the big
white building behind me.
Soon they were churning out
two to three short films a week.
Mack Sennett was quite
open in admitting that he stole
most of his ideas
from the early
French Pathe comedies.
This is a Pathe Comedy featuring
hapless policemen falling over.
And here are Mack Sennett's
Keystone Kops.
Initially, Keystone Comedies
were made without a script
or much pre-planning.
When Mack Sennett heard that
the lake here in Echo Park
was being drained,
he sent over a cameraman and a cast
of comedians to make a film.
The drawback of this approach
is inherently clear in the movie.
Once the water is drained
from the lake, we are left
with two stuck boats
with little prospect of the famous
Keystone fast-paced action.
Psychological motivation was never
a strong concern
at the Sennett Studios
and here the actors,
for no plausible reason,
throw themselves off stationery
boats and into the glorious mud.
This bridge is in exactly
the same location as the original
Echo Park bridge,
and that bridge featured in a hell
of a lot of Keystone comedies.
Roscoe Arbuckle, Charlie Chaplin -
they all ran across this bridge...
and now it's my turn.
The Keystone philosophy
was to always end on a chase,
and the custard pie fight was also
heavily associated with the studio.
It's one of the things we
know about silent comedies -
they're full of people throwing
custard pies at each other.
Except they're not. Very few
Keystone films feature them.
Occasionally there is the flung
pastry here and there
but generally speaking,
the object of choice to be
thrown is the simple brick,
easily found at the side
of the road,
whereas a custard pie fight can only
plausibly take place in a bakery.
In Mabel At The Wheel,
Charlie Chaplin in the distance
is giving as good as he gets.
Mabel At The Wheel nearly finished
Charlie Chaplin's film career.
He argued with the star and
director, Mabel Normand,
that he wasn't being given enough
time to develop his gags.
She threw him off the picture.
After tempers calmed down, it was
agreed that Charlie would help Mabel
to finish her film,
providing he was allowed to direct
his next.
This is a pivotal
moment in film history.
One moment Chaplin's career
was nearly over,
the next he's directing
his own pictures
and taking a giant step to becoming
the most famous man in the world.
Mack Sennett, Mabel Normand
and Charlie Chaplin
later starred together
in a Keystone comedy,
just to show
there were no hard feelings.
Mack Sennett created
the conditions for comedy to thrive.
The relaxed relationship
between Charlie and his employer
is glimpsed here,
much to Charlie's amusement.
But at the film's finale, we are
in no doubt as to who's boss.
Chaplin needed to direct
his own work.
In this early Keystone film
not directed by Charlie
the director immediately cuts away
from the legs hooked on
to the windowsill.
Under his own direction
in The Rounders,
Charlie allows the hooked legs
to properly register.
Charlie Chaplin's co-star
in The Rounders was Roscoe Arbuckle.
Roscoe worked under the name
of Fatty, a name he detested.
His friends always called him
Roscoe.
Roscoe had been a successful
Vaudeville actor when he first met
Mack Sennett
but within a few months of working
at Keystone, Roscoe was directing
his own films.
When Charlie came up with
the idea of the tramp character,
he borrowed a pair of Roscoe's
outsized trousers for comic effect.
In The Rounders, the two of them
are chased through this park
before eventually
they both fall into the lake.
Two young comedians
on the brink of world fame.
That same year, 1914,
also saw the film
debut of one of Hollywood's most
famous directors, Cecil B DeMille.
Born in Massachusetts,
he'd been an actor and a playwright
but was still looking for something
to do with his life
when he was approached to direct
a film for Adolph Zukor
and his partners.
The film that Cecil directed,
The Squaw Man, was over
80 minutes long.
I'm sitting in Cecil B DeMille's
office.
In 1913 Cecil and producer Jesse
Lasky had bought the film rights
to an old stage hit called
The Squaw Man, a western.
The plan was to film it in Arizona
but when they got to Arizona
they found it was lying
under two feet of snow -
not very good for a Western.
Who's ever heard of Big Chief
Snowplough?
So Cecil decided to come on
to Los Angeles,
where he heard about a barn that was
available for rent here
in Hollywood -
The very barn that I'm sitting
in now.
Cecil rented it, they shot
The Squaw Man in about 18 days
and it went on to become American
cinema's first feature length film.
The Squaw Man demonstrates
a bold approach to cinema,
keen to exploit its possibilities.
Here we see our hero's
inner thoughts.
The Squaw Man's status as American
cinema's first feature length film
no doubt infuriated DW Griffith,
who saw himself as the great pioneer
and he had ambitions
to make his own feature films.
Griffith was hugely frustrated
by Biograph's lack of vision
and by the sense that others
were stealing his thunder.
'He was inspired by the artistic
ambition
of such Italian
epics as Cabiria.
Imaginative sets and a cast
of hundreds
give Cabiria
a massive sense of scale.
While European directors were making
feature films over an hour long,
Biograph were restricting
DW Griffith to one reelers,
that's approximately 12 minutes
of screen time.
It made sense for them.
Short films could be made
very cheaply in two to three days,
but also make an enormous profit.
Griffith decided,
if he wanted to make a longer film,
he'd just have to go ahead
without telling Biograph.
DW Griffith filmed the battle
scenes for his first feature,
Judith of Bethulia,
here, north of Hollywood in 1913.
Judith was Griffith's response
to the Italian epics he so admired.
Although he didn't have
their budget,
he tried to match their scale.
100 years ago, these hills were
alive with the sound of extras
walloping each other across the head
with wooden swords.
DW Griffith must have been
in his element,
walking around this pretend
battlefield,
choreographing
hand-to-hand combat.
Judith of Bethulia is
a very difficult film to watch.
It's combination of excessively
wordy title cards, for example:
"In the eighteenth year
of his reign,
"Nebuchadnezzar,
King of the Assyrians,
"sent forth Prince Holofernes
"with the army of Assur
"to lay waste
all the countries of the West."
That, combined with
old-fashioned, over-the-top acting,
makes the film seem ancient
and plodding.
It's easy to believe
it was filmed before
the Old Testament was written,
making the Bible
the book of the film.
It's also extremely tedious because
there's no sense of humour anywhere.
Any laughs there are,
are purely unintentional.
The beheading scene
is so clumsily staged,
you would be forgiven
for missing it altogether.
The film looks awkward and bogus
in comparison to Cabiria,
which was made the year before.
The First World War gave Hollywood
an enormous advantage.
The European film industry
was severely hit.
With the competition gone,
Hollywood was king.
And Mary Pickford became its queen.
Tess of the Storm Country
was the feature length film
that catapulted Mary
to world stardom.
In Tess, we see the feisty side
of her screen image.
As a vivid illustration of how
famous film stars had become,
in 1910, audiences
didn't know Mary Pickford's name.
And here she is,
just a few years later,
appearing in front of thousands
of fascinated New Yorkers.
Mary's old boss, DW Griffith,
was also kicking up a storm
at the box office.
In 1915, DW Griffith made
the hugely successful blockbuster,
Birth Of A Nation.
At three hours long, it was
his most ambitious film to date.
History judges it
as both a masterpiece
and arguably the most
controversial film ever made.
The first half of the film
deals with the tragedy
of the American Civil War.
The Birth of a Nation
was told entirely
from the point of view
of the South.
The stories that Griffith
grew up with as a child
were dramatised on the screen.
DW Griffith and his cameraman
Billy Bitzer
made good use
of the Hollywood hills behind me,
and would judiciously place
smoke bombs
that made the battle scenes
gripping and epic.
Directorally,
the film has great flourishes.
But it also had long patches
of tedium.
While we're looking at this letter,
some of you might want
to raise a family,
or go to Canada and back!
The tedium is difficult
to sit through,
but Griffith offends more
than artistic taste.
At the end of the Civil War,
black African Americans briefly
attained some political power.
Here, Griffith depicts
the black parliament members
'as racial stereotypes,
barely civilised in their
behaviour.
Birth Of A Nation was released
just 50 years after the end
of the Civil War.
Its public screenings were
spectacular events,
accompanied by 35-piece orchestras.
This is the music
the public would have heard:
Wagner's Ride Of The Valkyries.
Griffith's heroes
are the Ku Klux Klan.
MUSIC: "Ride of the Valkyries"
by Wagner
William Walker saw the film
in 1916.
And some people were crying.
You could hear people saying,
"Oh, God."
And some say, "Damn,"
like you could hear them because
of the reaction of the people.
You had the worst feeling
in the world,
it just felt like
you were...
you were not counted,
you were just out of existence.
The Birth Of A Nation
is a racist film,
based on a racist novel,
The Clansman.
But so much of the film's power must
be down to Wagner's stirring music.
Let's take that same music
and put it over a Mack Sennett
comedy.
STIRRING MUSIC
MUSIC: "Ride of the Valkyries"
by Wagner
All the tension and suspense
of DW Griffith,
without the inherent racism.
If there's any one film that
demonstrates the power of cinema,
it's The Birth Of A Nation.
Griffith's divisive film
broke box office records.
The film was so effective
that the Klan,
which had been dormant for decades,
was re-established in 1915,
and not just in the lynch mob happy
south.
Within a few years,
thousands of Klan members
from all over America
were marching through
Washington DC.
The film's many opponents
tried to get it banned,
with little success.
DW Griffith,
with the extroadinary arrogance
of a man who is never wrong,
declared the critics of him
and his film, Birth Of A Nation,
were guilty of intolerance.
Griffith realised this could be
a theme for a new epic,
intolerance through the ages,
four parallel stories
told over the course of
three very long hours.
He was also partly inspired
by a visit to San Francisco in 1915
to see the World Fair.
He marvelled at the architecture,
like the magnificent
Palace of Fine Arts behind me.
He hired the same designers
and craftsmen
to build him a massive film set.
Although impressive in scale,
as a film, it's a mess.
Following the four continuous
stories is impossible.
And there are terrible
moments of weak plotting.
A woman looks out the window
and sees a street walker.
So impressed is she,
she dreams of becoming
a streetwalker herself.
The beheading, which is so badly
fumbled in Judith of Bethulia,
is better represented in
Intolerance.
The effect is more comic
than DW might have liked.
Although there are some
genuinely horrific moments.
DW Griffith was a man
who created his own myth,
claiming to have invented
techniques such as the close-up.
The truth is, he didn't.
The grammar of cinema had been
invented in Europe.
Griffith was an important
American pioneer.
But, as techniques progressed,
his style of melodramatic film
looked increasingly old-fashioned.
SIRENS
A new urban realism
was entering the American cinema.
These new films were shot
in real locations
and featured people
that didn't look like film stars.
Raoul Walsh, a former assistant
director to Griffith,
rivalled and even surpassed him
with his 1915 New York drama,
Regeneration.
Set amongst the tenements,
it was a gritty, riveting,
realistic portrayal
of how the poor lived their lives.
It brought a new freshness to the
American screen, a new realism,
real people, as opposed to the
melodramatic heroes and villains
of Griffith's era.
Also in 1915,
Cecil B De Mille
directed The Cheat.
Its atmospheric lighting
and depiction of physical violation
gripped audiences
throughout the world.
1915 was also a pivotal year
for Charlie Chaplin.
In his short film, The Tramp,
he successfully combined comedy
with emotion.
He was now a fully rounded
character audiences cared about.
Films stars' prestige and power
reached startling heights
at the end of the decade
when DW Griffith, Charlie Chaplin,
Mary Pickford and her husband-to-be
Douglas Fairbanks
stunned Hollywood by forming
their production company,
United Artists,
guaranteeing
their creative independence.
Film actors had gone from earning
five dollars a day
to becoming
world famous millionaires.
In ten years, Hollywood had
transformed itself
from a rustic, back water
stuffed with oranges,
into something much more
than a place:
a state of mind.
Power, excess,
fame, wealth, ambition.
Hollywood.
Film was now
the dominant entertainment medium
with millions going
to the cinema every day.
Its stars were young, charismatic
talented and newly wealthy.
This confident young industry
looked towards the 1920s
with a degree of confidence,
and licked its lips.
After all,
what could possibly go wrong?
In our next episode,
the decadence of 1920's Hollywood
threatens the industry
with extinction.
The sun shining behind me used to be
a Dutch reformed church.
Audiences attending
these nickleodeons...
CAR HORN
..were largely immigrants,
Russian Jews,
Germans, Italians, Spanish...
People hooting car horns to make
sure we have to do another take.
ITALIAN ACCENT: It's OK, it's all
right. I'm here anyway, you know.
The more acceptable object of
throne, desire, choice,
thing, bang-bang-bang. Pick a word,
put it in a sentence,
rearrange that sentence.
I'll start again.
OK, if I don't get this next time,
this is definitely voiceover.