American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century Read Online Free PDF Page A

“unlimited financial backing” from capitalist organizations throughout the country. And his own personal wealth was considerable: He had earned a net profit of $463,000 in the past year from the paper. Otis had to be stopped—to protect unionism throughout the country. The typographers appealed for help.
    The AFL passed a secret resolution: “A war fund for use in attacking the Los Angeles Times ” was established.

THREE
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    D.W. JOINED THE BATTLE . As opposing forces smashed into each other on the streets of Los Angeles, across the country on Fourteenth Street in New York City, D.W. offered up his own challenge. He, too, was concerned about the course of the nation’s future.
    A Corner in Wheat had only thirty-two frames, yet the argument made in the nearly 950 feet of film was more effective than any of Otis’s dehumanizing editorials, more of a provocation than any picket line. D.W. Griffith had made an intellectual connection between the uproar in the world around him and the fanciful world that he was busily inventing in the former ballroom of a Fourteenth Street brownstone; and the result was a new, expansive way to communicate. With A Corner in Wheat, D.W. had created a succinct yet transfiguring masterpiece about the workingman’s struggle to put a loaf of bread on his dinner table that struck deeply at the country’s economic injustices. And he had marched the engaging and manipulative power of movies—a new cultural weapon—into the rough chaos of American politics.
     
    “How can a movie be made without a chase? How can there be suspense? A movie without a chase is not a movie,” people at the studio challenged when they heard D.W.’s plan.
    D.W. heard them out. He was, by nature and southern breeding, a polite man. Besides, he didn’t like to play the deep thinker. He wouldn’t talk about art. “Art,” he would say, making his point by joking about one of the leading men in his troupe, “in those days merely meant Johnson’s given name.” But even as a fledgling director, he was determined to make movies his way.
    When D.W. suggested consecutive scenes in After Many Years showing the husband stranded on a deserted island, then a cut to the dutiful wife waiting in their home for his return, the actors and even Billy Bitzer, his cameraman, were incredulous.
    “How can you tell a story jumping about like that? The people won’t know what it’s about.”
    “Well,” said D.W., “doesn’t Dickens write that way?”
    “Yes, but that’s Dickens. That’s novel writing. That’s different.”
    “Oh, not so much,” argued D.W. “These are picture stories. Not so different.”
    D.W. would not be deterred. His vision was intuitive and visceral, and his confidence in his ability to tell a story was unshakable. Besides, Biograph was under contract to produce two films each week. Every day was a race to a new deadline, and there was little time for discussions. Moreover audiences liked what D.W. was doing. People, as one early moviegoer observed, “sensed Biograph pictures were ‘different.’ ” D.W.’s name was not on the screen, but on Mondays and Thursdays, the days when his films were released, nickelodeons and theaters put up signs reminding the public that it was “Biograph day.” Nickels in hand, customers flocked to see the new story the studio had filmed.
    So D.W. was allowed, as his wife Linda put it, “to go his lonely way . . . contrary to all the old established rules of the game.” At night in New York he would lie in bed in his tiny apartment in Murray Hill unable to sleep, excited by all the connections he was rapidly making, by all the possibilities he was envisioning. The studio had told him to shoot pictures so that full-sized figures appeared on the screen. This instruction troubled D.W. One afternoon he went uptown to the Metropolitan Museum and studied how Rembrandt and other great painters did it. “All painted pictures,” he observed,