Part 2 - Premiered 8th February 1915
The Birth of a Nation (1915)
As a symbolic gesture, filming of The Clansman began on 4th July 1914. Karl Brown, cameraman Billy Bitzer’s assistant, remembered the first scene to be shot was in the specially constructed town: carpetbaggers plying black field hands with whiskey before giving them pre-marked ballot papers with which to cast their first-ever vote (Billy Bitzer and Raoul Walsh claimed the first scene shot was the battle of Petersburg).
The battle scenes, filmed in the San Fernando Valley, were also among the first to be shot as they were the most difficult. The valley provided vantage points offering panoramic views from which Bitzer’s camera could capture the action through the haze of battle smoke.
The vast scale of the battles meant extras in uniform were spread across distances of up to four miles – much further than the sound from a megaphone could carry. Standing on a tower overlooking the location, Griffith used semaphore flags and mirrors to signal the start of manoeuvres or retreats. He developed a system he called the ‘nucleus system’, whereby the leader of a group of actors would relay Griffith’s semaphored instructions. Elmer Clifton, Henry Walthall, George Siegmann, Erich von Stroheim and Andre Beranger each led one of these groups. Sometimes, shots would signal the start or end of shooting – although Griffith used this method only as a last resort because ammunition was expensive.
Thick smoke from the bombs used in the battle scenes obscured much of the action and choked the actors, so the size of the charges had to be reduced. Even then, capturing the action proved a challenging task for Bitzer. Also, the intense California heat in July prompted Griffith to wear a large floppy straw hat while filming. The ventilation holes he cut around the headband left a pattern of small round sunburned patches on his shaved scalp.
Although publicity at the time claimed a cast of 18,000, Griffith probably employed somewhere between 300 and 500 extras to play soldiers in the battle scenes. Many of them were drifters and vagrants with no experience in pictures. Lured by the promise of two dollars a day and a box lunch, they lacked discipline. Shots fired indiscriminately resulted in Griffith firing one extra. Howard Gaye, playing a Confederate officer, complained to the director that he had to defend himself for real against extras playing Union soldiers. Raoul Walsh, who, as well as playing President Lincoln’s assassin John Wilkes Booth, also served as an assistant director, remembered having to instruct the group of extras under his control how to hold their rifles like weapons and not pool cues. When it was time for the Confederate extras to change into Union costumes, several refused. “My pappy rode with Jeb Stuart at Yellow Tavern. I ain’t no goddamn Yankee,” one snarled before throwing down his rifle and storming off, taking several others with him.
On the first day of shooting the scenes involving artillery, only three guns worked. Someone had tampered with the fuses. Rather than get excited, Griffith used a megaphone to inform the assembled cast and crew that if the guns failed to fire on the second day, nobody would receive their pay. The next day, every gun fired.
To simulate artillery gunfire, Griffith relied on the ingenuity of an eccentric man named ‘Fireworks’ Wilson. He was small, with only one arm and a beard that put assistant cameraman Karl Brown in mind of Mephistopheles. Despite his missing arm, Wilson claimed he’d never been injured in the line of duty. When his initial idea to achieve the desired effect by launching missiles from mortars failed because they ascended beyond camera range, he suggested having men lob firework bombs at the advancing troops from out of camera range. “You got to time it just right,” he warned Griffith. “Too soon and you get a lot of wiggly white trails from the fuse. Too late and you might get scorched a little. Now, you get twenty or thirty men to stand around to throw these things over your battle and you’ll get the damnedest finest bombardment you ever saw!”
“Suppose the boom is thrown too soon, and it lands down among the soldiers?” the director asked. “Boom” was the way he pronounced the word “bomb.”
“No problem,” Fireworks replied. “They just kick it out of the way.”
“But suppose they kick it into someone else’s way and it goes off?” the director asked.
“Look, Mr Griffith. You’re staging a battle, right? You want realism, don’t you? Suppose someone does get hurt a little. Not much. A foot blown off or something. What you want to do is hustle right on down to where he is and get a good big picture of it, and I tell you, sir, it’ll make your picture.”
Griffith, ever concerned for the safety of his cast and crew, thanked Fireworks for his advice, but chose a far safer method: he had Fireworks load packets with sawdust and lampblack, to which he added just a little gunpowder. The effect was just as impressive – and far safer – at a fraction of the cost of Fireworks’ proposed method. Despite Griffith’s precautions, injuries inevitably occurred. Tom Wilson, a former boxer, almost had his hand blown off when he held on to a grenade too long; the adapted bedsheet worn by an extra riding with the Ku Klux Klan became twisted as he thundered along, blinding him. His horse threw him when he collided with an overhanging tree branch. The blow left the rider unconscious, but otherwise unharmed. His name was John Ford, and had he not recovered, we would not have such classics as Stagecoach and Fort Apache.
The climactic ride of the Klansmen posed another unforeseen problem for Griffith. The outbreak of the war in Europe raised expectations of a massive demand for horses, resulting in a shortage of the creatures in the United States. Griffith’s wranglers rounded up so many horses and riders that studios had to suspend production of westerns in Los Angeles. So great was Griffith’s need, he even had them shipped in from Arizona ranches.
Finding riders for them proved to be an even bigger headache. Normally, movie studios required only a few riders, so Griffith had to make up their numbers with less experienced riders. Many men desperate for work exaggerated their proficiency and were a danger to themselves, other riders and cameramen. For one scene, Griffith asked Bitzer to lie in a hole in the dirt road to capture a shot of the horses riding over him. An inexperienced rider dismounted to straighten himself out when the sheet he wore became twisted. His horse, panicked by the other riders thundering past, bolted and ran straight towards Bitzer. Griffith somehow seized the horse’s reins to prevent it from trampling his cameraman.
Griffith shot Walter Long’s pursuit of Mae Marsh at Big Bear Valley, near San Bernardino. The director, the actors and selected crew members set out in a convoy of three cars on the arduous journey. The steep, winding, unpaved road over the mountain slope of the San Gabriel Valley was a challenging pattern of ruts and potholes. Charlie Muth repeatedly stalled the Packard carrying Griffith, Bitzer and Miriam Cooper. Brown would have to jump out and crank the engine, and when it got stuck, he had to push. After a long, gruelling journey, they arrived in San Bernardino, a haven full of tarmacked roads. In the lobby of their hotel, they found their fellow travellers. While Griffith’s party had been negotiating the treacherous sand roads, they, on the advice of a local, had travelled on a paved road near the Santa Fe tracks.
The next day, Griffith’s party once again travelled alone on a wide, bumpy path that had once been a riverbed. Soon, they were ascending canyon walls on a narrow, sloping road that rose and fell like a rollercoaster on its implacable ascent. Winter rains had worn its untended surface, littering it with rocks and bumps as it sloped towards the canyon hundreds of feet below. Not trusting the car’s brakes, they piled rocks in front of its tyres when they stopped to administer roadside repairs to the clutch. To negotiate the narrow hairpin bends, Muth had to reverse and crawl forwards as if squeezing into a narrow parking space. Each time, Bitzer would jump from the car and guide Muth with hand signals to ensure he didn’t reverse right off the side of the canyon wall.
After what seemed an eternity, the Packard found level ground. The travellers made good time through a fragrant pine forest before pulling up outside the Pine Knot Lodge at Big Bear Lake. There, once again, they found their fellow travellers had arrived hours before them. It turned out that the local in San Bernardino who gave Charlie Muth directions had given him the worst route. “Them San Bernardino jokers can’t rest until they get hold of some greenie and then fill him up with all the lies they can lay their tongue to,” the landlord of the Pine Knot Lodge told them. “And then lay back and laugh the rest of their lives on account of all the trouble they put him to.”
When Griffith edited the scenes they had taken at Big Bear Lake, he realised one shot was missing: that of Mae Marsh leaping from the pinnacle to the rocks below. So, Bitzer and Brown returned to the location – taking the easy route this time. Bitzer positioned his camera at the base of the pinnacle while Brown climbed to the peak with a dummy representing Marsh. When Bitzer gave the signal, Brown was to hurl the dummy over the edge. The simple shot almost ended in tragedy, however, when part of the dummy’s costume – a ribbon or belt, Brown wasn’t sure – caught on his arm, almost pulling him over the edge with the dummy. Only with much pinwheeling of his arms was he able to regain his balance.
Griffith paid little regard to the cost of bringing his revolutionary vision to the screen, but the executives in New York were growing concerned about the mounting costs. When expenditure reached $59,000, Harry Aitken informed Griffith that he would receive no more and was to finish the picture immediately. Undeterred, Griffith raised money wherever he could. He borrowed from Bitzer – first $400 to pay the extras for one day (principal actors would have to wait), then a further $600 the following day. Soon, the amount had risen to $7,000, the total of Bitzer and his wife’s savings. Griffith received a further $9,000 from a mysterious benefactor – a woman whose identity he didn’t reveal. William Clune of Clune’s auditorium supplied $15,000. In return, he received stock, the film’s California rights and the promise Griffith would hold its West Coast premiere in a Clune’s theatre. When costumier Robert Goldstein discovered Griffith couldn’t pay his $6,200 bill, he accepted shares in the film as payment. Griffith also lobbied the Los Angeles Herald city room for sponsorship, raising a sum of $250. Even Lillian Gish’s mother offered $300 – although Griffith politely refused her offer, explaining it was too great a risk. Although well-intentioned, he did Mrs Gish no favours. Had he accepted her money, her investment would have earned hundreds of thousands of dollars.