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could purchase a six hundred-seat burlesque house in Haverhill, Massachusetts, the Gem (known locally as the Germ), for $600. He moved his family from Boston to Haverhill, refurbished the house, called it the Orpheum, and opened for business at Thanksgiving, with “clean, wholesome, healthy amusement.” On Christmas Eve he ran a double bill, two-reeler films (twenty to thirty minutes each) of The Passion Play and Bluebeard —Christian salvation and mass murder.
    He had two daughters by then, and a rapidly growing business. “Never mind now,” he told his family, “this is short. It is the future that counts; the future is long.” He bought other theaters. He had an orchestra at the Orpheum. He hired live acts, too, and even a little bit of opera. The family moved back to Boston, and in March 1912, Louis Burrill Mayer took American citizenship. He elected to move into distribution, and for $4,000 he got the New England rights to DeMille’s The Squaw Man . Then, in 1915, with money acquired from a syndicate, he put up $20,000 to get the New England rights to The Birth of a Nation . For everyone in moving pictures it was the turning point.
    With Mayer, we are talking about a businessman, albeit one obsessed with the value of content. David Wark Griffith, who conceived of The Birth of a Nation , and made it, deserves to be considered an artist, even if the thing his film gave birth to was more a business than anything else. He was also someone who developed a future technology that would restore the past.
    Griffith was born on a farm near La Grange, Kentucky, in 1875, the son of man who had fought all through the Civil War for the Confederacy and been wounded twice. David was a country boy, in awe of a father who had difficulty expressing love. He was wistful and dreamy, and in his autobiography he recalled this childhood feeling about media to come: “I have thought what a grand invention it would be if someone could make a magic box in which we could store the precious moments of our lives and keep them with us, and later on, in dark hours, could open this box and receive for at least a few moments, a breath of its stored memory.” He was in love with nostalgia, and blind to the astonishing dynamics of the future he helped create.
    The father died when Griffith was ten, and the family was left poor. The boy grew up tall and handsome, albeit with a soulful expression, and in Louisville he took up acting and singing. He joined a theatrical company; he had parts, and for a few years he was a touring actor—who never seems to have impressed anyone who saw him. He wrote stories, poetry, and plays—one of them, A Fool and a Girl , was produced, and flopped. He applied to the Biograph movie company in New York as an actor, and when they deemed him an unimpressive performer, they asked was he prepared to “direct.”
    In 1908, directing was still a stooge’s job. In the mass of very short, sensationalist movies (many of them just ten minutes, few more than twenty), the stress was on getting an adequate camera exposure (catching the light), having enough action (to avoid boredom), showcasing prettiness  in its human forms (the embryonic age of stardom), and being wholesome. If you feel there’s a contradiction between sensationalism and wholesomeness, don’t let any glib argument dissuade you. Without any understanding of how it worked, or where it might go, the medium had let loose the alchemy of the real and of fantasy. A director presided over the shooting, without truly analyzing, let alone controlling it. He called “Action” and “Cut,” or their equivalents, and he may have guided the actors. (Sometimes actors did the directing.) But scenarists, actors, and bosses had louder voices, and the cameraman was a small god with a machine no one else understood. A part of us now regards this condition as primitive, or unformed. If film is going to be an