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Harry E. Aitken was an innovative production executive during the earliest years of American cinema. Originally he owned his own theater, but in the early 1910, he organized a movement to break the absolute control of Edison and the Motion Picture Patents Company. In 1911, he founded Majestic Pictures and one year later took over the helm at the Mutual Film Corporation. In 1913 he coerced filmmaker D.W. Griffith to join his company, and it was Aitken who helped fund and distribute Griffith's innovative epic The Birth of a Nation (1915). That year, Aitken went on to found and become president of Triangle Pictures which in it's heyday made films for not only Griffith, but Ince and Mac Sennet as well. Aitken retired from the film industry in 1920.