David Wark Griffith was the most important and influential film director of the silent period, one of the greatest American filmmakers, and the man who developed the basic visual language of storytelling in cinema. Born in Kentucky to Confederate colonel "Roaring Jake" Griffith, D.W. Griffith grew up in poverty, particularly after his father died. He became a stage actor in the 1890s, touring with regional stock companies and writing unsuccessful plays. Griffith's luck changed when he took up a friend's suggestion to try out at the Biograph motion picture studio on Fourteenth Street in New York. Although he appeared in one film for Edison, Rescued from an Eagle's Nest (1908), all of his other early film work was at Biograph. In mid-1908, Biograph's main director, Wallace \"Old Man\" McCutcheon, took ill and his son, Wallace McCutcheon Jr., took over as director. The younger McCutcheon proved worthless at the job, and Biograph head office man Henry Marvin offered it to Griffith. His very first film, The Adventures of Dollie (1908), proved so popular that Griffith…  » Read more