D. W. Griffith

Even the second one, which they say starts in 1915, and some of it they try to tie in with the Leo Frank case, the Knights of Mary Fagan, which is very suspect if that's even the case.

It's really the birth of a nation, D.W. Griffith, his movie that was a big deal from the book The Klansman.

And actually, that kind of was a rebirth.

But even then, that still involved a lot of Jews or a decent amount.

The only real thing we found, and I'll do some further digging about any additional projects when we do our 90s roundup, but during the late 90s, he publishes A Moment with Miss Gish.

which is his account of hearing Lillian Gish, the silent film actress, speak at a function in 1958 following a screening of W.D. Griffith's Way Down East, and this was at the Museum of the City of New York.

It's about 28 pages.

I found that there was a first printing that was given away to employees and slash guests at a publishing house like Christmas Party.

Everybody's buried there, basically.

Judy Garland's buried there, Rudolph Valentino, DW Griffith, Burt Reynolds, David Lynch.

Like, the list goes on and on from the silent era to the present day.

This is a cemetery, but you said it's more of a public park.

If I had done this a long time ago, it would have saved a lot of pain." She signed the note, "P.E." Since the 1940s, visitors have claimed to see the wandering spirit of the heartbroken 24-year-old Hollywood hopeful.

Rangers around Griffith Park and Mount Lee claim to see the slim, transparent figure of a woman roaming through the shadows around the sign late at night.

She moves slowly, as though she's walking on air, and she hangs her head in sorrow before disappearing.

Others claim that she leaves the faint, lingering smell of gardenias in her wake, a scent known to be a personal favorite of the doomed and tragic Peg.

Others claim that the room harbors a heavy and repressive energy, while still others have described chills and the appearance of an angry or aggressive spirit haunting the space.

Irene isn't the only tragic spirit said to be haunting the former Knickerbocker Hotel.

As legend has it, the soul of D.W. Griffith, widely credited as being the first pioneer of Hollywood, also roams the long-forgotten realm of the old Tinseltown hotel.

Griffith came to Hollywood in the 1910s and soon became known as a man who could identify the next popular starlet like no other, and he was the one, after all, who discovered Lillian Gish and her sister Dorothy, and he was the one who discovered Mack Sennett and Charlie Chaplin besides.

And what she does is she like is screaming at these Florida governors, these 10 old men.

And she basically like climbs to the top of the structure there at Hollywood and Highland that used to look like from that movie Intolerance, the D.W. Griffith movie, the big archway or whatever.

But then they kind of built over it.

So it looks like shit now because they made it modern.

Uh, w- do we know much about Way Down East?

I, no, I knew nothing about it, but I, I quickly looked, and you could see the director, D.W. Griffith.

He's, uh, I, I guess you'd almost consider the Christopher Nolan of that time period 'cause prior to this-

[laughs] Oh, my God

Patriot was a good movie.

Good movie

... back when, back before Mel Gibson turned into D.W. Griffith.

Yeah.

And regulators at the time believed that, well, one way to stop these violent breaches of the peace was to make hate speech illegal.

So it's in this context that a filmmaker named D.W. Griffith produced and released a movie called The Birth of a Nation, which is widely recognized to be both a masterpiece of cinematography and also a horrific piece of hate speech.

So Griffith's film was three hours long.

It was technologically sophisticated.

Most movies at this time were only 10 minutes.

But the subject of Griffith's film was absolutely noxious.

He glorified the Ku Klux Klan.

He presented reconstruction as a tragedy.

The business was scorned by the people of the legitimate stage.

The time for the magic transformation was at hand when David W. Griffith entered the old ballroom studio that year looking for work.

A play he had written for James K. Hackett had proved a failure.

He had heard that the biograph company bought plots for motion pictures.

Moreover, the train, which at Ippleton had seemed sparsely occupied, was disgorging passengers from every door.

It was the sort of mob scene which would have made David W. Griffith stream with delight.

And it looked, George says, like guest night at the Royal Automobile Club.

But as I say, we must remember, he was overwrought.